Content area
Full Text
The New York Stock Exchange wants to build a new trading floor at 23 Wall St., the landmark J.P. Morgan building, as it originally planned before the Sept. 11 attacks, Chairman Richard Grasso said this week.
"It is an ideal transaction," he said. "It was our first choice. It still is our first choice in terms of retaining the city's status as the capital of capital."
The world's largest stock market has on the drawing board the construction of a new trading floor across the street from its current headquarters in lower Manhattan, and only a few blocks away from the destroyed World Trade Center.
But Grasso reiterated his statement earlier this month that a 900- foot tower, which was proposed in the original plans, was no longer a "salable transaction."
The new exchange would be housed behind the limestone walls of the J.P. Morgan building, which itself has a violent past.
The NYSE would keep the facade of the landmark building, but would gut the inside of the structure and construct a...