Macy’s Commits to 145k SF in Booming LIC
Macy’s has signed a 15-year, 145k SF lease at The Factory on 47th Avenue in LIC. It’s one of the biggest leases of the year there and among the reasons we're excited to host Bisnow’s Future of Long Island City on Aug. 18 at Water’s Edge, starting 7:30am.
LIC Partnership president Liz Lusskin (above), who'll be a panelist, calls LIC one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in all of NYC. “This building is like Chelsea in Long Island City,” says Newmark Grubb Knight Frank principal Brian Waterman, who repped the ownership, Atlas Capital Group and Square Mile Capital Management, along with Howard Kesseler, Jordan Gosin and Brett Bedevian. Brian wasn’t exaggerating; he reminds us that the average floor plate at Google’s massive NYC HQ at 111 Eighth Ave in Chelsea is around 160k SF, only slightly bigger than The Factory’s 145k SF plates.
Brian says his team has done about 200k SF of leasing at the former warehouse building (above), snagging a cross-section of tenants like Gwynnie Bee, a company that does rentals of high-end clothing, TEI Group, an elevator and construction company, and Applied Research and Consulting, a data analysis company that moved from 320 West 13th St—a block from the Google HQ—to be in LIC.
“Where else do you get all of those creative juices flowing where you still have these big floor plates, with such transportation available?” says Liz. Macy’s, which is moving its creative and marketing operations from Brooklyn, housed a furniture showroom in the 1.1M SF building when it was developed in 1926. Back then and for most of the time since, LIC’s been an industrial area that didn’t exactly call to mind the word “creative.” But the creative use of Macy’s new space is emblematic of the area’s present, Liz says. Last month WeWork committed to 60k SF in Astoria, just outside of LIC, and is reportedly working on another lease in LIC itself. And the Joffrey Ballet School recently committed to 15k SF. That’s on top of 30 cultural institutions that call the neighborhood home, Liz tells us, including the American Folk Art Museum, which opened an annex in LIC this April. (Above: a sculpture in the lobby of The Factory, by artists John Carter, J.J. Veronis and Johnny Swing, fashioned out of a school bus.)
Asking rent for the space Macy’s took (shown above) was $42/SF—around half what creative office tenants regularly pay for similar space on the other side of the river. A CBRE team of Scott Gottlieb, Michael Laginestra, Michael Wellen and Ken Meyerson repped Macy’s. To learn more about LIC, please join us for Bisnow’s Future of Long Island City on Aug. 18 at Water’s Edge, starting 7:30am. Register here.
