After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, corporations dramatically overhauled their relationship with security, limiting who could gain access to an office building and even moving some or all of their operations away from major population centers like Manhattan.
Those swift changes remain with us 25 years later. Bags are searched. Employees must swipe into their office buildings. Companies often keep tabs on exactly where their employees were. Prospective employees are more closely vetted.
And more recently, there’s an added security wrinkle, as companies must bolster their cybersecurity operations.
Companies left NYC for NJ, some for good
After 9/11, some companies opted to keep some of their operations in Manhattan and moved other offices to nearby states such as New Jersey to maintain easy access to Manhattan, said Stephen Flynn, who since Sept. 11 has advised the Bush administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on security matters.
The approach for many companies was that “we’re going to continue to have a footprint in Manhattan because this is where we should be, but we’re going to make sure some key back-office things are located outside of the city,” said Flynn, who now heads the Global Resilience Institute and Defense Industrial Base Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.
For example, the New York Stock Exchange set up a data center in Mahwah for stock trading.
But for many companies, the move to New Jersey was temporary, said James Hughes, a professor at Rutgers University who studies planning and urban development.
American Express temporarily moved some of its offices to Jersey City after the attacks, CNBC reported.
Shortly after the Twin Towers fell, there were even predictions of the end of skyscrapers as a practical form of architecture.
“There was a lot of speculation that … 9/11 would cause a continued suburbanization of office employment and economic activities,” Hughes told NorthJersey.com. “But within two years, a lot of those fears essentially went away.”
The potential for an exodus from major urban centers clashed with the fact that suburban office spaces built in the 1980s and 1990s were beginning to outlive their usefulness, he said.
New skyscrapers soared over the former site of the Twin Towers, while other developments sprang up across Manhattan, including Hudson Yards on the west side, Hughes said.
Other factors such as the Great Recession, as well as the widespread telecommuting born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, hastened the movement of companies back to urban centers, Hughes said.