Rudin’s Dock 72 notches Food52 as second tenant

Cooking and home brand joining WeWork in Brooklyn Navy Yard office building

Food52 CEO Amanda Hesser, Rudin Management president Eric Rudin and 1 Dock 72 Way in Brooklyn (Getty, Rudin)
Food52 CEO Amanda Hesser, Rudin Management president Eric Rudin and 1 Dock 72 Way in Brooklyn (Getty, Rudin)

Dock 72 has notched its second tenant as an online cooking and home website is set to make its move from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Food52, the site founded by former New York Times food editors Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs in 2009, is departing Chelsea for the Brooklyn Navy Yard office building developed by Rudin Management and Boston Properties in cooperation with WeWork. The developers announced the lease on Tuesday.

Food52 is leasing approximately 42,000 square feet in the building for 12 years, taking up the entirety of the 13th floor. The company plans on moving during the second half of 2022.

Asking rents for the space were not publicized. However, CBRE put asking rents in the building between the mid-$50s and high-$60s as of February 2020, according to the Commercial Observer.

Dock 72 is a 16-story, 675,000-square-feet office building that opened in October 2019, marking the first ground-up office building constructed in Brooklyn in more than a decade. About a third of the office building is leased to WeWork, which is set to provide programming to other tenants in the building.

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Since its opening, the building has been slow to sign tenants since initial concerns around the fallout over its lone tenant as WeWork’s hopes to go public imploded. Dock72’s owners in December 2019 brushed off concerns about its leasing rates, which were likely exacerbated by its location and the pandemic.

The Real Deal reported in August that Vice was planning on moving its headquarters to Dock 72, where the media company would take up “four or five floors.” A Vice Media Group spokesperson said at the time the company was weighing its options for its lease expiration in 2022 and no agreement had been reached.

Hesser, who serves as the site’s CEO, said in a statement the company was looking to build studios and test kitchens to expand their content production in the new space.

Helen Paul and Rico Murtha of Cushman & Wakefield represented Food52 in the transaction.

The site’s employees will also have access to building amenities including a rooftop conference center, ground-floor food hall, basketball court and a health and wellness center.

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