What is the Commodities Exchange Center?

The Commodities Exchange Center was a nine-story building located in the Lower Manhattan section of New York City. At one time, the Center, known popularly as the CEC housed a total of five different futures exchanges. For a number of years, the Commodities Exchange Center was home to the New York Futures Exchange, the Coffee Sugar and Cocoa Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, and Commodity Exchange, Inc.

As the physical base of operations for some of the most powerful exchanges in the United States, the Commodities Exchange Center was located at Four World Trade Center in New York City. Along with housing the five prominent futures exchanges, the building provided space to high level tenants like the New York Board of Trade and Deutsche Bank. Built in 1977, the Commodities Exchange Center offered just under 600,000 square feet of office space to the tenants. For just under quarter of a century, the Commodities Exchange Center building was considered to be a key element in culture of Manhattan.

Housing a number of exchanges under one roof had a number of advantages for brokers and investors alike. The ability to work with so many exchanges in relatively close proximity was especially helpful in situations where telephone conversations would nice suffice. Especially during the years before widespread use of the Internet to conduct trades, the traffic to and from the Commodities Exchange Center was consistently heavy throughout the trading day.

Unfortunately, the Commodities Exchange Center did not function long enough to reach its 25th anniversary. Among the buildings that were damaged as a result of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Commodities Exchange Center sustained such a high level of destruction that repairing the building was out of the question. As a result, the exchanges and other tenants in the building found new offices in Manhattan and the greater New York City area. Once the building was vacant, demolition work began to clear the space.