Ms. Gonzalez said that many tenants had moved out, but that other businesses, mostly corporate offices, remained on the upper floors.

An engineer at the building on Thursday said that there was a showroom space at the back of the building, which faces 35th Street, and that it was not in use. The doors and windows to what appeared to be that space looked as if they had been sealed for some time.

A distribution center would come with its own complexities. Companies have been moving their warehouses out of, not into, Manhattan for decades. Perhaps the delivery drones that Amazon says it is working on fit into the secret plans here. That would at least solve the traffic problems.

A stock of inventory in Manhattan could conceivably offer advantages, like same-day delivery of books, an area in which Barnes & Noble has tried to set itself apart.

Amazon’s opening of a physical store is one of those stories that is constantly the subject of speculation in the technology news media, similar to what the next iPhone will be like or what the iPhone after that will be like. The Journal’s report of a possible Amazon store immediately became the top article on the Techmeme site, which collects technology news.

Part of the fascination is the irony: The company that basically invented e-commerce would be acknowledging the virtues of old-fashioned shopping. Partly, also, it seems inevitable. For all their focus on the future, technology companies have been expanding to traditional retail for quite a while.

“There’s a growing realization that you can’t force customers to shop in just one way,” said Chris Donnelly, global managing director of retail strategy at Accenture, a consulting firm. “We’re in a world where the retailer can no longer dictate the shopping experience.”