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ong before I ever covered corporate real estate, I had already developed a sort of “connection” with it — with some specific real estate at least. I’m thinking here of the World Trade Center complex in New York City, which loomed over my early career in the city’s financial district.
Many times, while covering the securities industry in the late 1980s as a reporter from offices quite near the World Trade Center, the huge towers helped me gain my bearings as I made my way to appointments in the confusing geography of the southern tip of Manhattan. Attending press events or meetings in the buildings, especially in the top-floor restaurant, was never “work.” No, those were field trips, opportunities to view the island and the whole metro area as would a high-flying bird.
Imagine my delight to learn that the publication was moving offices into Two World Trade Center — the south tower! Now, the 18th floor wasn’t quite in the clouds, but they were just a short elevator ride away on some days. I remember when the president brought Russia’s then-President Gorbachev to the top of the building to view the many monuments to capitalism below. Watching their motorcade down on Tobin Plaza, my colleagues and I had the sensation of being in a place very much at the center of things.
Even when working elsewhere in New York, I continued to enjoy the mighty towers by virtue of living just across the Hudson River from them in a high rise on the New Jersey waterfront. It seems they were always in my view, or not far from it, an immutable part of the landscape in a world that changes so rapidly.
The great loss of September 11, 2001, wasn’t the buildings, of course, but the people who worked there — or were simply visiting. Perhaps a job interview or a meeting with a client brought some victims to the huge complex that morning. Many of those people’s connection to the buildings was likely the sense of security the fortress-like towers could evoke by virtue of their sheer size.
I can’t help but feel different about workspace since the recent attack. Consider how our business — like the New York skyline — has changed. After all, a new set of issues is now before us. What are the real estate ramifications of interruptions in the supply chains that are so critical to my business? Must we now add “personal safety” or “distance from potential terrorist targets” to the list of search criteria we use in selecting a location? How, if at all, can real estate managers reduce their properties’ vulnerability to disasters? Should economic developers be forming strategies for addressing companies’ security concerns? And this: Is real estate just an asset to be driven from the balance sheet to increase shareholder value, or is its value, in part, more subtle?
Feeling a connection to the property we manage or in which we work enhances the experience of being there, casting the location in a new light. Buildings need not be towering or a world landmark to have intangible value, and not all buildings or locations can deliver it.
But when one does, you’ll know it.
Till next time,
P.S. My colleague, Ron Starner, who has edited Site Selection skillfully for the past year, has assumed new publication management duties here at Conway Data, Inc. My fellow editors and I wish him every success in his new assignment.
