Texaco's headquarters will be tough to fill up

With an office vacancy rate topping 11%, the last thing Westchester County needs is 500,000 more square feet of empty office space.

Unfortunately, that's what Texaco Inc. is about to dump onto the market once its merger with Chevron Corp. is approved by the Federal Trade Commission, expected later this spring. At that point, Texaco will vacate its 110-acre headquarters in Harrison and move to Chevron's base in San Francisco.

Thinking smaller

There are few likely tenants in sight for the trophy property. The main demand in Westchester is for small and medium-size offices, with leases averaging at around 25,000 square feet. Some big, single-user sites that were vacated in the 1990s, like the Kraft Foods complex, met this need by subdividing. But that won't work for Texaco, because of its property's configuration.

So Texaco's best...