Well, well, well! It looks like after Amazon’s hilariously dramatic exit from its plans to build its HQ2 facilities in Long Island City, Amazon may be coming to New York after all. The New York Post reported Monday that the company is allegedly exploring office space on Manhattan’s West Side. Big if true, as the kids say.
In an event that saw the very high and dry.
But citing unnamed sources, the Post reported that Amazon is looking into space in One Manhattan West, forthcoming space in Two Manhattan West, as well as space in the James A. Farley building, a landmark U.S. Postal Service property. All three properties are located just west of New York’s Pennsylvania Station.
Amazon is looking, according to a “well-placed” source who spoke to the Post, to secure “at least 100,000 square feet or much more” for the office space. To be clear, sucking up space in a high rise is not the same as the tens of thousands of jobs Amazon was expected to bring to the city with its project in Long Island City—its NYC HQ2 was expected to span over 4 million square feet—and Amazon already has over 5,000 employees in the area.
But if Amazon does indeed plan to grow its presence in the city, it would be a remarkable move for a company that just months ago essentially threw a fit over political push-back against the company’s corporate greed.
Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment, but a spokesperson told the Post that it doesn’t “comment on rumours or speculation.”
At the time Amazon pulled out of the HQ2 campus plans, the company in a statement blamed “a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project.” One of the project’s most vocal critics included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who criticised Amazon’s massive tax breaks and the ripple effects that its campus would have on the Queens community.
The Post’s sources reportedly said this rumoured exploration of Manhattan office space was an apparent jab at Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians who criticised the company’s corporate handouts in the deal. But as the paper rightly noted, office space doesn’t completely transform an entire neighbourhood the way that HQ2 would have. Even if Amazon views a presence on the island as some kind of petty “fuck you” to its political enemies, it’s still coming in sans subsidy deal. So quite frankly, that’s kind of a weak-arse clapback if it is intended to read that way.
You know what is a good clapback though? MacKenzie Bezos making her ex-husband look like a greedy arsehole on the world’s stage.