Convene to Open 16th Manhattan Location

Convene will open a 32,000-square-foot meeting and events venue at Scholastic Corp.’s 555 Broadway in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. The future location marks Convene’s 16th space in the borough, slated to begin welcoming customers in the spring of 2026.

Set on the building’s second floor, the venue will accommodate a maximum event capacity of 450 individuals. Amenities will include a retail entrance with a welcome desk, seven meeting and event spaces, a 252-person main hall, 16-person boardroom, five studios, gallery spaces and in-house catering. Convene’s deal with the property’s ownership also includes coveted branding rights on the building. The tenant’s in-house design team, together with New York City firm Marlo & Kroft, oversee the venue’s design layouts.

Convene owns and manages nearly 40 locations across nine cities in the U.S. and the U.K., including Boston, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C., London and Manchester. The NYC locations are concentrated in Manhattan, with three in Lower Manhattan and the rest in Midtown. The Lower Manhattan sites are closest to Convene’s newest venue, at 225 Liberty St. (Convene Brookfield Place), 1 Liberty St. (Convene One Liberty Plaza) and 101 Greenwich St. (Convene 101 Greenwich).

Last year, the hospitality firm opened a 30,000-square-foot meeting and conference center at 5 Times Square, which opened in March 2024. Around the same time, the company also expanded its footprint at 360 Madison Ave. by 22.519 square feet, reaching a total of 68,000 square feet at Stawski Partners’ property.

A 135-year-old SoHo asset

New York-based publishing company Scholastic acquired the 215,342-square-foot office building in 2014 for $255 million, from ISE America, Yardi Research Data data shows.

Originally completed in 1889 to serve as a retail property, the 10-story asset was converted into an office building a century later, in 1989. The property underwent a complete renovation in 1994 and cosmetic upgrades in 2015, according to the same source. The SoHo office building is adjacent to the Prince Street subway station on lines N, Q, R, W, which connect the Scholastic’s asset to downtown, some 4 miles north.

Manhattan’s full-service equivalent listing rates averaged $68.08 per square foot as of May, reflecting a 4.5 percent drop year-over-year, while staying well below the national figure of $33.15, the latest Yardi Matrix office report shows. Office vacancy in the borough clocked in at 15.7 percent, down 50 basis points over the last 12 months.