Conde Nast, which only finished moving into its HQ at One World Trade Center in 2014, is scouting midtown Manhattan for a potential new HQ.
The parent company, Advance Publications, confirmed to the Post late Tuesday it is considering moving the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ from the WTC site only six years after moving in with a 25-year lease for 21 floors.
“Advance Publications is in discussions about bringing the lease at One World Trade Center into line with current market conditions and its ongoing needs at this location. It is considering alternative locations to address these requirements.”
In 2018, Conde Nast consolidated its floor space in the iconic tower and began subleasing the vacated space for ten of the vacated floors.
Initially, the publisher moved 3,400 people into the building but subsequent downsizing as it wrestled with multi-million losses from the drop in print ad revenue cut the need for space in half. It is not clear how many people work in the tower currently, but the workforce has shrunk considerably.
it won’t be the first time Conde Nast has broken a lease. When it vacated its former Times Square HQ, it still had about four years left on its lease, but the Durst Organization, which controlled that lease as well as the lease at 1 WTC was very amenable to letting Conde Nast off the hook on the grounds that the glitzy publisher would be an anchor tenant that would help attract others to the WTC.
A spokesman for Durst had no knowledge about any pending negotiations for Conde Nast to move when the Post inquired Tuesday afternoon.
The Durst spokesman had not returned a call late Tuesday after Advance confirmed that Conde Nast may be looking elsewhere.
But one source that Conde Nast’s current CEO Roger Lynch is looking to return to midtown Manhattan. The company moved from its longtime HQ on Madison Avenue to 4 Times Square in 1996. It was Durst who persuaded Conde Nast to make that move. Conde Nast stayed there until it began moving into the Durst-controlled One World Trade Center in late 2014 and early 2015.
