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IT Executives From Three Wall Street Companies - Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and American Express - Look Back on 9/11 and Take Stock of Where They Are Now

By Sarah D. Scalet

September 01, 2002 — CIO — From the American Express executive library on the 51st floor of 3 World Financial Center, the ferries crossing from New Jersey look like toy boats, and Manhattan seems clean and orderly. With plush leather furniture and book-lined walls, with atlases arranged on the coffee table and brass telescopes at the window, everything about the room’s decor is supposed to make those who use it feel invincible.

That would be a big change from a year ago. Because of suspected structural damage to the building when the adjacent World Trade Center towers fell and because of questions about the future of the financial district, no one knew who?if anyone?might return to this room.

On Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001, American Express CIO Glen Salow stood in Jersey City, N.J., and looked across the Hudson to New York’s altered skyline. It was 7 a.m., and he had just the night before returned from Minneapolis.

"It was the first time I’d physically seen what had happened, saw the horrible smoke coming up," he recalls on a day in May two weeks after he returned to his old office. "I saw our building. It had shrapnel sticking out of it, which if you didn’t know [you] would think was actually our girders bent out. I looked at our building and said, It’s only a building."

Of course, that wasn’t how American Express executives acted when they staged a triumphant return to headquarters this spring, a move which should be complete by the end of this month. Step by step, Wall Street?the state of mind?is being painfully reconstructed. But Wall Street?the place?will never, can never and should never be the same.

With IPO cash dried up, investor confidence down and layoffs underway, 2001 would have been tough for financial services. Then came Sept. 11.

Thousands of people were killed. Tens of thousands more lost their jobs, and countless others had their foundations shaken. In hard dollars, the attacks on the World Trade Center cost New York City $83 billion, according to an economic impact analysis by the New York City Partnership, cited by the General Accounting Office as the most comprehensive one completed.

"In a lot of comments I hear from the Street, they sort of view this past year as a lost year," says Rob Gould, a PWC Consulting financial services partner, who participated in the study.

Cantor Fitzgerald, a small financial services and trading company perched atop one of the towers, came to represent the human tragedy of the attacks on the World Trade Center. But next door, three multinationals with headquarters in the World Financial Center?American Express, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch?came to represent what the future of Wall Street might look like.

 

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