Part of Amazon's still-expanding headquarters in downtown Seattle. Credit: PHOTO PROVIDED

Awww….

Amazon announced the 20 finalists for its Headquarters 2 location this morning, and the Rochester-Buffalo area isn’t one of them.

From the proposals it received from 238 cities and regions, here’s who made the cut, in alphabetical order:

  • Atlanta
  • Austin
  • Boston
  • Chicago
  • Columbus
  • Dallas
  • Denver
  • Indianapolis
  • Los Angeles
  • Miami
  • Montgomery County, Md.
  • Nashville
  • Newark
  • New York
  • Northern Virginia
  • Philadelphia
  • Pittsburgh
  • Raleigh
  • Toronto
  • Washington, D.C.

Amazon didn’t give reasons for dropping the other 218, but clearly it leaned toward larger metropolitan areas and, in the case of the mid-size cities, toward places with a kind of national buzz.

This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2018.

Mary Anna Towler is a transplant from the Southern Appalachians and is editor, co-publisher, and co-founder of City. She is happy to have converted a shy but opinionated childhood into an adult job. She...

2 replies on “No Amazon HQ2 for us”

  1. This bid was fake news from day one. With the longest regularly scheduled non-stop flight from the Rochester airport ending in Chicago, the lack of direct connections to the West Coast immediately ruled Rochester out.

    While the list of 20 cities includes many trendy cities, Amazon did not rule out two mid-size cities with metro areas not all that larger than Rochester – Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana. Both cities are business-friendly, an adjective that does not apply to the city of Rochester.

  2. Rochester and Buffalo’s bid for the Amazon HQ was as ludicrous, ALMOST as ludicrous, as Bob Duffy’s proposal back in his mayoral days that the communities in Western New York file a joint bid to host the 2024 Olympics.

Comments are closed.