It hired a new employee and is renting 1,500 square feet at $8 a square foot.

He said he rented 10,000 square feet for $10,000 to $15,000 a week.

With the exception of an insurance company that rents several thousand square feet on the first floor, the building has never been occupied.

For $2,400 including utilities, they rented nearly 2,000 square feet of raw space.

We'd have been happy to rent 200,000 square feet last year.

The firm intends to rent 400,000 square feet of space outside Manhattan, beginning in 1991.

It would apply to businesses that rent less than 10,000 square feet of space, including most small businesses.

"They give us ways of expanding in the city without having to rent 10,000 square feet."

"Elsewhere, we probably would have had to rent 4,000 square feet and had a lot of dead space," he said.

Swiss Bank is expected to rent more than 100,000 square feet of interim space while its new downtown complex is being built.