Jamie Dimon pulled out the stops to lure bankers back into the office—and to incentivize them to stay late.
JPMorgan Chase’s new $3 billion skyscraper on 270 Park Ave in Midtown Manhattan is packed with amenities designed to make full-time office workers actually want to return to the office, including 19 restaurants and an assortment of coffee shops that employees can order from in a building-specific app.
The new 60-story headquarters opens this week, and at full capacity, it can hold 10,000 employees. The tower is also outfitted with a gym, a company store, and biometric access—and it’s open all hours of the day. David Arena, the head of global corporate real estate at the bank, told CNBC the new HQ will serve as a blueprint for the global bank’s future offices worldwide.
“We tried to future-proof the building,” Arena said Tuesday.
Architect Norman Foster, whose past work includes Apple’s headquarters in California and Hearst Tower in Manhattan, said the project may top his previous designs. He told The Wall Street Journal last week: “In terms of leisure, entertainment, lifestyle, I would say that every level of this tower pushes those boundaries further than anything we’ve done before.”
Dining options on-site range from Morgan’s, an English pub, to a Michelin-starred vegan restaurant and a cafe that serves protein shakes from an Airstream trailer, according to CNBC. The tower has 50% more hospitality space than any previous JPMorgan property, Arena said.
The six-year-long rebuild of JPMorgan’s headquarters exemplifies Dimon’s push for in-person collaboration, which he believes is essential for creativity and young worker development.
Dimon told The Journal last week that he and other execs were intimately involved in the building’s design process. Arena described Dimon as the building’s “master architect.”
As a vocal proponent of working from the office rather than remote, Dimon has led JPMorgan’s overhaul of 125,000 workspaces around the world over the past five years, with plans for 75,000 more. The new headquarters, according to Dimon, sets the gold standard. “We think of the building as a recruitment tool,” Arena told CNBC. “A workplace needs to be a destination, it needs to be commute-worthy. It needs to provide an elevated experience for employees, for clients and for visitors.”
