Stamford
About Stamford
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Stamford is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, one the top five richest counties in the country. According to 2006 Census Bureau estimates, the population of the city is 126,745. Its population is rapidly growing due to an influx of jobs and its commuting distance to New York City. Stamford is one of the top 4 largest cites in the state of Connecticut. Stamford is part of the New York metropolitan area.
For the first half of 2004, Stamford was the safest city in the United States with population over 100,000, according to the FBI. Crime in the New York metropolitan area in general has diminished since the 1980s and is lower than many other major U.S. metropolitan areas today. In 2005, Stamford was voted “The Best City to Reside In” by the magazine United States Living. The city has one hospital, Stamford Hospital. The city is run by Mayor Dannel Malloy and the first family who reside on Ocean Drive East.
Stamford made up of into sections (locally a more common term than “neighborhoods” for these areas), each of which has distinct character owing to the type of business and industry that thrived there at one time, such as the South End with its heavy manufacturing. Other areas include Downtown, North Stamford, Turn of River, Roxbury, Newfield, Belltown, Springdale, Glenbrook, Hubbard Heights, the East Side, Shippan, Shippan Point, the Cove, the West Side, Waterside, Westover, Bulls Head, and Long Ridge, which is home to many blue chip corporations.
North Stamford (zip code 06903) has been nationally ranked as one of the wealthiest areas in America, and has the highest average household income rate in Fairfield County, surpassing areas of extremely wealthy towns such as New Canaan and Greenwich.
Downtown also has a shopping mall, the Stamford Town Center, which opened in 1982. Ridgeway Center, located about a mile north of downtown, is one of the oldest shopping centers of its type, having been built in the 1940s. It was renovated in 1998.
Stamford has a cluster of corporate headquarters (many of which moved from New York in the 1980s both to lower their tax bills and to be closer to the homes of their top executives). This includes four Fortune 500 Companies, nine Fortune 1000 Companies, thirteen Courant 100 Companies, numerous divisions of large corporations, as well as a large number of secretive hedge funds. This gives Stamford one of the largest concentrations of corporations in the nation.
Among the larger companies with headquarters in Stamford are World Wrestling Entertainment, Xerox and Pitney Bowes. UBS also has a major headquarters here, boasting North America’s largest equities trading floor.
Royal Bank of Scotland announced in October 2005 that it would consolidate its North American headquarters in downtown Stamford and build the largest trading floor in North America (the current largest trading floor is in the UBS building across the street from where the new building is under construction).
Companies also leave Stamford regularly, either to escape the city’s traffic problems or relatively high office rental rates (in which case they often move to Norwalk, Westport or farther to the east in Fairfield County), as a result of being acquired by other businesses (in which case they often move out of state), or for other business reasons. International Paper and MeadWestvaco announced in 2006 that they were leaving the city. Pitney Bowes has kept its headquarters in the city but, like many other companies, it moved some of its back-office operations elsewhere (in this case to Shelton). Stamford and Greenwich both rely on businesses moving in from Manhattan or European companies setting up North American headquarters in local buildings.