The New York Post: New York’s most iconic buildings go orange in bid to woo Amazon

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t think the brightest lights of the Big Apple are enough to woo Amazon—so he turned them all orange.

Officials lit up some of the city’s most iconic landmarks—including the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center—in Amazon’s

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  signature color Wednesday night in a bid to court the Seattle-based mega-online retailer, which is looking to build a second corporate campus.

The city stooped almost as low with its stunt as the Georgia town that offered to change its name to Amazon to lure in the big fish.

But New York officials stopped short of dangling tax breaks, like the $7 billion on the table from New Jersey to get the Web-retail giant to Newark.

Republican mayoral candidate Nicole Malliotakis said the light show proves that de Blasio—who recently revealed that he has never made a purchase via Amazon — “doesn’t understand the private sector and how the business community thinks.

“Pretty lights won’t attract businesses, but cutting taxes, red tape and regulations will,” she said.

Amazon is soliciting bids from cities across North America for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, which will require at least 500,000 square feet of space.

The final deadline for submitting proposals is Thursday.

The city released an overview of its bid Wednesday night, including:

—Four separate neighborhoods that could house the $5 billion headquarters: Midtown West, Long Island City, Brooklyn Tech Triangle and lower Manhattan.

—The New York metro area already has the largest tech workforce in the nation, with 296,000 workers.

With 105 institutions of higher learning, New York and Amazon “have [an] opportunity to leverage ­industry and academia.”

—The city has the nation’s largest public-transportation and air-transit system.

—The Big Apple has diversity and competitive labor costs and is known for innovation.

Amazon’s new campus will bring an estimated 50,000 high-paying jobs to the city that lands it, and the competition has been fierce, with at least half a dozen cities and counties in New York state alone making bids.

The Empire State Development Corp. plans to offer a package with tax breaks and incentives to Amazon before Thursday’s deadline that would be applicable to any ­location chosen in New York.

Anthony Hogrebe, a spokesman for the city’s Economic Development Corp., said the city’s proposal does not include new tax subsidies.

He said the city is “open to making investments in infrastructure and transit that would both benefit” Amazon and the winning neighborhood.

“[Amazon’s] priority is access to talent,” Hogrebe said. “New York City has more people with bachelor degrees or above than Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, DC and Boston combined. That, and the fact that we are the city where young people want to live.”

The orange-lit landmarks included 4 Times Square, 1 Bryant Park and Bloomberg Tower — for 15 minutes, from 9 to 9:15 p.m.

Screens and billboards across Times Square and all LinkNYC ­kiosks in the five boroughs went orange for five minutes as well.

Geoffrey Croft, of the government watchdog group NYC Park Advocates, said the orange lights were a muddled message, given that Halloween is just weeks away.

“It is doubtful many people will think this has anything to do with . . . Amazon,” he told The Post.

—Additional reporting by Danika Fears

This report first appeared on NYPost.com.