Among exposed wires and cement columns, seated side-by-side on metal chairs at long tables, about 1,000 traders and support staff for Dean Witter, Discover and Co. spent Monday in an expansive open room that had been storage space days ago.
“It’s terrific. We’re doing business as usual,” said company spokesman Jim Flynn, speaking in the room, one of seven sites around New York and New Jersey where Dean Witter, the largest tenant of the World Trade Center, dispersed its staff.
On the first workday after the Friday explosion at the trade center killed at least five people, injured 1,042 and closed the towers for at least a week, it was, for many, not business as usual. But as is usual in New York’s financial district, it was business first.
Many of the 900 firms displaced-the towers account for one-tenth the office space in Lower Manhattan-spent the days since the explosion grappling for open offices, computers and other necessities of business. Dean Witter had more than 1,000 additional phone lines installed over the weekend in its temporary facilities.
By Monday, often with the assistance of contingency plans drawn up in the terrorism scare during the Persian Gulf war, most of the largest tenants were maintaining key operations in temporary quarters: Fuji Bank and Trust Co. had moved to a New Jersey facility; the Big Six accounting firm Deloitte & Touche had put together a patchwork of Manhattan offices.
Smaller businesses in the towers, the ones without deep pockets and file cabinets full of alternative plans, are mostly the ones out of pocket for a while.
But Mitchell Moss, director of New York University’s Urban Development Center, said that, for the city as a whole, the losses of firms based in the tower will be balanced by some gains elsewhere.
Additional security, sure to be demanded, will add jobs. The depressed real estate market in New York can use any small stimulus from tenants’ searches for temporary digs.
“I don’t think it’s a net loss,” Moss said.
Wall Street’s financial markets, which influence the ebb and flow of fortunes around the world, ticked up and down with a minimum of disruption. The city’s stock exchanges, several blocks from the trade complex, had not shut Friday, and the volume of trades Monday was within normal ranges.
New York’s five commodities exchanges-where trades set world prices for products ranging from cocoa to jet fuel-returned to business despite their location in one of the smaller buildings within the trade complex. The session was abbreviated, the temperature uncomfortable and the safety system a primitive walking fire patrol, but business went on.
Government-bond markets persevered Monday in their rally, a movement of importance to homeowners because of its downward effect on mortgage rates, despite the absence of the largest intermediary in the $3 trillion market.
Cantor Fitzgerald, a “broker’s broker” that handles anonymous trades among dealers who wish to avoid telegraphing strategy to competitors, was based in one of the towers and unable to re-enter the Treasury-bond market Monday. Consequently, trading volumes were low. But Cantor Fitzgerald expects to be back in the market Tuesday.
Worries that the bond market might be disrupted had caused U.S. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen to confer Monday morning with Wall Street leaders.
But by afternoon, Bentsen was satisfied. “The vast majority of (traders) did not have any problems,” he said.
Throughout the financial markets, in stocks, in bonds or in futures for orange juice, the assessment was generally the same as the one given by Michael Metz, chief investment strategist for Oppenheimer & Co.
“A lot of small firms are not in today. A number of them are looking for desks and telephones,” he said, but “it’s really not had any significant effect.”
