Did you know that Amazon.com is Staten Island’s largest private sector employer? Since 2017 Jeff Bezos’s company operates a $100 million, 855,000-square-foot fulfillment center that employs a 4,500 full-time workforce. Now Amazon.com has leased a second warehouse in the borough for distribution purposes. The new 450,000-square-foot building will be on Staten Island’s West Shore in Matrix Global Logistics Park, next to the first one.
Last year, Amazon abandoned its plans to locate a second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City after facing a backlash over a state and city package of up to $3 billion in financial incentives. Although the company pulled the plug on that project, it said it would continue to add jobs in New York City, writes the WSJ.
Seven years ago, when we wrote “Tech and the City”, Staten Island barely existed on the digital map of New York. <<It’s too “uncool,” – we noted. – It has no appeal for the young people who are at the core of the metropolitan startups.>> The Staten Island’s best-known startup was the one founded in 1871 by Antonio Meucci, the Italian inventor of the telephone: it was a failure! We recommended a visit to Meucci’s museum to understand that even the most brilliant idea is useless unless it can find the capital to finance it.
