I Live on Wall Street

In Manhattan, Finding Home Sweet Wall Street
Business District Sees Residential Boom
Lisa Kassenaar
Bloomberg News
1 April 2006

David Gustamante, a Manhattan lawyer, spent a couple of days this month touring apartments on Wall Street. Last week, he signed a lease.

"You can't knock the convenience," said Gustamante, 31, who works three blocks from his new two-bedroom. Cutting the commute from Brooklyn, where he now lives, will mean billing an extra five hours of work a week, he reckoned.

Wall Street, New York's financial district for more than 200 years, is the city's latest home address. Residents are pouring in, drawn by new apartments in old office buildings that no longer accommodate banks and securities firms. 23 Wall St., the marble building at the corner of Broad Street built in 1914 for J.P. Morgan, is now part of a condominium.

Celebrities including actor Bruce Willis and model Naomi Campbell are buying pied-a-terre with butlers and private wine cellars. Families are finding cheaper homes than on the Upper East and Upper West sides. By the end of next year, the population will jump to about 41,000, up 80 percent from 2000, according to the Downtown Alliance, which manages Lower Manhattan's business improvement district.

"There's still a pioneering aspect to it," said Pamela Liebman, chief executive of the Corcoran Group Inc., a Manhattan-based real estate brokerage that arranged $11.9 billion of transactions last year. "Long-term, the financial district has nowhere to go but up."

Corcoran helped sell 92 percent of the 382 units at 15 Broad St., a 40-story tower across from the New York Stock Exchange. Prices range from $610,000 to $3.8 million. The project includes the adjoining 23 Wall, which once housed J. Pierpont Morgan Jr.'s office. That building, which still bears the pockmarks left in 1920 by an explosion tied to anarchists, will house retail shops. The moving vans begin arriving in May.

New York's financial district is bordered by Chambers Street to the north, and the East River and West Street on either side. It includes the site of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, and St. Paul's Chapel, the city's oldest public building, where George Washington worshiped the day he was sworn in as the first U.S. president in 1789.

Joggers, dog walkers and moms with strollers now navigate the winding alleys. The borough's first new private elementary school in a half-century opened on Broad Street in September.

On Stone Street, one of America's first paved roads, customers line up at Ulysses Folk House on Sundays, where the $20 all-you-can-eat brunch includes oysters and mimosas. The restaurant packs in patrons in their twenties and thirties, some with kids and others with visiting relatives.

Jeffrey Matty, a 26-year-old lawyer, said he has eaten brunch at Ulysses at least 50 times in the year and a half since he rented a studio apartment at 45 Wall St., about 10 blocks from his work in the Woolworth Building.

"You used to be able to go in and relax for hours because it's Lower Manhattan and it was pretty empty," Matty said. "Not any more."

About 310,000 people stream into the area each business day from the five boroughs and surrounding suburbs. They work in finance, insurance and law, or in the delis, barbershops, dentist offices and dry cleaners that serve the Monday-to-Friday crowd.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most profitable U.S. securities firm, is based at 85 Broad St. and constructing a new headquarters across from Ground Zero. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, the No. 1 legal adviser on mergers last year, is at 125 Broad. American International Group Inc., the world's biggest insurer, is at 70 Pine St. in a Jazz Age skyscraper completed in 1932.

The neighborhood suffered in the late 1980s when securities firms including Bear Stearns Cos. and Credit Suisse First Boston, now simply Credit Suisse, moved uptown, pushed by the need for facilities that could handle the technology of contemporary trading floors.

New York began offering tax breaks in 1995 for converting office space into homes, a program that took off in the past five years as low interest rates and Wall Street profits catapulted Manhattan real estate prices to records.

At least 115 buildings have been renovated with the incentive, which is ending June 30, a year earlier than planned, the Downtown Alliance said.

"It's a continuing story of adaptive reuse, which is a very New York story," said Sarah Henry, chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York. The shift is "an interesting sequel" to loft living in abandoned manufacturing spaces in SoHo and Tribeca, she said.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., formed in 2001 to oversee revitalizing the area, offered discounts to renters for two years after the Twin Towers fell, encouraging life on blocks stung by tragedy and destined for years of construction dust.

There are now about 21,000 rental and condominium units, and 29 projects will add 4,000 units. With current proposals, housing stock may rise 40 percent by 2010, according to the Downtown Alliance. Even with a gush of new apartments, occupancy has held steady at about 95 percent.

The average price per square foot for financial district apartments was $767 in 2005, more than double the amount five years earlier, said Jonathan Miller, president of Manhattan appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. But that's less than the average $965 in the entire borough last year, he said.

Prices are rising in part because some renovations offer amenities from reflecting pools to simulated golf to complimentary dog-washing.

At 55 Wall St., headquarters of a predecessor of today's Citigroup Inc. from 1904 to 1961, Italy's Cipriani family is selling what marketing materials call "the good life," complete with custom-made furniture, linens and dishes. The building will house a screening room showing movies before they hit theaters and a restaurant, the latest in a group started by Giuseppe Cipriani in 1931 with Harry's Bar in Venice.

More than half the 106 units, priced from $800,000 to $3 million, have been sold since November, said Laura Cordovano, director of the building's sales and a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Among those taking space: Campbell, Willis and movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

Three blocks away, at 20 Pine St., a 38-story limestone tower built in 1928 that was once Chase Manhattan Bank's headquarters, developer Leviev Boymelgreen hired Armani Casa, a unit of Milan-based Giorgio Armani SpA, to design the interiors.

The pool, still under construction, is in the basement vault next to a Turkish hammam, or steam room. High-floor residents get a concierge to make travel and dinner reservations, serve breakfast, or muster up a foreign newspaper. Studio apartments start at $650,000.

Some say Wall Street's lush new condos have to offer hotel-like services because neighborhood conveniences are lacking. The area has no large grocery store, and most small businesses are shuttered after 6 p.m. and on weekends.

Even take-out pizza and Chinese food, available at all hours in the rest of Manhattan, can be hard to come by after dark, Matty says. And don't even try to hail a cab.

"You're isolated," said Eamon DeSacia, 37, a fixed- income analyst at Guardian Life Insurance Co., who has worked at 7 Hanover Square since 2002 and typically goes home to the Upper East Side at 6 p.m. "I would never live here."

Along with new residents, shops appealing to those with Wall Street salaries are coming, brokers say. A BMW car dealership opened last year at 67 Wall St., and French fashion house Hermes has agreed to an emporium at 15 Broad. Whole Foods Market Inc., the organic grocery store chain, plans to open a store at the corner of Greenwich and Warren streets.

"We looked at it as being an up-and-coming neighborhood," said Joshlene Sandhu-Boparai, 31, who moved from New Jersey to a two-bedroom at 50 Pine St. three weeks ago.

Her husband, an optometrist, has shaved more than an hour off his commute to work in Brooklyn, she said. Battery Park is nearby for watching seagulls with their baby daughter.

Last Monday, Sandhu-Boparai toured friends through three apartments off Wall Street. "I'm trying to get everyone to move down here," she said.>