Shortly after getting married, we moved to the NYC area from Washington DC.
I interviewed for a position in a corner office of a building that was situated caddy corner on Park Avenue and 34th Street. It was the tallest building in an area near the residential Kips Bay and Murray Hill neighborhoods with magnificent views in every direction. I worked in the building from 1982 to 1994 and loved its location. It was an easy in and out from the Lincoln Tunnel and every once-in-a-while my wife drove in and we would catch a play, have dinner, or go to Rockefeller Center during the holidays.
New York City in the 1980’s and 1990’s was sans the 1950’s, the best time to live and work in New York City. The city buzzed with excitement day and night and the city’s energy was palpable. Even walking around Times Square before they turned it into Disneyland was a gritty but interesting experience. B. Altman’s was two blocks away and it was the quintessential department store with wooden floors, majestic columns and roving carolers that entertained the customers during Christmas. Before Barnes and Noble there were fabulous bookstores such as Rizzoli’s, Scribner’s, and Doubleday.
But it was the people that gave the city its energy and uniqueness. This was long before cell phones and people forced to smoke clustered together outside offices. People still wore suits to work, and women dressed to the nines. I did not know it at the time but my job at 3 Park Avenue would end up being the best job of a 40-year career. This is attributed in large part to the two men I worked with, Matt Scanlon and David Latham. Both men were at their heart teachers and mentors. Additionally, they were patient, understanding, creative and extremely competent. They did not micromanage staff but at the same time they were there for you.
I used to love walking a couple of days a week to the Path Station at the World Trade Center taking me through the iconic parts of the city like Union Station, Washington Square Park, the Village and Soho. On Friday’s I took the ferry across the Hudson to Hoboken. As the ferry left Manhattan with the heat shimmering off the concrete buildings and the majestic view, it never failed to be awe inspiring.
The first shot across the bow that changed New York City occurred in early 1993 with the first World Trade bombing. That day, returning home on the train from Hoboken I was sitting next to a man with soot on his face and all over his suit. I had not yet heard of the bombing until the man told me what happened. The next week I walked down to WTC to catch the PATH and seeing this large hole extending from the mezzanine down to the parking garage was incomprehensible.
In 1995, my firm merged with another public benefit corporation located in Albany and I accepted a position with the new merged entity. They had a New York City office and I worked at that location until we moved upstate in 1997. After moving upstate, I continued to travel back to the city for board meetings, but the feeling was different from when I worked in New York City. I felt much more like a visitor than a part of the fabric of New York life.
The seismic shift that changed New York forever occurred on September 11, 2001. I had a meeting at our New York City office about ten days after the attacks and from our office windows at One Penn Plaza, we had an unobstructed view downtown and even ten days later, the residue from the falling buildings still formed a plume over lower Manhattan. I walked downtown but the closest you could get to the site was Broadway. Peering down the side streets, you could see a 10-story high pile of mangled debris. It was more than your eyes and brain could comprehend. I walked back uptown passing the 23rd Street Armory where there were thousands of signs plastered on the walls with people hoping that somehow their loved ones were still alive. That night my hotel room overlooked a NYC fire station and all through the night, people stopped by with food, flowers and offers to help in any way they could. It was the beauty and the tragedy of New Yorkers coming together and as I am writing this; I still get the chills recalling that day in my mind’s eye.
In early 2002, I represented our agency at a closing dinner for a hospital financing that took place in the corporate dining room of Merril Lynch located in the World Financial Center, just west of the WTC site. The dining room overlooked the vast open pit vacated by the towers. Most of the metal and debris were cleared and there was a singular uphill wooden plankway for the wheelbarrows and personnel still clearing the site. The area was illuminated and cast an eerie pallor over the Merril Lynch dining room. I was asked to say a few words, but it was difficult to get the words out as nobody could ignore the scene that we were overlooking.
The lasting effects of September 11th profoundly affected everyone living in the New York metropolitan area. For years, New Yorkers felt vulnerable with a vague sense of foreboding. One of my favorite attorneys of the hundreds I worked with over the years, had his office on the 60th floor of the north tower. He made it out safely but after trying to go back to work retired early and moved south, leaving the work and life he loved forever.
Following September 11th came the widespread use of cell phones with so many people always looking down at the ground as they navigated the streets of Manhattan. People in their own tiny bubbles oblivious to the environment around them.
I retired from my career in public finance in 2010 but was unexpectantly offered a position with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2012. The office was located at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. My wife and I were not willing to leave upstate, so I was back to the daily commute into Manhattan, now from my sister-in-law’s house in New Jersey. I quickly found out that commuting in your sixties was quite different than commuting in your thirties. By the time I reached the office, I was exhausted and ready for a nap. One early October afternoon we had a fire drill and were all ordered to take the stairs down to the floor below us, whose occupants were the FBI. As we made our way for an express elevator to the street, all the FBI agents made a double row down an aisle of cubicles for us to walk past. On the street, we were shepherded to the Verizon Building a couple of blocks away. When we arrived at the designated meeting point, I started chatting with an FBI agent. He told me that the two buildings most often targeted in intercepted intelligence chatter were the Empire State Building and 26 Federal Plaza, our building. From that day, I always looked out of my office window a little bit differently.
About a week later, Hurricane Sandy closed lower Manhattan, the PATH trains and much of New Jersey Transit. From that point forward, I worked from home and subsequently ended up driving down to 26 Federal Plaza occasionally. This continued until I retired at the end of 2019.
COVID was the final blow to life in Manhattan as we knew it. It is estimated that vacant commercial office space in Manhattan is about 35%. Many people have bolted for upstate New York, New England or Florida and the number of stores and restaurants that have closed is alarming. I still hold onto the belief that NYC will bounce back, but it will be a different New York City than the one that existed in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
