Wall Street now Main Street, says L.A. Times
Normally I wouldn’t look to the L.A. Times to tell me much about what’s happening in NYC, but to their credit they have an interesting piece about the changing lanscape and culture of Wall Street (linked here by way of the Seattle Times).
Wall Street, the gray financial district, is becoming more like a bustling, colorful Main Street. Once desolate at night, the area pulses with vibrancy, increasingly resembling the rest of the city.
“I think I fell off my chair the first time I saw someone walking a dog on a Sunday morning,” said Alan Scott, head of corporate real estate at Deutsche Bank. “The financial district, especially this area around Wall Street, is becoming a 24/7 community.”
You’re probably wondering, what does this have to do with technology. O.K. I was getting to that.
Today, many of the older buildings on Wall Street are ill-suited for the heavy wiring that securities-trading firms need. And big investment banks want trading floors as big as football fields that are available only in newer buildings.
Not surprising when also considering the rise of electronic trading exchanges and the globalization of finance. Some of the most active growth in finance is in the hedge fund space and as we all know these can be set up to operate from practically anywhere with a fat enough network pipe.
I’ve been wondering for the past decade what Wall Street will end up looking like in 30 years. As the Times notes, this metamorphasis has been an ongoing process. Despite City Hall’s best efforts to give tax breaks to big firms like Goldman in order to retain their presence at the tip of the borough, I’d be surprised if in twenty years from now Wall Street had any resemblance to its universally recognizable iconic image. After all, the Times points out that the impetus for a neighborhood of tightly woven financial buildings has long since been gone:
Their departures continued a decades-long decampment of major Wall Street firms to Midtown.
Brokerages years ago had to cluster on Wall Street so that “runners” could deliver stock certificates, but improved technology eliminated the need for physical proximity.
Hmm. Quite poignant. Maybe we should change the name of this blog to TheStreetFormerlyKnownAsWallTechDaily-dot-com ?
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