[NYguy]

https://www.ft.com/content/4e5af632-...f-ed926b22c8df

One Wall Street: the residential takeover of a banking behemoth
The biggest office-to-apartments conversion in New York’s history signals a deeper shift in Manhattan power





Edwin Heathcote
2/11/22

It’s a good address. One Wall Street. Not a bad building either, one of Manhattan’s best Art Deco skyscrapers by its very best Art Deco architect. A good address, at least, for a bank. But for a home? Why would anyone want to live on Wall Street? In the heart of that famously potholed, intensely dense, dead-in-the-evening neighbourhood that stands for finance capital and the global hegemony of banking?

That this 50-storey tower has become the biggest office to residential development in New York’s history tells you something about the huge shift in finance, power, status and locus taking place in the city.

When it was designed for the Irving Trust in 1928, this was the most prestigious plot in the city, the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway by the Stock Exchange and Trinity Church. As it was rising from the ground, all around it the crash came and went on Wall Street, but this remained the finest real estate in global finance, surviving the Depression, the New Deal, the war, a restructuring, a transition to the Bank of New York, and 9/11. And now, in a perfect encapsulation of the shift in power from corporate to personal wealth, this one-time behemoth of banking and an eyrie for Wolfeian masters of the universe, is being bundled up into apartments. Bedrooms are rapidly displacing boardrooms, heated bathroom floors replacing trading floors.

When the site changed hands in 1905, at $615 per sq ft, it became the most expensive plot in America. There was no question, a century ago, that this was to be the commercial centre of the world, fast outpacing the City of London. Workers poured in every morning, but they flowed out again at the end of the day. Now, Downtown hosts a community of about 64,000 residents, double the number at 9/11.

Wall Street is not what it was. It has accrued a horrible acronym, FiDi, part of a package to make it appeal, incredibly (but successfully) to young families. Like the nearby Woolworth Building and dozens of other buildings in the immediate neighbourhood, one-time banks and brokerages are emerging from hoarding pupae as newly metamorphosed lofts and glamorous apartments. One Wall Street, though, is on another level: an Art Deco-shaped nail in the coffin of this global hub of banking. The institutions are still here, but they are shrinking back. It seems like every new tower and every tower that is being renovated is reappearing as residential.

One Wall Street’s change in destiny is being guided by Harry Macklowe, the developer who has set fashions in New York real estate for decades, from persuading Steve Jobs to build the “glass cube” Apple Store beneath his GM Building to his stark skinnyscraper at 432 Park……….

It’s a pretty good read. The rest of the article is in the link.