$2.4 Billion Deal for Chelsea Market Enlarges Google’s New York Footprint (original) (raw)

New York|$2.4 Billion Deal for Chelsea Market Enlarges Google’s New York Footprint

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/nyregion/google-chelsea-market-new-york.html

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The Chelsea Market building sits across the street from Google’s New York City headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Feb. 7, 2018

It’s a tech takeover.

Google, the tech company with a seemingly insatiable appetite for space in New York, is buying Chelsea Market, the blocklong Nabisco factory turned food mart, office building and tourist attraction, for about $2.4 billion, according to two executives who have been briefed on the deal and requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.

Chelsea Market sits directly across Ninth Avenue from the company’s headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue, which is larger than the Empire State Building and covers the entire block between 15th and 16th Streets.

But it is only the latest example of an internet behemoth, and even smaller tech companies, expanding rapidly in New York City.

Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, a cloud computing company, and Spotify, a music streaming service, are all enlarging their footprints here by hundreds of thousands of square feet. Employment at technology firms has grown three times faster in New York City than in the rest of the private sector, adding more than 50,000 jobs since the end of the recession in 2010, according to a report by the state comptroller.

“The modern tech sector began on the West Coast when it was about developing new technology and programming,” said Scott Rechler, chairman of RXR Realty, a Google landlord at Pier 57, a new mixed-use space on the Hudson River that is scheduled to open this year. “It’s now about the implementation and application of technology. And that’s presented an opportunity for New York, the business capital of the world. The talent pool is here.”

Google’s pending purchase of Chelsea Market was first reported by The Real Deal, a real estate publication. Google, Jamestown, the investment and management company that owns Chelsea Market, and its adviser, Douglas Harmon, of Cushman & Wakefield, declined to comment.

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