The grassroots coalition that took on Amazon ... and won

#NoAmazon, armed only with intimate knowledge of their home community, came together to take on an internet behemoth

On the morning of February 14, Maritza Silva-Farrell was on a call in her Lower Manhattan office with a fellow climate activist when she noticed a New York Times news alert pop up on her phone.

Amazon was pulling out of New York City. The tech behemoth had cancelled its plans to build a second headquarters, and create a reported 25,000 jobs, in Queens barely three months after choosing the city. The decision to select New York as one of the chosen cities - the Washington, D.C. suburb of Crystal City, Virginia was the other - had marked the end of the company's two-year-long American-Idol style HQ2 contest where over 230 cities from across North America doled out major tax breaks and other corporate freebies to lure Amazon.