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By John Reid Blackwell, Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
Thursday, November 9, 2006
MeadWestvaco Corp. has chosen downtown Richmond for its permanent headquarters.
The Fortune 500 company plans to move from a Henrico County site into a multistory, riverfront office to be built on Byrd Street between Fifth and Seventh streets, company executives said yesterday.
The 4-acre site, now a parking lot for the Federal Reserve Bank, is owned by Richmond-based NewMarket Corp. The company, formerly Ethyl Corp., has been planning to develop the land as part of a project named Foundry Park. MeadWestvaco will lease the office from NewMarket, a fuel-additives company that also has headquarters downtown.
"With all the energy and excitement downtown, it will be a perfect place for the company," said John Luke Jr., MeadWestvaco's chairman and chief executive officer. He described the site as "a remarkable piece of property."
The packaging company announced in February that it would move its corporate headquarters from Stamford, Conn., to the Richmond area. About 700 employees work in a temporary headquarters, a five-story building on West Broad Street in the Innsbrook area of western Henrico. That office was formerly occupied by Capital One Financial Corp.
Construction on the new office will begin next year and is expected to be completed by mid-2009, MeadWestvaco executives said. The total size and cost of the project have not been determined, but the company estimates that the building will have eight to 10 floors and 250,000 to 300,000 square feet. The site will have the capacity to house 1,000 employees and will feature underground parking.
The Federal Reserve Bank is planning to build a parking deck on Byrd Street.
MeadWestvaco considered numerous sites in the Richmond area for the headquarters and received good proposals from localities, Luke and other executives said. The company chose downtown because of its central location in the region, its access to transportation such as Richmond International Airport, and its proximity to other businesses such as downtown financial and legal firms.
The company also was attracted to the downtown because of other developments such as expansions by Virginia Commonwealth University. "It puts us squarely in the center of an environment where we can thrive and grow," said Linda Schreiner, the company's senior vice president.
Copyright Richmond Times-Dispatch. Used by permission.
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