Conde Nast didn’t win over any employees as friends when it formally announced yesterday that it is in “active discussions” with the Durst Organization and the Port Authority of New York to move into 1 World Trade Center by 2014, vacating its current headquarters at 4 Times Square.
In fact, many of the staffers are very unhappy.
“It’s just depressing,” said one insider. “Everybody is pretty bummed out about it. Nobody wants to move down there.” Condé is expected to take about 1 million square feet for the new digs when it vacates the 800,000 square feet it is renting from Durst in Times Square.
The extra space would allow Condé to consolidate the Fairchild unit at 750 Third Ave. with the consumer magazines such as Vogue, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, now housed in the Condé Nast tower.
Although the Times Square headquarters lease has several years to run beyond 2014, the Durst Organization has several reasons for allowing Condé to move downtown. It gives Durst a highly visible anchor tenant for the hard-to-fill 1,776-foot skyscraper on the site of the fallen Twin Towers while enabling it to rent out 4 Times Square for a lot more than it got when Condé Nast moved there in 1998.
As for Condé making the move — “It’s probably a combination of lower rents and city and state tax breaks,” said another insider.
News that Condé Nast was looking to move downtown is not a shock. It actually broke several months ago and was greeted with a chorus of boos back then. Discontent in the ranks of those who work for Condé Nast’s billionaire owner S.I. Newhouse, Jr. was not enough to call off the search led by CEO Charles Townsend.
The only other tenant currently booked in 1 WTC is Vantone Industrial, a Chinese firm with close ties to Beijing, which is taking about 200,000 square feet.
A memo sent to Condé Nast staffers yesterday said that “while a final decision is still months away and a move itself unlikely before 2014, we wanted to keep you appraised of the status of this project.”
Said one insider, “I don’t think they would have sent the memo if it wasn’t a done deal.”
Some downtown residents might not be too chagrined. Vogue editrix Anna Wintour has an opulent pad in the West Village, where she recently hosted a dinner party for President Barack Obama, and Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter resides in a townhouse on Bank Street, where he is also the owner of the Waverly Inn. They’ll both see shorter commutes to their day jobs.
For most of the rank and file, the best consolation is that it isn’t happening for a long time.
“I think for a lot of people, 2014 seems so far away, they can’t wrap their minds around it,” said a source.
Added another: “If I’m still here by then, just shoot me.”
Hooked
Don Logan, the onetime CEO of Time Inc. who also ran AOL and Time Warner Cable before retiring in 2005, is about to take a more active role in the publishing world. He is part of a trio of exec utives buying Bass LP from ESPN. Logan’s teaming up with Jerry McKin nis, the former host of the “The Fishing Hole” on ESPN, and former Deloitte CEO Jim Copeland.
The company has three magazines — two consumer titles: Bassmaster Magazine, with circulation of a half million, and Bass Times, with circulation of 120,000-plus, as well as the trade title Fishing Tackle Retailer and its related Web sites, TV shows and an exhibition wing.
“I still believe in print and I’m putting my money where my mouth is,” said the unretiring Logan.
Logan was once famously described by The Post as a “squirrel-eating CEO” because he said in his hardscrabble youth he used to hunt rabbit and squirrels and would eat what he killed.
The Alabama native didn’t develop his affection for bass until just before he came north from the Southern Progress wing of Time to run the main Time Inc. unit in the mid-1990s.
“When everyone else would head out to the Hamptons for a party,” said Logan, “I’d head off with a couple of buddies on a lake and do some fishing.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.