Currently headquartered on 12 floors at 118-29 Queens Blvd. in the Forest Hills section of Queens, the airline will move six miles closer to Manhattan by subleasing approximately 200,000 square feet at Brause Realty's 27-01 Queens Plaza North in Long Island City. Ironically, the tenant from which it's subleasing the space is MetLife, whose logo now sits atop Manhattan's 200 Park Ave. in a space once occupied by the Pan Am emblem.
In 2012, JetBlue will consolidate its present operations in Forest Hills and Darien, CT into the Long Island City space, which will house a total of 950 employees. Seventy positions from the Darien offices, which provide transactional financial support, will be relocated to Queens. At a news conference Monday afternoon, JetBlue CEO Dave Barger said the airline plans to add another 130 positions at its new headquarters over the next few years.
For more than a year, the airline had contemplated relocating from the city. Barger said Monday afternoon that the roster of candidates for JetBlue's corporate offices was finally whittled down this past fall to a shortlist of two cities: New York City and Orlando, where it maintains a training center known as JetBlue University.
Both cities worked to persuade the airline on its headquarters decision. The Orlando Sentinel quoted a spokeswoman for the Orlando Economic Development Corp. as saying her city offered JetBlue $39 million worth of incentives, including tax-exempt bond financing, cash, workforce training and infrastructure development support.
Barger had expressed concern that the cost of relocating from New York City was a liability, the Sentinel reported. The airline employs a total of 5,000 across New York State. Published reports say the tax incentives offered by New York City and State were comparable to the package Orlando presented.
For its part, the Bloomberg administration—in tandem with the Empire State Development Corp., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and both the state's US senators—mounted a considerable effort to keep its homegrown tenant from moving out. At Monday's news conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the incentives included "opportunities for unique co-branding promotions." Specifically, the state and JetBlue, which touts itself as "New York's Hometown Airline," will begin joint branding of the familiar "I Love NY" logo.
In an effort that Bloomberg said was spearheaded by Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber, the city helped the airline shop around for locations. "We presented JetBlue with an array of creative real estate options in up-and-coming areas of our city," Bloomberg said Monday. The airline opted for Long Island City, where its new location, the century-old Brewster Building, boasts an aviation-related lineage as the onetime headquarters of the Brewster Aeronautical Co. MetLife will maintain a presence at the property with 800 employees, according to a release.
Bloomberg said Monday that as part of the agreement with JetBlue, the city will make a capital investment of up to $3 million toward the airline's continued growth of its hub at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The airline's JFK base, Terminal 5, opened in October 2008. The 636,000-square-foot facility is designed to accommodate up to 250 flights per day.
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Paul Bubny
Paul Bubny is managing editor of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. He has been reporting on business since 1988 and on commercial real estate since 2007. He is based at ALM Real Estate Media Group's offices in New York City.
