Amazon still expanding in NYC with Bryant Park lease

Amazon’s 330,000 square-foot lease at 10 Bryant Park — or  452 Fifth Ave. at West 40th St. — is big news both for Jeff Bezos’s ever-expanding behemoth and for the on-fire Midtown office market.

The deal at the former HSBC tower closed last week, the Real Deal reported. Realty Check first reported the talks last October, and things moved along smoothly after that.

The Amazon lease keeps the tower owned by Israel’s little-known Property & Building Corp. at 100% spoken for. Sources said HSBC, which moved to Tishman Speyer’s Spiral, is paying rent until the end of this month on floors 3-11, which Amazon will occupy.

Despite fears that Amazon’s setback in 2016, when politicians nixed its hopes for a major campus in Queens, would scare it out of the city, Bezos has expanded here relentlessly.

He bought the former Lord & Taylor flagship on Fifth Avenue, where Amazon has 2,000 employees, for $1 billion in 2020 (and where a 34,000 square-foot food court called Shaver Hall will open this year). Since then, as Bezos ordered most employees back to the office five days a week, it gobbled up space  at  330 W. 34th St., 237 Park Ave. and 5 Manhattan West.

They were all relatively short-term subleases, two of them from WeWork. But our sources said Amazon — which Bezos said needed thousands more seats in the city than it had — isn’t likely to give them up when their space at  10 Bryant Park is ready by early 2026.

“This is really their first, long-term direct-lease commitment since the pandemic,” one source said.

“And it’s close enough to the other locations to call it a Manhattan campus for them.”

Amazon’s rent at 10 Bryant Park will start at $29.5 million a year, rising to $32.2 million in five more years, the Real Deal reported, citing a filing by Property & Building with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

The landlord was repped by a JLL team led by Paul Glickman and Benjamin Bass. A different JLL team repped Amazon. All  involved in the transaction  either declined to comment or couldn’t be reached.

Amazon’s is the latest large-scale corporate expansion in Midtown, and removes another high-quality block of space from the available inventory. Many brokers, such as CBRE’s Mary Ann Tighe and Stephen B. Siegel, have warned that Midtown’s top-tier buildings were actually running out of space — a phenomenon that would have seemed unthinkable just four years ago.