Walking Off the Big Apple: NYC Finance

Soon after Walking Off the Big Apple arrived on the web in the summer of 2007, the economy started showing visible strains. Do not read a correlation here. While hedge fund managers knocked back expensive bottles of champagne and built luxury condominiums with lofty views, a great percentage of people - a number we now popularly identify as the 99% - struggled to keep up with daily expenses.

The subjects of finance and social class have long been important themes in New York history, culture, and in its literature. I don't think it's possible to write about New York in any deep sort of way without an understanding of these issues. For example, during the fall of 2008, my reading of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), found echoes with contemporary events.

To explore Wall Street themes, let me modestly propose several walks to Wall Street. You can march, if you like.

Self-guided Walks with Economic and Financial Themes:

• A Timely Visit to the Museum of American Finance (February 21, 2009)
• Follow Your Money: The New York Financial Crisis and Recovery Walk (March 4, 2009)
• Walking an Uncertain Wall Street: A Strolling Guide to Stops, Sleepovers, and Anxieties in the Financial District (July 26, 2010)
• Breakfast at Standard & Poor's (August 10, 2011)

A Timeline of the Economic Crisis,
as documented by Walking Off the Big Apple

"She was too genuinely ignorant of the manipulations of the stock-market to understand his technical explanations, or even perhaps to perceive that certain points in them were slurred; the haziness enveloping the transaction served as a veil for her embarrassment, and through the general blur her hopes dilated like lamps in a fog." - Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, quotes in the post "New York in The House of Mirth: Social Class, Money, and Speculations on Wall Street," Walking Off the Big Apple (September 12, 2008)

A year before the Wall Street upheaval during the fall of 2008, the signs of the coming crisis were more apparent beyond the New York bubble, most notably in the larger nation's housing market.

September 17, 2007 Walking Off Class Struggle in New York
"Walking Off the Big Apple is increasingly concerned about the appalling division of social classes in the city. Though an ever-present part of the city's life, documented over the ages in fiction and non-fiction, the current configuration of hedge fund managers on top and the working poor at the bottom bothers the moral conscience."

October 7, 2007 "The Pain Threshold," Or, Maintaining Dignity with Our Euro-spending Friends
"New Yorkers know only too well that it's expensive to live here. According to the latest census numbers, large numbers of New Yorkers shell out a large percentage of their income for mortgage or rent. Other dollars go to the utility company, the cable company, mass transit, and to caffe lattes grandes. That leaves precious little for a movie and brunch."

"My entire possessions consisted of five dollars and a small hand-bag. My sewing-machine, which was to help me to independence, I had checked as baggage. Ignorant of the distance from West Forty-second Street to the Bowery, where my aunt lived, and unaware of the enervating heat of a New York day in August, I started out on foot. How confusing and endless a large city seems to the new-comer, how cold and unfriendly!" - Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Vol. One, Page 1

November 13, 2007 Walking Off the Wall Street Bears: A Subprimer
"Much of the worries on Wall Street these days stem from the crisis in subprime mortgages, risky loans to often credit-risky individuals to buy homes for themselves. However, these individuals found themselves overwhelmed financially with often high adjustable rate mortgages, and they faced foreclosure. Some of the lenders are also up a creek. All this is just sad."

Wall Street, an image inspired by Paul Strand.

November 19, 2007 Walking Off the Wall Street Bears: Confessions of a New York Consumer
"Consumer spending drives approximately two-thirds of the United States economy, so it follows that Wall Street will become nervous if people stop buying all the stuff they would like to have but don't need."

"When I remarked to a friend that I was engaged in compiling an anthology on the subject of walking, he said, 'I suppose the depressed state of the world has made walkers of a great many people who a few years ago were almost in danger of losing use of their legs. It's odd, when you stop to think of it, that because of the harshness of the times and the fact that shoe leather is cheaper than gasoline a lot of people have been driven to the discovery that walking is among the most rewarding pleasures of life.'" - Introduction of The Pleasures of Walking, edited by Edwin Valentine Mitchell, from 1934

January 12, 2008 Walking Through a Recession
"News on Wall Street this week was grim. After a few dramatic sessions on the stock exchange, talk of a looming recession grew louder in the mass media and on the campaign trail. In New York, luxury retailers like Tiffany reported soft holiday sales, and Starbucks is losing the coffee market to fast food giants. I'm concerned that the city will see a noticeable decline in visitors from the domestic US market, and it's clear that the New York tourist industry has shifted its marketing already to visitors from other countries. Many businesses will suffer from the ripple effect of a recession, even in New York."

The fall events of 2008

September 5, 2008 An Exterior View of the New York Stock Exchange, On a Day the Dow Dropped 344.65 Points
"Inside, however, traders engaged in a vigorous sell-off, the result of poor showings of the national's retail sector and concerns with the number of workers filing for unemployment. Early this morning, more figures were released that indicated a higher than expected number of job losses for the summer. In addition, many more people seem to be behind in their mortgage payments, and the number of foreclosures grows alarmingly. In turn, these trends damper any enthusiasm that an end-of-year economic recovery is in sight. "

September 14, 2008 Walking Off the Wall Street Bears, Part II: The Crisis at Lehman Brothers, and You
"As of this writing, Lehman Brothers, a financial house that dates back to 1850, may succumb to recent stock pressures and be headed for liquidation before markets open on Monday. Barclays PLC and Bank of America (in hard breaking news as I write, in talks to buy Merrill Lynch), two potential suitors, have left the building (as pictured here, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street). "

Some people think Occupy Wall Street came out of nowhere. It did not.
Here's an expression of discontent from September of 2008.

September 25, 2008. After the Closing Bell, A Protest March Against the Wall Street Bailout
"While the gestures of protest were familiar - satirical costumes of billionaires, hand-made signs, numerous bells and horns to draw attention to the cause - some deep-seated anger about an administration and Congress bailout deal for Wall Street was apparent today in a late afternoon protest in the financial district. "

December 8, 2008 All Shopped Out, Maybe It's Something I Read
"Shopping for holiday gifts is peculiar this year, thanks to the grim economic news. The beautiful objects in the store windows seem far away, unreachable, as if there's some sort of veil separating object and possession. It's not like that I'm a poor child pressing her nose on the window of a candy store and wanting the treats inside; rather, I have somehow lost my desire for them. The once-certain passion for material things, driven by psychologies of success and attainment and fueled by the advertising industry and deep-rooted cultural traditions, was the real bubble that burst this autumn. That's a big problem when consumers drive two-thirds of the American economy."

January 28, 2009 Lessons from the Days of the "Empty State Building"
"A guy called The Drifter, an anonymous writer who wrote a weekly column for The Nation, characterized the urge to build tall buildings as an adolescent pursuit. Paris, by contrast, was more sophisticated, needing only the Eiffel Tower. In a column published in late 1930 he wrote, "Only a spineless race with brains of straw will let itself be forever crowded into subways, jammed into elevators, and shot into space in order that 'modern industry' may be enabled to sell more separate brands of what might as well be the same toothpaste."

Outside the Courthouse: Madoff Plea Hearing 3/12/09

Madoff plea hearing. March 12, 2009

March 12, 2009 The Madoff Plea Hearing
"I hadn't planned on staying for nearly three hours outside the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan this morning, but I got drawn into the reporter pack covering Bernard Madoff's plea hearing. Just a handful of his victims were on hand to witness live the guilty pleas of the man who made off with their life savings, so a small army of mainly broadcast journalists took turns interviewing them."

Fall 2011: Occupy Wall Street

September 30, 2011 Situating Zuccotti Park: The Landscape of the Wall Street Protest