Newport Financial struts its stuff - Newport Financial Center equipped with $40 million high-technology infrastructure, unaffected by power failure

Real Estate Weekly, July 22, 1992

A power failure emanating from a Jersey City substation halted computer operations in office buildings up and down the Gold Coast today -- but not for tenants of Newport Financial Center in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The 408,000-square-foot "office tower of the future" --designed with redundant power, communications, water and firesafety systems -- provided uninterrupted electricity for the firms that have located there to support and protect their intensive data processing operations.

"The incident never happened, as far as we're concerned," observed Ronald H. Bowman, Jr., director of real estate for Newport Office Properties Corporation, developer of Newport Financial Center.

"With a $40 million high-tech infrastructure, ours is the first and only office complex in North America to match the sophistication of its high-tech tenants," said Bowman. "The power outage was like a trial run," he adds, "and it gave the building a chance to demonstrate its true worth."

Bowman says Newport is the vanguard of a new breed of office complex.

In fact, when an August 1990 fire in a Con Edison substation interrupted power to Wall Street for six days, many financial service firms were already wishing for more facilities like Newport. The Jersey City structure contains a 134,000-square-foot mainframe/data processing center, to which a number of Wall Street firms could transfer their computer operations for the duration of the Con Ed problem.