The headquarters of the World Wrestling Federation has the manicured look of a call center. Or the back office of a bank — its black, reflective glass exterior concealing a few hundred third-shifters, examining checks for floating endorsements and miskeyed routing numbers.

It is no Dallas Sportatorium, Fritz Von Erich’s legendary wrestling venue, a low-hanging mess of shingles and rickety bleachers, filled from its dirt floor to exposed rafters with beer, popcorn, and hooting. No rival wrestling promoter will ever drive his Corvair to the Federation’s Stamford home in the dead of night, heft a jerry can onto the roof, and torch this building.

It is the strange fate of America, in its waning days, that even wrestling — carnival redoubt of grifters, heels, and freaks of every stripe — would wind its way into the colorless confines of a ratty corporate park. Today, World Wrestling Entertainment — now renamed, per a legal settlement with that more genteel WWF, the World Wildlife Fund — trades on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of over $856 million.