Stamford and the Corporate Migration

Starting in the nineteen sixties and accelerating through the seventies and eighties, something unusual happened to Stamford. Corporations started arriving from New York City, dozens of them, drawn by lower costs, suburban campuses, and a commuter rail line that put Midtown Manhattan forty-five minutes away. The city that had been a manufacturing town, a lock-making town, became something else: a corporate headquarters city, one of the densest concentrations of Fortune five hundred companies outside of Manhattan.

The shift reshaped downtown Stamford entirely. Urban renewal bulldozed much of the older commercial district in the sixties and seventies, replacing it with glass office towers and a shopping mall. The developer responsible for much of this transformation was a firm called the F. D. Rich Company, which built One Landmark Square and the GTE building and the Marriott and large stretches of the rebuilt downtown with city backing. The process was contentious, displacing businesses and residents, producing a downtown that looked prosperous from the outside and sometimes hollow from within.

By the early twenty twenties, Stamford had only a handful of Fortune five hundred companies and numerous divisions of large financial firms, giving it the largest financial district in the New York metropolitan region outside of the city itself. The hedge fund industry is particularly concentrated here. Greenwich, just to the west, is even more so, and the money from both towns has made this stretch of the Merritt Parkway corridor one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

The transformation from Lock City to finance hub took about forty years. What it produced is a downtown that runs on corporate leases and commuter schedules, surrounded by some of the wealthiest residential suburbs in America.