To nearly all passersby, the scene at 767 Fifth Avenue Sunday evening could not have been more mundane. The usual handfuls of tourist gawked at the gleaming cube atop the midtown Manhattan Apple Store. A slight but insistent breeze whipped up the front plaza’s fountains, glowing warmly in the deepening twilight.
But 25 floors above in the General Motors Building, however, the mood assuredly was anything but calm.
Hundreds of people — executives from General Motors and scores of lawyers — were gathered, preparing for the carmaker’s epochal bankruptcy filing, to be made 12 hours later.
Inside the cavernous white-marble lobby, one would be hard-pressed to find any sign of the company whose name the building shares. (The showroom G.M. once maintained for a fleet of vehicles has been absent for years. While the company maintains a small presence in the building, it is better known today for tenants like Apple, the toy store F.A.O. Schwarz and scores of hedge funds and investment firms.)
By Monday morning, the lobby will undoubtedly be filled by throngs of reporters, headed to the 25th-floor offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, G.M.’s restructuring counsel, to attend briefings. A bevy of TV news trucks would assuredly ring the building.
But on Sunday night, only a pair of security guards idly stood sentry in the space.
Gathered at Weil’s offices were teams of high-powered lawyers and advisers representing the company, the government and other parties, poring over documents to ensure that one of the most complicated and far-ranging bankruptcy cases in American corporate history went as smoothly as possible.
Several times, my colleague Micheline Maynard and I saw a smattering of G.M. executives entering or exiting the building. And at the curb, a black G.M. sport-utility vehicle idled behind a hot dog cart, seemingly waiting to spirit a company official away from the marathon preparations for Monday’s bankruptcy filing.
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