Vacancy Curbed
A photo posted by Pete Wang (@pwang1025) on Aug 1, 2015 at 8:57am PDT
The Real Deal reports that Vox Media “is in advanced discussions to sign a lease for more than 70,000 square feet at 85 Broad Street.” Vox Media’s New York headquarters, which houses much of its editorial, Vox Dot Com excepted, is currently in Midtown Manhattan. A move to the Financial District would have Vox following in the footsteps of Conde Nast, Time Inc., and News Corp., who have all fled Midtown for the austere-but-prosperous canyons of downtown, or announced plans to do so, adding another data point to the story that the “center of gravity” in New York media and dining has shifted southward.
If the deal goes through, Vox, a recent-but-proud member of the billion-dollar-valuation club, will be settling into the former headquarters of Goldman Sachs, a “brownish tower [that] isn’t interesting enough to be ugly,” according to the New York Observer:
Goldman Sachs became the world’s most important firm in a spectacularly dull, purposefully frumpy, desperately anonymous tower. Inside, it smelled like cigarettes in the 1980s and homemade chocolate chip cookies on the 30th floor. Babies cried in the first-floor day-care center; Jon Corzine worked outside in a Town Car parked on the curb after his ousting; and Hank Paulson felt sad when birds flew into the windows.
After being sold to MetLife and subsequently abandoned by Goldman in 2010 for a new headquarters at 200 West Street — which “appears to have been designed in the hope of rendering the company invisible” — 85 Broad Street was the home of the “largest vacant block of available space on the market,” which it couldn’t seem to fill until rather recently.
If Vox runs out of space again soon, it can always send employees down a few flights to the building’s new WeWork location.