Amazon has inked a lease in midtown Manhattan less than a year after abruptly withdrawing from plans to bring half of its second North American headquarters to Queens, according to the the Seattle-based company.

The e-commerce giant has signed a lease for 335,000 square feet in the Hudson Yards where it will have more than 1,500 employees.
The arrangement is Amazon’s largest expansion in New York City since the company abandoned plans to situate half of its second headquarters in Long Island City’s Anable Basin.

It’s worth noting that the HQ2 campus would have spanned between 6 and 8 million square feet and brought some 25,000 jobs over 15 years if the deal came to fruition.

“This is crumbs from the table compared to a feast,” Cuomo told the Associated Press. “We don’t have a problem bringing businesses to Manhattan but we have been trying for decades to get that Queens waterfront developed.”

After Amazon abandoned its HQ2 plans, the New York business community feared that the backtrack could spell trouble for the city when trying to attract other tech behemoths and major companies to the city and state. News of the the company’s midtown expansion may put some of those fears to bed as Amazon joins the ranks of Google, Facebook, and Disney in their continued push to snap up prime Manhattan office space.  (source: Curbed NYC)