It's not surprising that Elyssa S. Baltazar was in New York City on Sept. 11. As senior vice president and branch manager for the Salt Lake office of investment firm Morgan Stanley, formerly Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, she must occasionally make pilgrimages back to the home offices on Manhattan Island.
What is surprising is that instead of being in World Trade Center's south tower that morning, where Morgan Stanley was the largest single tenant, with some 3,700 employees and offices ranging from the 44th to the 74th floors, Baltazar was eight blocks away in a classroom at New York University when a hijacked airliner hit the north tower.
"It was the first time that I had gone to New York on business and was not in the WTC," recalls Baltazar. "After the first plane hit, we all started making calls to our families and home offices to let everyone know we were OK."
Then the group gathered around a TV set and watched the second plane crash into "their" building, the south tower.
But Morgan Stanley emerged relatively unscathed from the disaster compared to other WTC tenants. While more than 5,000 people are unaccounted for in the attacks, which leveled the twin 110-story towers, only six of them were Morgan Stanley employees, three of them security personnel.
For that, Baltazar credits her boss, Morgan Stanley chairman and CEO and former Utahn Phillip Purcell. He wasn't in the WTC either, his office being in Morgan Stanley's midtown headquarters. After the first plane hit the north tower, some survivors in the south tower reported that WTC building management announced everything was fine and that workers should return to their desks.
Some WTC workers apparently did just that, but not anyone at Morgan Stanley. After the first hit, Baltazar said Purcell told his people to evacuate their tower and to ignore anyone who told them otherwise. As a result, only a few Morgan Stanley people didn't get away in time. Moreover, because of contingency plans made years in advance of the attacks, the firm was up and running within hours using the dual operations and data storage it had set up in Dallas that virtually mirrored its WTC operations.
This wasn't just luck. Morgan Stanley had chosen not to ignore warnings it had received in 1991, when Operation Desert Storm in Iraq generated many bomb threats against the WTC, and again in February 1993, when a car bomb exploded in one of the tower's basements, killing six people. That was on a Friday, and by Monday morning, Morgan Stanley was back in business in the WTC.
After the 1993 bombing, the New York Port Authority installed lighting in the stairwells, and Morgan Stanley established a system of floor "wardens" to guide employees down the stairs and also "searchers" whose job it was to make sure no one was left behind. The pre-planning was a lifesaver.
Like most of us, Baltazar saw the second plane hit on television, but she viewed the collapse of the south tower live and in person as she walked back to her hotel.
She recalls being shocked to the point of numbness, unable to believe what she was seeing.
"It was pretty scary for a while, but then it became surreal, like a dream," she said.
But she wouldn't do much dreaming for the next four days, because she didn't do much sleeping. Like millions of others, she was trapped in New York when all she wanted was to get back to her home in Erda, Tooele County, where she and her husband, Chuck Baltazar, a retired jockey, raise quarter horses for reining and cutting competitions — a milieu as removed from ultra-urban New York City as the Australian Outback . . . or her hometown of Miami, Fla., for that matter.
Baltazar finally "escaped" New York by renting a car and driving to Philadelphia, where she was able to fly home on Friday.
But she'll never forget that day when she was only eight blocks from ground zero. She now treasures two postcards sent to her on Aug. 28 by staffers from the Salt Lake office who had attended training sessions at the World Trade Center. One card depicts an aerial view of the WTC. Ironically, the staffer wrote Baltazar: "All is well in the Big Apple. I went to the top of the trade center, and I did not dare to look down."
The other card is a photograph of the WTC from ground level, and the writer notes: "We just thought we would send a card to the office and remind everyone of the World Trade Center." Two weeks later, the World Trade Center towers no longer existed.
But life moves on, and Baltazar is back at work awaiting her next adventure, one she hopes will be less traumatic. In December, Morgan Stanley will move its Salt Lake headquarters and its 50 financial advisors and support staff from the Walker Center at Main and 200 South to new offices in One Gateway, an office building under construction in the new Gateway multi-purpose center due to open Nov. 1 west of downtown.
Morgan Stanley will occupy 5,000 square feet of ground-level space at One Gateway, as well as 8,000 square feet on the building's third level. The exterior will display a stock ticker, and a video screen will provide market updates and the latest financial news.
The so-called "smart office" will be so efficient and laden with state-of-the-art technology that Baltazar said they will actually be able to do the same work in less space than they lease at Walker Center and save on costs in the process.
While Morgan Stanley's Salt Lake offices were not physically harmed by the Sept. 11 attacks, the local employees felt the psychological impact more than most, as did their investment customers, who were already nervous from 18 months of market losses.
Baltazar's first order to her advisers, even before she left New York, was to call all their clients and reassure them that their accounts were safe. Once that concern was alleviated, they advised them that selling low at this time was not a good idea unless it was absolutely necessary.
"We don't like to give people advice on a broad scale," Baltazar said, "because it's different for everyone. But many times, as with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, it's such a mistake to sell when the market is down. This is not the time to sell. It's actually a good time to buy, because stocks are cheaper than they've been in years."
Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm involved in securities, asset management and credit services with some 700 offices in 28 countries.
E-mail: max@desnews.com