The New York Giants will be honored soon with a new plaque in Lower Manhattan's Canyon of Heroes. The plaque, installed by the Alliance for Downtown New York, will join the 203 already embedded in the sidewalk along Broadway, from the Battery to City Hall. The plaques mark the ticker-tape parades that have traveled up (or, occassionally, down) the route.

The first ticker-tape parade was a spontaneous one marking the arrival of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. The last one, before tomorrow's scheduled parade for the Giants, was for the World Series-winning Yankees in October 2000.

The Alliance for Downtown New York, the city's biggest business improvement district, just put out a statement by its chairman, Robert Douglass, on Merrill Lynch's pending plans to move from downtown to midtown.

While understandably heavy on the pleading, the statement also leans on the practical:

Utilizing the many financial incentives available to the company if they choose to locate in the World Trade Center site or another site Downtown... will save Merrill Lynch $600 million, while constructing a new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan could cost in excess of $600 million more than constructing a new one in Lower Manhattan. These two factors alone bring the additional cost of moving to Midtown to more than $1B, a figure that is hard to justify.

Full statement after the jump.  read more »

This stat might surprise you:

The average salary in lower Manhattan now is more than $115,000, and about $550 million is spent there annually by employees of businesses below Chambers Street.

These numbers come from business-booster group Alliance for Downtown New York’s recently released Lower Manhattan Retail Market Overview. The report looks at trends in the business, residential and visitor markets.  read more »