Condé Nast Eyes Move to New Jersey, Cut to One World Trade Center Offices
By Nicholas Rizzi January 29, 2021 10:50 am
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Media giant Condé Nast could further shrink its presence at One World Trade Center and move staff to New Jersey instead, Bloomberg reported.
Condé Nast — which owns publications like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Vogue — is reportedly considering reducing its office footprint to 400,000 square feet split between Manhattan and space near New Jersey’s waterfront, according to Bloomberg. It’s unclear if the plans call for Condé Nast retaining any space at One World Trade Center.
“One World Trade Center is proud to be the home of Condé Nast, Vogue, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair — some of the world’s most iconic and respected brands,” Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for One World Trade Center owner The Durst Organization, told Commercial Observer in a statement. “Condé Nast has 19 years left on their lease and we don’t expect them to go anywhere.”
A spokesperson for Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Condé Nast first moved into One World Trade Center in 2014, when it took 1 million square feet spread out over 23 floors of the tower. However, in April 2018, the publisher tapped JLL (JLL) to put 350,000 square feet on the sublease market and offloaded 50,000 square feet to Ambac Financial Group in 2019, as CO previously reported.
Media companies have been struggling for years — with former newsrooms around the country being redeveloped into condominiums — but the coronavirus pandemic made things worse as advertisement dollars further dried up. About 37,000 employees in the industry have been laid off, furloughed or faced pay reductions since the pandemic hit, The New York Times reported.
And Condé Nast is not the only media company shifting its offices because of the pandemic. The New York Daily News closed its physical newsroom at 4 New York Plaza in August, and in July, the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by Advance Publications, announced it would sell the Grasmere newsroom it built in the 1960s.
At the same time, too, as Condé Nast is reportedly mulling an exit from One World Trade Center, one of the tower’s other prominent tenants is definitely headed for the door. Commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield (CWK) plans to sublease its approximately 10,000 square feet at One World Trade as it consolidates that and its Brooklyn office.
