Thor marketing director Christine Gillies tells GlobeSt.com the lease was signed on Sept. 14, four days after the attacks. By then, she says, Manhattan office space was already picked over. "We hit the town on Friday and secured the space that day," she says. We looked at a couple of properties and started to feel how tight the real estate market is. We knew we had to snap it up.

Thor subleased the space from HQ Global Workplaces, which has the direct lease with building owner Dakota Realty. Gillies says the new location is a "hotel type of office space. We're moving in our own people and our own computers and it's pretty much ready to plug and go." The firm hopes to have permanent space secured when the current lease expires. "We've already started looking.

The 41-story building on the northwest corner of 57th Street and Park Avenue, known as the Ritz Tower, was once considered the city's most prestigious apartment hotel and was the home of Le Pavillon, New York's most famous and expensive French restaurant of its time.