Apple will build a massive store in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, Cult of Mac independently confirmed.
The store will open in the fall, likely early September — and it will be Apple’s largest retail space in the world.
The store already has a name: Apple Store, Grand Central, according to a source close the company. The source said Apple will be making an internal announcement within the next month or so.
“The company will certainly pull out all the stops on this one,” said the source, who asked not to be named.
This year is the 10th anniversary of Apple retail, and Apple wants to make a big splash, our source said. Apple’s retail operation has been a spectacular success, helping fuel the company’s explosive growth and creating shops that make twice as much money as Tiffany & Co.
Apple plans to build store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal
Reports that Apple was looking at the New York landmark first appeared last week in The New York Observer and IFOAppleStore.com. Both publications said Apple was “evaluating” Grand Central but hadn’t started the long and complex approval process, which is overseen by New York’s bureaucratic MTA.
The Apple Store, Grand Central, will be the largest in the world. It will be bigger than the Apple Store in Covent Garden, London, currently Apple’s largest retail location. The Covent Garden store is about 40,000 square feet over four stories, but only 16,372 square feet is public, according to IFOAppleStore.
It’s unclear where Apple will find more than 16,000 square feet inside Grand Central.
The terminal is home to more than 100 retail locations, spread across three levels and 130,000 square feet. Most average between 1,000 and 6,000 square feet. One of the largest stores is Rite Aid at 10,000 square feet, followed by Kenneth Cole, which has about 8,500 square feet next to the iconic Vanderbilt Hall. Here’s the leasing plan (pdf).
The Observer said Apple isn’t expected to take one of the traditional retail spaces, but will locate right in the terminal.
Our source suggested that Apple may be taking walls down — but didn’t elaborate.
The terminal sees more than 700,000 visitors a day, most heading for trains or subway. But about 250,000 come to look at Vanderbilt Hall or eat at the 35 restaurants, including the historic Oyster Bar on the lower level.
Apple already operates four super-popular stores in Manhattan. The largest is the spectacular glass-fronted store on the Upper West Side. The busiest is the famous glass cube on Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue Apple store is only a mile away from Grand Central. In fact, the mad crowds at Fifth Avenue are the reason Apple wants another store so close, to take the pressure off, according to IFOAppleStore.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
