Wall St. Looking More Like Main St.
Though It Still Draws Tourists, Storied Financial Hub Is Increasingly Residential
Wall Street is still home to the New York Stock Exchange, but many financial firms have moved elsewhere.
(By Mary Altaffer -- Associated Press)
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Sunday, October 26, 2008
NEW YORK -- Every day in recent weeks, tourists have poured onto Wall Street to catch sight of its demise, only to discover that the financial center of their imaginations, which once stretched the length of the fabled street, has long since ceased to exist.
Only a few major financial institutions still have national headquarters on Wall Street. Others have moved over the decades to more spacious and modern offices in Midtown Manhattan or New Jersey, or to distant outposts such as Iowa and South Dakota.
Wall Street is, in fact, an increasingly residential strip, with the dogs, babies, fitness clubs and juice bars to prove it. Its workers are just as likely to be lawyers or architects, nonprofit agency directors or researchers, artists, writers or broadcasters, as they are to be bankers.
"Wall Street is shorthand for an industry that is no longer on Wall Street," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, there were 23,000 residents in Lower Manhattan, said Nicole LaRusso, vice president for planning and economic development at the Alliance for Downtown New York, which manages the area's business improvement district. Now, there are more than 56,000 residents, including those in more than 2,000 apartments on Wall Street itself.
"Wall Street is the model for the new, 21st-century central business district, where people live and work in the same place," LaRusso said. "Of course, 300 years ago, this was 100 percent a live-work community. There was no place else to live or work."
As financial leaders give up the risky practices that gave Wall Street its reputation, the street itself has become a mecca for microphones, cameras and visitors, an impulse to bear witness to history. But some feel let down, finding that the street is actually a difficult vantage point from which to view the crisis.
"I'm a little disappointed in Wall Street," said Richard Whittaker, 26, an engineering PhD student visiting from the United Kingdom with a friend. "We thought it'd be on a grander scale, less touristy, more business, more banks."
Changes in the banking industry began affecting the ecology of the area years ago. Once, brokerages clustered on Wall Street so that runners could deliver stock certificates, but the advent of computers reduced the need for physical proximity.
Financial firms began to leave for Midtown in the 1960s, Moss said, seeking big, new buildings with large floors for trading and the capacity for extensive wiring. Employees were also moving to the suburbs and wanted to be closer to the commuter trains at Grand Central Station in Midtown.
In the 1970s, some financial firms moved to the World Trade Center. In the 1980s, companies began moving farther afield, to cheaper, tax-advantageous states.
In the 1990s, government used incentives to encourage the conversion of empty banks to apartments. The terrorist attacks of 2001 accelerated the exodus of financial institutions, and federally backed Liberty Bonds were later made available to help with the conversion to housing.
