The investment bankers at Lehman Brothers Holdings are finding out this week that when your company gets blown out of its headquarters, it's good to have friends in the hotel business.
Late last week, Lehman negotiated a friendly takeover of the Sheraton Manhattan Hotel on Seventh Avenue north of 51st Street and on Tuesday began refurnishing 665 rooms as offices for about 1,500 bankers and analysts who do not know when they will be able to return to their offices.
Lehman is based in 3 World Financial Center, a building that remains intact but was connected by a skywalk to the demolished World Trade Center.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Out went the beds and in came the folding tables, fax machines and copiers. Mattresses and box springs were stacked against the concierge desk and leaning against a jewelry display case as a battalion of maintenance workers carted the beds away.
The conversion was just one of the extraordinary measures that Lehman and other firms have had to take in the week since a terrorist attack devastated the downtown financial district.
Across the Hudson River in Jersey City, another 1,700 displaced Lehman employees were buying and selling stocks and bonds on makeshift trading floors that overlooked the smoldering rubble next to their old quarters.
"Welcome to the lap of luxury," joked James Merli, an executive in the firm's bond business, as he stood among the traders, holding a black mobile phone to his ear and discussing car-pooling with a fellow co-worker.
Three floors up, Lehman's stock traders were settling in. Throughout the floor, gray fabric tiles had been removed from cubicle dividers so that traders could see each other and be heard across the room.
Many of the work spaces, which had been occupied by the firm's bookkeepers and support staff until last week, remained bereft of decoration.
But touches of home had begun to sprout: pictures of children, house plants, even a softball trophy.
Jeffrey Vanderbeek, managing director, said the employees' mood had been lifting day by day.
But emotions were still raw. One young woman wept at the sight of a picture on the firm's Web site of the one employee still missing: Ira Zaslow.
Aside from the casualties, Vanderbeek said he felt for the firm's employees who were staying home until Lehman could find office space for them.
"We don't want any of them to feel nonessential," he said. "We want to wrap our arms around all of them."
As Vanderbeek spoke, Bradley Jack, who runs the investment banking operations, was bouncing around the conference center in the lower levels of the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, across Seventh Avenue from the one being emptied of its beds.
Jack slapped people's backs and raved about their exploits in commandeering a luxury hotel and a conference center in Manhattan in a few days.
It was all possible, he said, because of the close ties between the firm and Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, which operates the two Sheratons and eight other hotels in New York City.
Lehman has raised money for Starwood. Last Wednesday, a Lehman investment banker had the idea of moving into a hotel and the firm's executives and real estate bankers worked out the deal by Friday, he said.
Jack needed a lot of their help last week because he, three dozen co-workers and several clients were racing back to New York from San Francisco on a chartered bus.
They were attending a technology banking conference when the attack occurred and could not fly back, so they hit the highway, gathering information about what they would find in New York through phone calls.
The bus had three drivers -- "one to drive, one to rest and one to recharge the cellphones," he said.
It made only a few stops to drop off clients in places like Salt Lake City, Iowa City and Moline, Illinois. The passengers' only sit-down meal was at Misty's steakhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska. They had ordered ahead.
Back in New York, Starwood had to clear out guests, upgrading them to rooms in the New York Sheraton. Lehman was busy finding and gathering its bankers and analysts in the conference center. Monday morning, after the market reopened, Jack and Richard Fuld, Lehman's chairman and chief executive, rallied 1,800 of the troops from a stage in the New York Sheraton's main ballroom. Then, they went back to work.
In large, high-ceilinged rooms usually used for conventions and corporate conferences, Lehman's analysts sat at rows of folding tables typing out spreadsheets on laptop computers.
In one, Joseph Campbell, who analyzes stocks of aerospace companies, huddled with an assistant as they wrote a report to be sent to investors who are Lehman clients.
Just down the plush corridor was a room reserved for group meetings of investment bankers.
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