WeWork growing again in NYC years after crashing and burning

WeWork — remember them? — just signed a lease for 37,000 square feet at 511 Fifth Ave.between East 42nd and 43rd streets.

It adds to WeWork’s growing, 3.3 million-square-foot portfolio of Big Apple coworking spaces — part of a global portfolio of 45 million square feet.But if you didn’t know the company had such a big footprint since its meltdown and subsequent 2023 bankruptcy, you aren’t alone.WeWork emerged as a responsible, if stealthy space-consumer that operated mostly under the media radar — a stark contrast to earlier days when office brokers hated it for out-bidding their clients at rents neither they nor WeWork itself could afford.“We’re growing again, sensibly and sustainably, in line with demand.We recently added locations at 250 Broadway and 245 Fifth Avenue, and now, 511 Fifth Ave.,” WeWork global head of real estate Peter Greenspan told us.Owners Aurora Capital and Jeff Sutton recently added a glass-box lobby and upgraded systems to 21st-century standards.

WeWork will partner with the owners on a 9,000 square-foot co-working lounge, too.The deal brokered by JLL’s Peter Riguardi for WeWork and by JLL’s Mitchell Konsker for the landlord brings WeWork’s presence to 36 Manhattan locations including 500 Seventh Ave., where it has 186,000 square feet.Today’s disciplined, targeted approach is worlds removed from the excesses of the Adam Neumann era, when WeWork —  a real estate subleasing company — claimed to be a “tech” outfit and seemed to announce new deals every week at high-profile locations such as the Lord & Taylor building on Fifth Avenue.(It later bailed out to Amazon).Gone, too, is the swagger of the Neumann era when he overexpanded despite chronic losses even while he and his wife, Rebekah, were summoning employees to “summer retreats” that required them to stand in mud holding hands.WeWork has less than the 5 million square feet that it boasted before its 2019 meltdown, but more than its shrunken...