The Boston Globe is set to move its editorial and business operations to a downtown office tower in January 2017, after finalizing a lease agreement Thursday.
Boston Globe Media Partners chief executive Mike Sheehan announced that the company had followed an earlier letter of intent by signing a lease for two floors of office space in the Exchange Place complex at 53 State St., which is owned by UBS Realty Investors.
Renovations to the space will begin in August after the current tenants leave, Sheehan said. The Globe has hired Gensler, an international design firm, to fit out its new offices.
The new headquarters is less than a quarter mile from the Globe’s historic home on “Newspaper Row,’’ at 238-240 Washington St., where the paper operated from its founding in 1872 until moving to Dorchester in 1958. Exchange Place is also near Boston’s political and business centers, a short walk from City Hall, the State House, and numerous corporate offices.
The Exchange Place complex is a union of the former Boston Stock Exchange building, built in the 1890s, and a 510-foot-tall glass skyscraper built in 1985.
Sheehan has previously said the move will save the company a significant amount of money compared with the high cost of operating and maintaining its current aging headquarters on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester.
The Globe — which also prints the Boston Herald, The New York Times, USA Today, and other papers — had previously announced that its printing and delivery operations would move to a new 328,000-square-foot facility in Taunton, bought last May for $20.3 million. Sheehan said Thursday that the Globe’s customer service operations are already working from Taunton and that printing of USA Today will shift there by the end of June. Printing of the other papers is expected to switch to Taunton later this year.
John Henry, the Globe’s owner, has said he intends to sell the paper’s 16.5-acre Morrissey Boulevard property. An earlier deal for the site with a Concord development firm fell through last year.
Dan Adams can be reached at dadams@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanielAdams86.
