Amazon Is Gobbling Up Midtown

Amazon Is Gobbling Up Midtown

By Kim Velsey, Curbed

May 6, 2025
Amazon, which already owns one midtown office building, bought another one at 522 Fifth last week. Photo: Google Maps
Last week, Amazon bought 522 Fifth [between 43rd & 44th Street] from Aby Rosen’s RFR — a 600,000-square-foot office building that Rosen purchased from Morgan Stanley in March 2020, but which couldn’t find another full-building tenant for after the investment company’s departure. It’s just five blocks north of Amazon’s main headquarters in the old Lord & Taylor building, which it opened in 2023. The new building is also right around the corner from its latest office lease, which it signed just last month for 330,000 square feet across nine floors at 10 Bryant Park (according to CoStar, that’s one of the biggest Manhattan office leases this year)…

Most of the office space (with the exception of a lease at 5 Manhattan West) is in Midtown East, along the Bryant Park/Grand Central corridor, Manhattan’s most historically popular office district. All together, the neighboring offices constitute a kind of de facto Amazon campus…

While the area fell somewhat out of favor as companies moved downtown during the aughts, it’s experienced a resurgence since the pandemic, as have other areas by major transit hubs…

All this office expansion also lines up with the company’s ever-adapting RTO policy. This month, Amazon mandated that New York employees return to the office five days a week, making it one of the first tech companies to take a hard stance on a full return to office…part of its ethos to run the company like “the world’s largest startup,” in the words of CEO Andy Jassy…

But perhaps the main perk at Amazon’s Manhattan offices will be space for everyone to sit.