Two days ago, we told you that Goldman Sachs' tower in Jersey City -- the tallest building in new Jersey and home to the bank's tech and back-office operations -- was just inches from being inundated by waves from New York Harbor.
The tower sits on the Jersey City waterfront at sea level, and took the full force of Hurricane Sandy as she came ashore on the Jersey coast to the South. In preparation, Goldman's office operations staff had placed a gigantic wall of white sandbags all around their temple of capitalism.
The only question was, how bad would the damage be?
We visited the tower on Tuesday morning, and this is what we saw.
The Goldman tower is in the Southeast corner of Downtown Jersey City, on the river at the mouth of the harbor. Right in front of the incoming hurricane, essentially. (Why Goldman chose to build such an important structure at sea level is an open question.) It sits across from Battery Park City and Wall Street in Manhattan, where Goldman's official HQ is.
Monday morning: The center of the hurricane has passed but we're still within its radius. The Goldman tower is the silver building in the background. This view is from Montgomery St. and Marin Blvd., to the West, and already you can see that the tower is in a section of the city that was cut off by the surging tide. Also, you can see by the traffic lights that the power is out.
This is actually an extremely unusual view of the building -- because no lights are on. The tower is completely dark from the power outages. Some office towers in Jersey City's financial district maintained power by parking huge generators on tractor-trailer flatbeds in their parking garages. Goldman didn't do that. Note that every tree has been tripped of its fall foliage in the wind, but that none of the windows on the building appear to be broken.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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