Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, has subleased more than 198,000 square feet across three floors of Vornado Realty Trust’s Penn 2 tower in Manhattan from Verizon, according to Crain’s New York Business, which first reported the deal Monday. The transaction hands Snap the entire eighth through 10th floors that Verizon leased directly from Vornado just over a year ago as the future home of its own corporate headquarters — a plan the telecom carrier has since abandoned.
The sublease is a reversal for Verizon, which signed a 19-year, roughly 203,000-square-foot lease at Penn 2 in July 2025, according to Vornado’s own announcement of that deal. That original commitment covered 195,000 square feet of office space on floors eight through 10 plus a 4,400-square-foot flagship retail store at street level, with an asking rent of $115 per square foot. Verizon planned to use the space to consolidate roughly 1,000 corporate employees from two existing Manhattan locations into a single new headquarters, with a move-in date targeted for 2026.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Josh Kuriloff, Heather Thomas, Peyton Horn and Kyle Ernest, the same brokerage team that represented Verizon in its original 2025 lease, again represented the carrier in the sublease to Snap. Snap was represented by Cushman & Wakefield’s Ethan Silverstein, Amy Zhen and Bianca Di Mauro. The sublease term runs through 2044, matching the back end of Verizon’s original 19-year commitment.
Terms of Snap’s sublease rent were not disclosed. It is also unclear whether Snap intends to relocate its New York operations to Penn 2 or treat the space as an additional office. The company currently leases about 26,000 square feet at 229 West 43rd Street, a commitment set to expire in June 2027.
Penn 2 is the centerpiece of Vornado’s roughly $750 million reinvention of its Penn District campus near Pennsylvania Station, a 31-story, 1.8 million-square-foot tower with a rebuilt curtain-wall facade, a triple-height lobby and 72,000 square feet of outdoor space, including a rooftop pavilion called The Perch. “Our reinvention of THE PENN DISTRICT has produced a vibrant gateway to New York’s new West Side and represents a new era of workplace thinking,” Glen Weiss, Vornado’s executive vice president of office leasing, said when the Verizon lease was announced in July 2025.
The building has drawn a wave of large tenants since Vornado relaunched its leasing program in 2024, including Madison Square Garden, Universal Music Group and Major League Soccer. Vornado said in a June 2026 announcement that Penn 2 had reached 90 percent leased after signing full-floor headquarters deals with data analytics firm Altana on the 21st floor and life-sciences software company Veeva on the 11th floor.
Snap’s move into Verizon’s former space adds to a run of large office commitments that has tightened availability across Manhattan even as sublease listings from companies retrenching on real estate remain part of the leasing mix. The deal also illustrates how quickly large-block space can turn over in Manhattan’s Penn District, where new office development near Grand Central and redevelopment projects have competed for a limited pool of technology and finance tenants willing to sign long leases. It comes as the city continues to referee competing pressures on its office stock, including recent scrutiny of office-to-residential conversions in older Manhattan towers.
What it means: The core facts of the sublease — the more-than-198,000-square-foot footprint, the eighth-through-10th-floor location and the Cushman & Wakefield brokerage teams on both sides — are confirmed by Crain’s New York Business and consistent with Vornado’s own disclosures about the space’s original configuration under Verizon. Rent terms on the sublease itself were not disclosed, and neither Snap nor Verizon has said whether the space will become Snap’s primary New York office or a supplemental one. What to watch: whether Snap allows its existing West 43rd Street lease to lapse in 2027, and whether Vornado formally credits the sublease toward its stated leasing totals at Penn 2 in future disclosures.
