NYSE Cancels $1B NYC Office Plans
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:42 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Stock Exchange will not pursue a $1 billion plan to build a 50-story office tower with state-of-the-art trading floors across Wall Street from its headquarters, the exchange's chairman said Thursday.
After what became contentious negotiations with the Bloomberg administration during the past several months, NYSE Chairman Dick Grasso said the exchange would look elsewhere for a backup trading floor.
``What we had proposed to build was just the greatest trading floor of the 21st century,'' Grasso said. ``It will now happen somewhere else.''
Afterward, NYSE spokeswoman Diana deSocio confirmed Grasso's comments meant the exchange was ending negotiations on the Manhattan project, which would have included 10 stories of trading floors.
Instead, the exchange will look for a site in Westchester County, Long Island, Brooklyn or Queens.
The scuttled deal has been expensive for the cash-strapped city: It is paying $3 million a month for the right to hold onto land set aside for the tower, has committed to paying $160 million to build an apartment building adjacent to the site and has agreed to buy a neighboring office building from J.P. Morgan Chase for $220 million. It was not immediately clear Thursday whether the city would have to continue honoring those agreements.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg had no comment Thursday. Instead, a spokesman directed a reporter to comments the mayor made last week, when Bloomberg said a decision by the exchange to move some of its operations outside the city would ``let the terrorists win.''
The stock exchange has been considering relocating some of its operations since the World Trade Center attack last year forced it to close for four days.
Before the attack, the exchange had threatened to move its entire headquarters to New Jersey. In 1998, to keep the exchange in the city, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani negotiated a contract to build the office tower across the street from the 210-year-old exchange.
Despite the hefty city subsidies, Giuliani called the agreement ``a Christmas gift to the city.''
The $1 billion deal in land, city and tax breaks fell apart after Bloomberg said in May that the city's $5 billion budget deficit made the arrangement impossible.
Even then, Grasso and Bloomberg said negotiations continued on a scaled-down version of the project.
Last week, however, Grasso said the exchange was considering locations outside the city, which prompted Bloomberg to suggest that the exchange was giving into terrorism by considering leaving lower Manhattan.
``In this day and age, if they were ever thinking about moving away, 9-11 must have ended that,'' Bloomberg said last week. ``Nobody's going to desert New York City at this point in time. And it wouldn't be a smart business move for (Grasso), either.'' |
