Wall Street firm behind 'girl' statue to leave New York

The Fearless Girl statue will stay on Wall Street, but its sponsor is leaving, adding to the glut of office space in New York City.

Boston-based financial firm State Street Corp is doing what it told its 500 employees in the city in May, vacating its two Midtown Manhattan office locations, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. 

The company had been considering whether to renew its Manhattan leases since at least February, according to the Journal. 

Now it expects to sublease the two offices near Rockefeller Center to other companies, adding to the vacant office space in a city where property taxes are the top source of revenue, with commercial property accounting for the largest share of that at 41 percent.

The New York City employees are being invited to either work from home or commute to State Street's offices in New Jersey or Stamford, Connecticut. State Street also will rent co-working spaces in the city for those workers who are interested while it sublets its office space in Midtown Manhattan.

State Street said it will give its teams the ability to decide how often they should be going into the office and where. Employees have been mostly working from home since the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. In recent months, they've been allowed to return to the office in New York City as long as they observe health and safety guidelines.

"We remain committed to our clients, our business lines, corporate functions and colleagues who work and live in New York City and the surrounding area," State Street spokesperson Ed Patterson told The Post. "We have seen our employees adapt quickly to working remotely, and we intend to capture and adopt the new ways of working that have arisen during the COVID crisis."

"It's certainly a wake-up call that we cannot take for granted New York's position as the financial capital," Kathryn Wylde, CEO of business group Partnership for New York City, told the Journal. "During the pandemic, people have learned they can work profitably from anywhere — and that's a competitive threat to the concentration of talent in New York."

Like State Street, many New York City companies are rethinking their space needs. Some are ending their leases or seeking tenants to take them over. Landlords of commercial space — from office space to brick-and-mortar stores — are doing whatever they can to keep or attract tenants, from redesigning the space to offering lower rents.

In July across Manhattan, 18.7 percent of all office space is available for lease, an increase from more than 15 percent at the end of 2020 and more than double the rate from before the pandemic, according to Newmark, a real estate services company. Some neighborhoods are faring worse, such as Downtown Manhattan, where 21 percent of offices have no tenants, Newmark said.

Just 23 percent of office workers have returned to their desks in the New York metro region as of Aug 11, according to data from Kastle Systems, and the Delta variant is causing companies to change their reopening plans. 

Wells Fargo is pushing its date to get employees back to the office to early October rather than early September, Bloomberg reported. BlackRock is also delaying its plans to have employees go back to the office by a month.

Last month, Apple pushed back its return-to-the office plan to October, and The New York Times indefinitely postponed its date for employees returning to the office.

The Fearless Girl statue — which in 2018 moved to a spot outside the New York Stock Exchange from its original site opposite the Charging Bull statue — will stay put, according to the firm.