ROLLIN’ OFF OF 6th AVE.
Wenner eyes B’klyn
Midtown could lose yet another publisher.
Rolling Stone parent Wenner Media is said to be in talks to move the 49year-old company away from the land of sky-high rents — to the Brooklyn waterfront.
The company, now located at the 49-story 1290 Sixth Ave., in the area long known as Publishers Row because of its concentration of magazine, newspaper and book publishers, is weighing a move to a onetime coffee warehouse on the East River.
The Brooklyn site comprises 50,000 to 70,000 square feet at Empire Stores, according to Bloomberg News, which first reported the talks.
If the move comes to pass, it would mark the third time a major publisher has fled Midtown in the past two years.
Condé Nast started the trend, when the Newhouse family-owned publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and GQ moved from Four Times Square to One World Trade Center at the end of 2014.
Time Inc., an anchor tenant at Rockefeller Center, followed suit a year later when it moved to downtown facilities at One Brookfield Place, in the shadow of 1 WTC.
Wenner Media, which also publishes Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, is cur- rently in offices owned by Vornado Realty Trust.
Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in San Francisco in 1967 with money borrowed from the family of his then-wife, Jane Schindelheim.
Wenner moved the magazine across the country to New York in the 1970s.
The company stayed intact even after the revelation in the 1990s that Wenner and his wife split. Wenner took up with former Calvin Klein model Matt Nye.
Wenner subsequently divorced Schindelheim and wed Nye in 2011, following passage of the state’s Marriage Equality Act.
Wenner, now 70, has been passing more and more responsibility in the company to his 25-year-old son, Gus, as the outfit seeks to stay relevant to a new generation of readers who are increasingly shunning print for digital outlets.
The Dumbo neighborhood under consideration is one of the hottest outside Manhattan, with asking rents of $65 to $85 a square foot.
“I can tell you that demand for our relatively limited space is overwhelming and we are excited about the growing roster of tenants that we are curating for this building,” Jack Cayre, of Midtown Equities, the developer of Empire Stores, told Bloomberg in an e-mail.