Manhattan (NYC)

Wall Street Warms Up, Grudgingly, to Remote Work, Unthinkable Before Covid

In private, many senior bank executives tasked with raising attendance among their direct reports expressed irritation. They said it was unfair for highly paid employees to keep working from home while others — like bank tellers or building workers — dutifully come in every day. Salaries at investment banks in the New York area averaged $438,450 in 2020, up 7.8 percent from the previous year, according to data from the office of the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli.

Two senior executives, who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters, said they might push out subordinates who are not willing to come back to the office regularly. Another manager expressed frustration about a worker who refused to show up at the office, citing concern about the virus — even though the person had recently traveled on vacation.

Executives “have not felt that they could put on pressure to get people back in the office — and those who have put on pressure have gotten real pushback,” said Ms. Wylde, of the Partnership for New York City. “Financial services is one of those industries that are hugely competitive for talent, so nobody wants to be the bad guy.” She expects that big financial firms will eventually drive workers back into the office by dangling pay and promotions.

For now, banks are resorting to coaxing and coddling.

Food trucks, free meals and snacks are occasionally on offer, as are complimentary Uber and Lyft rides. Dress codes have been relaxed. Major firms have adopted safety protocols such as on-site testing and mask mandates in common areas. Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are requiring vaccinations for workers entering their offices, while Bank of America asked only inoculated staff to return after Labor Day. JPMorgan has not mandated vaccines for workers to return to the office.

At Citi, which asked employees to come back for at least two days a week starting in September, offices are about 70 percent full on the days with the highest traffic. Citi, whose chief executive, Jane Fraser, started her job in the middle of the pandemic, has hired shuttle buses so that employees coming into Midtown Manhattan from suburban homes can avoid taking the subway to the bank’s downtown offices. To allay concerns about rising crime in New York, at least one other firm has hired shuttle buses to ferry people a few blocks from Pennsylvania Station to offices in Midtown, Ms. Wylde said.

Remote working arrangements are also emerging as a key consideration for workers interviewing for new jobs, according to Alan Johnson, the managing director of Johnson Associates, a Wall Street compensation consultancy.

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Drama Book Shop, Backed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, to Open in June

The Drama Book Shop, a quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners.

Those new owners — the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander — said Wednesday that the store will have its long-delayed reopening on June 10.

The opening, at 266 West 39th Street, is a sign of the team’s confidence in Times Square, which has been largely theater-free since March 12, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to close. Broadway shows are not planning to resume performances until September, but the new store owners say they are ready for business.

The “Hamilton” team bought the Drama Book Shop, most recently located on West 40th Street, in early 2019 after years in which the store had struggled to survive the challenges of Manhattan real estate, e-commerce, and even a damaging flood. Kail had a particular passion for the bookstore, where he had run a small theater company in his early years as a professional; Miranda joined him there to work on “In the Heights,” a musical Kail directed. “In the Heights” has now been adapted into a film which is being released on June 11, the day after the bookstore opens.

online; capacity will be limited.

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‘We’re Suffering’: How Remote Work Is Killing Manhattan’s Storefronts

“Not being able to have a flexible deal was making the business unsustainable,” Mr. Perillo said.

The landlord of his best store, Premier Equities, declined to comment on its dealings with Dr Smood. But property records show that Premier had amassed a big debt on the building that housed the store, which may have factored into its decision.

In 2014, Premier Equities paid $11.25 million for the building, financing the purchase with a $9 million mortgage. In 2017, Premier borrowed another $5 million against the building, the records show. Premier also declined to comment on the debt.

Some property owners have deeper pockets than others, and in big office buildings where retail income makes up a small fraction of overall rent, landlords are not hurting as badly because corporations, law firms and other tenants are still paying rent. These landlords can offer rent deals for longer to keep their properties looking lively.

Mark Strausman, a noted chef, went ahead last fall with plans for a new restaurant, Mark’s Off Madison. He could do so in part because his landlord, Rudin Management, is not charging him rent, except for the first month’s payment.

Nonetheless, the restaurant is losing money. But, Mr. Strausman said, “I don’t believe that after all of this, people want to stay home and cook.”

William C. Rudin, Rudin’s chief executive, said he wanted the restaurant to stay open in part so that employees in the offices above might feel better about returning. Mr. Rudin said he believed in Mr. Strausman’s vision but had not decided how long to keep waiving the rent. “Luckily, this is a small percentage of our portfolio, so it hasn’t impacted us, but for small owners, these are very difficult decisions to make,” Mr. Rudin said.

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Looted Objects From Afghanistan Are Returned

For half a century, through war, anarchy and upheaval, Afghanistan has been stripped of tens of thousands of Buddhist and Hindu antiquities, some dating back more than 1,800 years.

Many of those items entered the Western market in the 1990s and early 2000s, St John Simpson, a curator at the British Museum, told The New York Times last month. “And all of those,” he said, “were almost certainly illegally exported or stolen.”

On Monday, 33 of those antiquities, valued at $1.8 million, were handed over to the Afghan ambassador, Roya Rahmani, by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Department of Homeland Security, at a ceremony in New York.

