Financial crisis tours are catching up in New York City
Financial crisis tours are catching up in New York City
As financial turbulence grinds on and the global economy stutters towards a half-hearted recovery, a cottage industry has sprung up in "credit crunch tourism". At least two companies have set up financial crisis tours of New York's financial district, while the Museum of American Finance is drawing a steady stream of visitors to its new exhibition on Wall Street scandal.
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| Walking tour: Tourists get to gawp at AIG's head office, the original Lehman Brothers building, the Standard & Poor's tower block and New York's Federal Reserve, among others |
Annaline Dinkelmann (49) can recite the local haunts of almost every financial icon on Wall Street, from the area's beginnings in the 1600s to the present. On a recent Monday morning, Dinkelmann, a former IT professional at Morgan Stanley, was standing at 57 Wall Street, the site of Alexander Hamilton's law office, preparing to take four New Yorkers on one of her Wall Street Walks -- specialised tours of the financial district.
For that walk, Dinkelmann comes prepared with a binder of photos of Wall Street's first outlaws, including William Duer, Hamilton's right-hand man at the Treasury, whose speculative activities led to a market crash in 1792, and Jay Gould, the railway developer and gold speculator who helped cause a panic on Black Friday: September 24, 1869.
The walk complements an exhibit for the Museum of American Finance for which Dinkelmann also leads tours and discusses more contemporary scandals as well, including the bailout of American International Group, Timothy Geithner and and Goldman Sachs. The tour, which costs $45 (Rs 2,000) a person, ends with a drink at a Wall Street pub.
Brisk demandDemand for the walk has been brisk. "There are so many scandals, and in the financial crisis so many people lost so much money, so there is a lot of fear," Dinkelmann says.
Dinkelmann has been running Wall Street Walks since 2006, when she left Morgan Stanley after 10 years.
Tom Comerford, a graphics employee at Goldman Sachs who leads guided walks in his spare time, runs tours for The Wall Street Experience, a business set up last year by a former Deutsche Bank bond trader, Andrew Luan, to capitalise on public fascination with the industry's villainous excesses.
Tourists get to gawp at AIG's head office, the original Lehman Brothers building, the Standard & Poor's tower block and New York's Federal Reserve -- all to a running commentary of anecdotes about bankers' excesses.
Did you know?Wall Street got its name from a wall that was erected by Dutch settlers on the southern tip of Manhattan Island in the 17th century, as a defense against attack from various tribes, New England colonists, and the British
