Recession Ghost Towns Offer Choice of Seats, Parking: Joe Mysak

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Recession Ghost Towns Offer Choice of Seats, Parking: Joe Mysak

Commentary by Joe Mysak

Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- I remember the floor of chairs.
In 1986, a friend of mine moved down from Boston to New York tojoin E.F. Hutton Group Inc.'s legal department. It was sort of abig joke that the firm would need lots of help after its guiltyplea to check-kiting charges the previous year.
Then the stock market crashed in October 1987, and later that year the beleagueredHutton, which had never really recovered from the scandal, waspurchased by Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc. The usual ritualslaughter began.
Floors of chairs. See-through office buildings. Lots of parking.And wondering: Where is everybody? These are the prospects for arecessionary 2009, if the aftermath of the 1987 Crash is any guide.
I remember visiting my friend's office near Battery Park in 1988. Imarveled that the U.S. Custom House next door, a grand Beaux-Artsbuilding that now houses the National Museum of the American Indian , was hollow, and had an elliptical dome in the middle of itcompletely unseen from the street. My friend was used to the viewby then and asked me if I wanted to see the floor of chairs.
He explained that Hutton was using a few levels of the building towarehouse office furniture that was no longer required after somevery significant pruning in the ranks.
Sure, I said. So we took the elevator to the floor of chairs. Therewere all kinds of them in that pre-Aeron era, all undoubtedlyergonomically unfriendly, from little padded numbers without armsright up to the big-boy leather executive thrones.
Manhattan Storage
We were both amazed that Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc., as it wasthen known, was using valuable Manhattan office space for storage.But remember, at that time, post-Crash, office space in thefinancial district wasn't so valuable anymore.
The floor of chairs came to mind as I contemplated the wave oflayoffs to come, not only in the financial-services industry, butacross the board in the U.S. economy, at least if forecasters areto be believed.
People who haven't lived through it may not quite appreciate thecarnage and weirdness to come.
The floor of chairs was bad enough, I suppose, a littlemelancholic, but the floor of desks was even worse.
There it was, an entire city block full of office furniture in allits hierarchical glory, from Steelcase desks to imitationwood-topped tables right up to the large gateways that must havesat outside managing directors' offices for their secretaries. Andthen there was the big oak aircraft-carrier expanse of Mr. Big'shome itself, along with lots of incidental furniture, like coffeetables and those odd pieces known as credenzas. Remember wheneverybody had an office?
Hard Times
This floor was a little eerier because there were ghosts here,memories, little post-it notes, a departmental telephone directoryand the occasional squares of tape marking off where people had putup photos of their spouses and children.
I worked downtown in those days, and it didn't take long before Inoticed that the trains and the streets were less crowded. Therewere fewer people.
For a golden moment or two, when you walked into a shop orrestaurant, you enjoyed the attention as one of the survivors. Andthen, slowly, the shops and restaurants started to close.
The card-shops went first, then a couple of fast-food places, thena bookstore, then some women's clothing shops, a bank branch ortwo, and then a couple of first-tier restaurants shut down. This iswhat happens in hard times, even in the city that never sleeps.
`It Was the Wives'
And then a mysterious late-night fire claimed our local bar, threeblocks away from the office.
``I think it was the wives,'' joked a colleague.
We were bereft.
The same thing is going to happen across the country, and hasalready begun in some places, although the layoffs haven't reallystarted in earnest.
I have to think that some cities and towns, far more dependent upona few companies than even New York is dependent upon finance, aregoing to be devastated. Municipal bond investors would do well tocheck the ``Largest Employers'' sections of their bonds' officialstatements. The downtowns that haven't gone residential are allgoing to get a lot quieter.
Rust Belt cities and towns have already experienced this becalming.There are some places in New England and Upstate New York where youwonder where everyone went, where you wonder if the high tide ofeconomic prosperity was 1950, or 1912, or 1860.
Repopulating cities takes years. And sometimes the people nevercome back.
( Joe Mysak is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are hisown.)
To contact the writer of this column: Joe Mysak in New York at jmysakjr@bloomberg.net Last Updated: October 31, 2008 01:01 EDT