Bank of New York Mellon Corp. plans to sell Manhattan’s 1 Wall St., the Art Deco skyscraper that serves as its corporate headquarters, and has hired brokers to find a smaller amount of space to lease elsewhere.
CBRE Group Inc., the world’s biggest real estate services firm, will market the 52-story limestone tower, said Kevin Heine, a BNY Mellon spokesman. The bank hired Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. to seek space for some employees who work in the building.
“We will only make the move if it makes sense financially,” Heine said in a phone interview. “We’re exploring the possibility of moving our headquarters to our other main downtown location at 101 Barclay St.”
BNY Mellon, the world’s biggest custody bank, would join other large financial companies in scaling back their offices to reduce costs and boost efficiency. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to sell a nearby skyscraper, 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, and move employees to other locations. Citigroup Inc. is in talks to consolidate its New York operations into a Tribeca complex, people with knowledge of the negotiations said in October.
BNY Mellon has about 1,700 employees at 1 Wall St., which has about 1 million square feet (93,000 square meters) of space. Some of the workers would be moved to 101 Barclay, a 25-story tower it owns nearby, said a person with knowledge of the plan.
BNY Mellon probably will concentrate its search for new space on lower Manhattan or in the Jersey City, New Jersey, area across the Hudson River, with price being a key consideration, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is seeking about 400,000 square feet, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.
State Competition
The plan is almost certain to trigger competition between the developers of lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center, which has about 2.4 million square feet of unrented space, and Brookfield Place, where 2.2 million square feet of space formerly leased by Merrill Lynch & Co. is available. It may also test Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s resolve to avoid giving tax breaks to businesses, should a landlord in New Jersey make a compelling offer, sweetened by subsidies from the state.
BNY Mellon’s Pershing LLC financial advisory unit is already in Jersey City, at 1 Pershing Plaza.
The Bank of New York, a predecessor of BNY Mellon, has been on Wall Street since 1798, 14 years after it was founded by Alexander Hamilton. One Wall Street was completed in 1931 for the Irving Trust Co. The tower sits at the western end of Wall Street on its southeast corner with Broadway.