Online News From The Tribeca Trib

Museum Leases Grand Wall St. Space

By Barry Owens

"We've been looking for a space for a few years, and I'd say we've found it," deadpanned Kristin Aguilera, a spokeswoman for the Museum of American Finance. Aguilera was speaking with a Trib reporter one afternoon last month in the middle of the main hall at 48 Wall Street. The museum is the new leaseholder of the landmarked space, which formerly belonged to the Bank of New York, and it was an understatement to say that an institution dedicated to the history of finance would fit in nicely there.

It is 30,000 square feet of space on Wall Street, after all, in the onetime home of a bank founded by the father of American finance, Alexander Hamilton. The hall features wall murals depicting foreign trade, mining, steel and other mainstays of the stock market, and the building is located just one block from the New York Stock Exchange. (The brass chandeliers, marble floors, and 30-foot-high ceilings are nice touches, too.)

"It's perfect, thematically, for us," Aguilera said.

The museum, formerly known as the Museum of American Financial History, signed a lease for the space in late November and last month announced its new address and name. The institution has launched a $10 million capital campaign to fund a renovation of the interior, which includes unfinished basement space as well as the landmarked hall, with the hope of opening in December as the "de facto visitor center for the New York Stock Exchange," Aguilera said.

The museum plans to have large monitors showing live feeds of the action on the floor of the stock exchange, which has been closed to the public since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The former bank building will be a significant upgrade from the museum's current location in a carpeted basement room at 26 Broadway, across the street from the bull statue on lower Broadway.

John Herzog, a securities dealer, started the museum in 1988 with little more than a dream-and his collection of stock and bond certificates. The museum has since grown to include financial literacy programs and a number of other artifacts, including an Edison stock ticker that produces souvenir tape with that age-old chestnut of financial advice: "Buy low, sell high." In 1999, the museum became an affiliate of the Smithsonian.

"As we moved along we realized that people didn't want to just look at pieces of paper," Herzog said. "They wanted to know what it all meant."

Last month, Herzog walked the marble floors of 48 Wall Street and dreamed anew.

The building, built in 1927, was home to the Bank of New York through 1998. The cornerstone from the original 1797 bank building that Alexander Hamilton founded there, remains.On the lower level, Herzog plans to build a 250-seat auditorium for speaking events, perhaps a catering hall, and a permanent office for the National Council on Economic Education.

"We want to make everybody who comes here better informed about what they have, and how to make more of it," Herzog said of the museum's educational programs.

On the main floor, the museum will have enough room to display many more artifacts, as well as the live feeds from the stock exchange.

"The capital markets are the jewel of the nation," said Herzog, who was toting beneath his arm a presentation titled, "Assuring America's Global Leadership." "We want to give the public a place to go to see how it all works."