MOSTLY nearsightedness. That is the early conclusion drawn by Dr. Veronica Ruelas of the status of Goldman eyes.


Dr. Ruelas has become something of the Goldman Sachs optometrist of choice. It’s the proximity. Late last year, she was installed at the Artsee Eyewear store in the cluster of stylish shops and restaurants beckoning commerce at the back of Goldman’s new Battery Park City headquarters. Goldman people need their vision checked. There she is, right downstairs, with a patient chair in a shade of red known as “American beauty.”


She is an unorthodox optometrist, intermingling yoga and meditation techniques. When she sees patients, especially those with blood pressure or cholesterol issues tested by deals involving several quadrillion dollars, she often shares with them relaxation concepts.


Someone may be in the chair, and she will tell them things like: “Inhale I am ... exhale love.”


How are the Goldman people responding to such advice?


“They’ve been very lovely,” she said. “But I don’t necessarily say it to every patient. I can tell if they’re going to be receptive.”


When Goldman Sachs, the potent financial services firm, opened its new 43-story, $2.1 billion steel-and-glass headquarters on a former parking lot at 200 West Street in October 2009, it was an area sorely in need of more shops and restaurants. So Goldman, helped along by $1.65 billion worth of tax-exempt Liberty Bonds and an additional $115 million in tax sweeteners, simply created its own.


Fanning out from its headquarters bounded by Vesey and Murray Streets, next to the World Financial Center and a block northwest of ever-rising ground zero, there is now a kind of Goldman village anchored by Goldman Alley, as the locals call the public passageway between Vesey and Murray that’s shielded by a tilted glass canopy.


In this Goldman-enabled world, any of its 8,000 employees can dart downstairs and acquire spicy onion rings at 1 a.m. Or, if the need arises during the day, pick up a Cymbidium orchid. Or grab a bottle of A. Edmond Audry Tres Ancienne Grande Champagne Cognac.


Its location and thick wallet allowed Goldman to assemble its environment as few companies in New York ever have. Since it is a busy user of black cars and cabs, it carved out a driveway in front of its building. It contracted with two parking lots nearby for black cars to sit, keeping them from idling on the street. (Residents say traffic has still worsened.)


Goldman employees visiting from out of town must sleep, so the company bought a hotel and then upgraded it to fit its particularities. And when you need a place to park, a good solution is always to buy a parking garage. So Goldman did, acquiring the lease to the public garage at the Riverhouse condominium building nearby. The hotel offers valet parking at the garage.


Goldman occupies another tower across the Hudson River in Jersey City, and owns the pier there. Ferries already plowed back and forth, but Goldman paid the BillyBey Ferry Company to increase frequency to every seven or eight minutes from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Residents have repeatedly lamented the noise and pollution, so Goldman has built two quieter ferry boats of its own, though they are not yet in service.


Just what effect Goldman’s village will have on the encircling Battery Park City neighborhood remains unclear. It’s still early. Most of the alley has come alive just in recent months, and a couple of spaces await occupants.


Nonetheless, Elizabeth H. Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business group, said: “The sense I have is there’s a buzz. Certainly it’s good for local baby sitters, because more people are going out at night.”


TIMUR GALEN, the global head of corporate services and real estate at Goldman, spearheaded the group that imagined Goldman Alley. In 2006, Goldman bought the 15-story building behind the headquarters location, which contained a midpriced Embassy Suites hotel, a movie theater and dining choices that might fit well in a suburban strip mall. It had a markedly different vision for what would be reborn there.


As Mr. Galen expressed it, Goldman wanted to shift to “what we thought of as the best of New York.” It didn’t rely on chance. “Mostly we went out and invited who we wanted,” he said.


That included Danny Meyer, the prolific New York restaurateur who heads Union Square Hospitality Group, and he opened three restaurants, with his latest outpost of the Shake Shack already a popular attraction on the corner of Murray Street.


Goldman people like wine. Enter the Poulakakos family, whose Wall Street restaurants Goldman knew well. The family opened its first wine store, Vintry Fine Wines, and Harry’s Italian restaurant.