NORFOLK, Va. - TowneBank and Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters (CHKD) have finalized the purchase of the Norfolk Southern Tower in downtown Norfolk.
Norfolk Southern Tower, located at 3 Commercial Place, was purchased along with the adjoining Commercial Place parking garage at 520 East Main Street owned by the City of Norfolk.
While TowneBank and CHKD now equally own the tower and the garage, Norfolk Southern will continue to occupy several of the floors until the end of 2021.
“TowneBank and CHKD are both respected corporate citizens and assets to our community,” says Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Cooper Alexander. “Their significant investment reinforces Norfolk’s downtown as the urban employment hub of the region.” Alexander is pleased that nearly 900 people will eventually work in the tower, several hundred more than are presently there from Norfolk Southern.
The building will now house the headquarters of Towne Financial Services which will include approximately 400 team members in TowneBank Mortgage, Towne Insurance and Towne Benefits.
The bank’s headquarters will remain in the Harbour View area of Suffolk and TowneBank’s Norfolk Main Office and Corporate Banking Group will remain in their current downtown locations.
“We have been looking for a way to bring the Towne Financial Services Executives and Operations Teams together under one roof and had been exploring numerous locations throughout the region,” says G. Robert Aston, Jr., Chairman of TowneBank. “In 2018, when Norfolk Southern announced its plans to relocate, the opportunity to purchase their iconic building was too good to pass up."
TowneBank says they will donate the net proceeds of Norfolk Southern’s lease payments through 2021 to CHKD’s current campaign to build a mental health hospital for children on its Norfolk campus.
CHKD says they plan to relocate nearly 475 employees to the new building, including information services, patient financial services, Human Resources and Health System administration.
While the downtown tower will not include any direct patient-care services, Jim Dahling, CHKD President and CEO says, “This opportunity allows us to move office functions out of our on-campus clinical buildings so that we can re-purpose those spaces to better serve the children of our community."
