Ironside Newark at 110 Edison Place in Newark — File photo/courtesy: Edison Properties
By Joshua Burd
Global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has found a new home in New Jersey, in downtown Newark, where it will bring together some 700 employees currently spread across two offices.
Sources familiar with the plan say the company is slated to lease space at Ironside Newark, Edison Properties’ distinctive, industrial-style office and retail building at 110 Edison Place. McKinsey, which has a long-established presence in both Summit and Jersey City, declined to identify the specific location and the size of the lease before finalizing the deal, but said it expects to move in the second half of 2024, as its looks to bring its New Jersey team under one roof and become part of Newark’s acclaimed, tight-knit business community.
“We want to invest where it matters,” said Jeff Lewis, McKinsey’s senior partner in New Jersey. “We think Newark matters to New Jersey — it’s New Jersey’s largest city and it represents entrepreneurship, resilience and diversity. It’s an environment we would like to be part of our next chapter overall, and we want to have our community together.
“Part of that is creating a more central location,” he added, citing Newark’s mass transit network, highway connectivity and its access to local, regional and global destinations.
“It’s a vibrant city. I think it has an exciting value proposition for our colleagues for what we do — being embedded in a business community, being embedded in a college campus community, being surrounded by amenities and being part of a continued growth story for the city. I think all of those are exciting parts of the value proposition for our colleagues, in addition to being at the center of connection … (with) ways to access our other offices across the country as well.”
The consulting giant would be among the latest tenants at Ironside Newark, a historic warehouse that Edison Properties restored and repurposed into 456,000 square feet of office and retail space. The building is home to Mars Wrigley Confectionary’s North American headquarters, as well as architecture firm Ware Malcomb, law firms Pearlman & Miranda and Robinson Miller and Edison Properties’ headquarters, all of which benefit from its location next to Newark Penn Station, the Prudential Center and other resurgent parts of the downtown.
HLW is designing McKinsey’s space at Ironside.
McKinsey established its offices in Jersey City and Summit in 2008 and 2012, respectively, but is no stranger to Newark. The company last year announced the launch of a new high-tech learning and innovation facility in the city, which specializes in innovative manufacturing processes in life sciences, allowing biopharma companies to see how digital technologies work in practice to improve operational efficiency and provide immersive, hands-on learning experiences for their workforces.
BioCentriq operates the facility, which McKinsey debuted in partnership with the New Jersey Innovation Institute, an affiliate of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lewis also pointed to the firm’s past pro bono work for Newark institutions including University Hospital, the Newark Museum of Art and other organizations.
“We’ve invested in the city for a long time and intend to continue that,” he said. What’s more, he noted the synergies between McKinsey’s broad client base and Newark’s diverse range of industries, including financial institutions, health care providers and payers, technology firms and innovators.
A new office in the city would also provide McKinsey with a more modern workplace for its New Jersey team. Lewis said the firm has seen “a lot of growth in utilization of our offices across the board in the last year or more, but of course the idea of creating this office is to bring the full New Jersey community together and in new space that meets the times.”
“Both of our offices were designed more than a decade ago, and the idea is to design the space for the way we work today,” Lewis said. “We’ve historically had a very hybrid-type culture because a significant amount of our colleagues work on client sites and have always done that. So this will create the opportunity to work remotely, work on client sites, work with clients at our site and continue what we’ve always done.”
JLL’s Tim Greiner and Newmark’s Harrison Russell have represented ownership in past office deals at Ironside.
