Office profile: New York;

              OFFICE PROFILE:
NEW YORK
By: Thomas B. Hogan PARTNER-IN-CHARGE
"New York is a great place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there." We hear this, or something like it, said by many of the visitors we have each year from other practice offices around the country who come here to serve client interests, to attend training meetings, or for other reasons.
I suppose it is natural for them to compare New York with their home city and to compare the New York Of-fice with the office in which they work.
New York City is big. Every visitor to the city, whatever else he may think of it, agrees on that. The over seven and one-half million residents inhabit five boroughs spread over 320 square miles of the world's most costly real estate. Manhattan, where our office is located, is the smallest geographically. Each day over a million more people commute to work from the suburbs in New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, and West-chester. Add to these the almost 14 mil-lion visitors New York has each year, and you have a lot of people.
The New York practice office is big. Its working force is more than 500 people, and the office area is about the size of a football field. It is also the oldest office in the Firm, which is pre-sumably why we are asked to write about it for the first issue of H&S Reports.
New York has frequently been called "Headquarters City," and it probably well deserves this title. Since 1946 it has been host to the United Nations, and most of the 111 member countries have representatives permanently sta-
tioned in New York. New York is un-questionably the financial center of the free world. Of the 500 largest industrial corporations in the United States 133 make their headquarters in New York City, and of these companies 21 are served by the New York Office. The 15 largest stock brokerage firms maintain their principal offices within a small area, known throughout the world as "Wall Street," within a stone's throw of the New York Office. Ten of these brokerage firms are clients of the Firm. Interestingly enough, the largest com-mercial bank in the United States (Bank of America) is not in New York City but in California. The next four largest com-mercial banks are here, however, and two of them (Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co. and Morgan Guaranty Trust Co.) are audit clients of the New York Office.
New York City is a curious combina-tion of contrasts and variety. It is the home of the winningest baseball team (Yankees) and the losingest (Mets). It houses the world's largest securities ex-change (New York Stock Exchange with 2,761 issues of 1,419 organizations) and the smallest (National Stock Exchange with 12 issues). Those who think of New York as a city chiefly of big busi-ness are wrong. Though the city is a home for some of the world's largest companies, the pattern of New York is that of a vast concentration of small business. It has been estimated that there are more than 240,000 business establishments in New York City, but only 500 of them have more than 500 employees. The bulk of the clients served by the New York Office are rep-resented by medium-size business es-tablishments.
Some of the statistics about the New
York Office are quite impressive. It oc-cupies 35,000 square feet with 66 pri-vate offices, 3 conference rooms, 3 staff and class rooms, a working paper file room with almost 2,500 feet of shelving, a Report Department with a full-time staff of about 35 people who annually turn out several thousand audit and MAS reports, 10KS, tax returns, etc. Last year we mailed out almost 2,000,-000 confirmation requests to customers of our clients. Our 134 telephones han-dle hundreds of calls each day. A sec-retarial staff of about 30 produces a steady stream of correspondence which goes to every corner of the world.
Looking out of our windows in Two Broadway we see a harbor in or out of which an ocean-going vessel sails every twenty minutes. To the north, we see the New York Stock Exchange from which emanate reports on an average of 63,000 transactions a day (flashed on about 700 quotation boards of our client, Teleregister Corporation, in bro-kers' customers rooms around the coun-try and Canada). On the south is the new New York Clearing House where, on a usual day, almost $4 billion worth of bank checks are cleared in what has been described as "the vastest waterfall of cash flow in the world."
On any given day New York Office staff men are at work in many of the skyscrapers opposite our windows. In one week last February, audit teams, generally consisting of three or four men, were serving ten transportation companies, seven paper companies, five food-processing companies, five chem-ical companies, five publishing com-panies, and four insurance companies; the rest of the staff were serving clients, many of them relatively small, in a variety of other fields. By July, staff as-
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Two Broadway, seen from the U.S. Customs House, at the tip of Manhattan.