The artifacts were part of a hoard of 2,500 objects valued at $143 million seized in a dozen raids between 2012 and 2014 from Subhash Kapoor, a disgraced Manhattan art dealer currently jailed in India on smuggling and theft charges.

Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of enormous carvings, in 2001. In the face of near-universal condemnation, officials dynamited the works, which stood in tall niches hewed from a sheer sandstone cliff.

The objects repatriated on Monday will be housed in the National Museum in Kabul. Afghan officials have said they were confident they could now safeguard their museums and cultural institutions against plunder and smuggling.

According to UNESCO, “the Afghan authorities have taken important steps” to prevent the theft, smuggling and desecration of cultural objects. Those steps include a separate new police force tasked with protecting cultural sites, up-to-date museum security systems, and educational campaigns aimed at convincing anyone who finds lost or forgotten relics to turn them over to the government.

Matthew Bogdanos, said that over the past decade, it has recovered several thousand stolen antiquities collectively valued at more than $175 million, from more than a dozen nations.

Since August, the unit has overseen the return of 338 objects to seven nations, among them Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt and Pakistan, with more to be sent back once the countries involved resolve travel and transport issues related to the pandemic.

Crimes involving looted and stolen religious relics, Mr. Vance said, “not only tear at the societal fabric of nations but also deprive millions of believers worldwide of the earliest sacred symbols of their faith.”

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After Pandemic, Shrinking Need for Office Space Could Crush Landlords

Roughly 17.3 percent of all office space in Manhattan is available for lease, the highest proportion in at least three decades. Asking rents on the island have dropped to just over $74 a square foot, from nearly $82 at the beginning of 2020, according to a recent report by the real estate services company Newmark. Elsewhere, asking rents have largely stayed flat from a year ago, including in Boston and Houston, but have climbed slightly in Chicago.

The Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo, whose United States headquarters are in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, recently relocated to another office building nearby, an open layout with tables designed for its work force of 130 people who will come into the office only a few days a week. Many of its office workers will keep working remotely after the pandemic, while some employees, like those in the marketing department, will hold meetings occasionally in SoHo.

“As a leader, it has been challenging because meeting people face-to-face is so important,” said Daisuke Tsukagoshi, the chief executive of Uniqlo USA. “However, since we are a Japanese company with global reach, the need for remote collaboration among many centers has always been part of our culture.”

The stock prices of the big landlords, which are often structured as real estate investment trusts that pass almost all of their profit to investors, trade well below their previous highs, even as the wider stock market and some companies in other industries like airlines and hotels that were hit hard by the pandemic have hit new highs. Shares of Boston Properties, one of the largest office landlords, are down 29 percent from the prepandemic high. SL Green, a major New York landlord, is 26 percent lower.

Fitch Ratings estimated that office landlords’ profits would fall 15 percent if companies allowed workers to be at home just one and a half days a week on average. Three days at home could slash income by 30 percent.

Senior executives at property companies claim not to be worried. They argue that working from home will quickly fade once most of the country is vaccinated. Their reasons to think this? They say many corporate executives have told them that it is hard to effectively get workers to collaborate or train young professionals when they are not together.

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Goldman Sachs Partners’ Exits Point to a Changing Culture at the Bank

Late in March, Gregg Lemkau, the longtime co-head of investment banking and an executive who was widely considered a potential Goldman C.E.O., sent a Twitter post about getting up during the wee hours to work remotely from his home in Hawaii, which is six hours behind New York.

He soon got a call from Mr. Solomon, who was not pleased with the perception of the message, say three people with knowledge of the call. The two executives argued, those people said, over whether Mr. Lemkau should return to New York. They settled their differences and Mr. Lemkau stayed put for two months before flying back. In mid-November, Mr. Lemkau, then 51, announced plans to retire from Goldman to become chief executive of the family investment office of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of the computer company.

“The reaction was overwhelming,” said Mr. Lemkau in a podcast weeks later. The memories colleagues shared, he said, underscored how his treatment of other people had defined him. “Not the big deals I did, not anything formal I did, but the little things that you did that made a difference in their lives,” he reflected, “it sort of makes you feel like, ‘Damn, I’m glad it was worth doing all that stuff.’”

Mr. Lemkau has told people privately that his departure had nothing to do with his tiff with Mr. Solomon.

The exodus picked up steam this year. Last month, Michael Daffey, who had led the global markets division, retired.

Then, this week, Eric S. Lane, co-head of the firm’s asset-management business and also viewed as a contender for the Goldman C.E.O. role, took a senior role at a large hedge fund. Karen Patton Seymour, the firm’s general counsel since 2019, also left, and plans to return to her former law firm, according to internal emails. All were members of the management committee, and all but Ms. Seymour had long tenures at the firm. Around the same time, Omer Ismail, head of Goldman’s Marcus consumer business, left to run a new financial-technology venture that has been seeded by Walmart, taking a deputy who had overseen the firm’s Apple credit card partnership along with him.

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