Thousands of commodity traders and staff are coming to a Manhattan neighborhood that some residents worry will lose its small-town flavor if it becomes the center of global trading for coffee and cotton.
“We live in Mayberry,” said Adele Rahte, a 38-year-old mother of two. “My kids can leave their toys in the park and come back the next day and they’re still there.”
She opposes construction of a new $136 million building to house commodities trading because it will create more traffic in the neighborhood, which is within walking distance of Wall Street.
Like the quintessential small town of the Andy Griffith Show, it’s a place where volunteers plant flowers in front of the grade school and children play on a gem of a Little League baseball diamond. And all of it within a few blocks of the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center.
A change is coming, possibly as soon as this fall, when construction of a new commodities exchange begins in a parking lot.
That site is to include the trading floor of the newly created Board of Trade of the City of New York, where several thousand people will work in trading everything from orange juice to futures contracts on the Malaysian ringgit.
“We’ve got all the city and state approvals,” said Joseph O’Neill, president of the New York Cotton Exchange. “As far as I know, we’re going.”
The new Board of Trade will be created from the merger of the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange with the New York Cotton Exchange, which are both now at 4 World Trade Center.
Opposition to the project is confined to “one condominium building,” which is the one where Rahte’s family lives at 275 Greenwich Ave., according to John Melia, a spokesman for the Empire State Development Corp.
Empire State Development and New York City are providing a total of $91 million in incentives for the building. Melia said the new exchange site is a former urban renewal area, which gives it a stronger position in staving off opposition.
“We definitely have the power to build,” Melia said.
Rahte, her 37-year-old husband, Bernard D’Orazio, and some of their neighbors, including Brazilian actress Sonia Braga, did not fight the project initially because they did not believe anything would be built.
A larger project on the site had been put on hold and residents figured the new one would be, too. Originally, all of New York’s commodity exchanges, including the New York Mercantile Exchange, were to have been housed in the building. Nymex decided last year to build its own trading floor on the Hudson River about two blocks away from the Board of Trade’s site.
All the public hearings and approvals were done in 1991 for the larger project, according to Empire State and the exchanges. The residents dispute that.
It was only after Empire State Development Corp. came before Community Board No. 1 late last year that the project’s impact sank in to D’Orazio. D’Orazio is a member of the board, which passed a resolution unanimously to oppose the new exchange.
“That was when I thought, `They’re really going to do this,”‘ said D’Orazio, a lawyer who said his condominium board has obtained a legal opinion that it would be permissible to use condominium funds to hire outside legal counsel to fight the building.
The neighbors’ main objection is that the new exchange will create traffic. School hours are very similar to trading hours, which could create traffic jams around the schools.
Also, the parking lot currently at the site pays maintenance for a nearby park, and the residents don’t know if the new Board of Trade will continue those payments.
