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Historic Interiors
A Classic Wall Street Space Fits in a Financial Museum
The new home for a Smithsonian Institution affiliate required a careful restoration effort within an occupied office building in Lower Manhattan.
by Kyla K. Wilson
New York City’s financial district has a new attraction that links back to its own roots.
A $6.5 million renovation at 48 Wall St., one block from the New York Stock Exchange, is transforming a 22,000-sq-ft space into the new home of the Museum of American Finance.
The museum began the process of moving last year from its prior location at 26 Broadway, the Standard Oil Building, to its new three-floor space, which is about 10 times larger. It also changed its name from its prior moniker, the Museum of American Financial History. The museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.
Originally built between 1927 and 1929, the exterior of 48 Wall St. is known for its colonial revival style and a distinctive marble-clad interior with predominantly neoclassical features. The 34-story, 324,000-sq-ft steel-frame skyscraper is owned and managed by Swig Equities, a New York-based real estate development, investment, and management firm. The rest of the building is fully leased to commercial tenants.
The move was prompted by rising demand for its programs and services in recent years due to increasing interest in financial education, according to the museum. Founded in 1988, the institution holds the world’s largest museum archive of financial documents and artifacts. It will reopen this summer.
The project team’s biggest hurdle was ensuring that it created a space that would serve the institution for the long term and for varying flows of visitors, says Stephen Heyman, president and project manager for Realinsight, a real estate consulting and project management firm based in New York that was owner’s representative for the effort.
“Museums are extremely complex and sophisticated facilities as they’re constructed today,” Heyman says. “You’re trying to provide electricity, data access, and audio-visual inputs almost anywhere and build an enormous amount of flexibility in terms of heating and air conditioning to accommodate the great variations of [space use]. It’s not like a standard office space where you can anticipate how much heat is being produced.”
The main exhibition space is located in the former banking hall in the grand mezzanine of the building, which until 1998 was home to Bank of America. The museum will also feature a 250-seat auditorium, an educational facility equipped with modern features, a library, archives, and offices.
The permanent and rotating exhibits are geared for both children and adults and focus on various aspects of money, finance, banking, entrepreneurship, and the history of the American financial markets. The museum’s programs include forums, seminars, tours, and educational presentations for students from kindergarten through the MBA level. During off hours, it will offer the space for weddings and corporate meetings.
The building’s entrance opens right onto Wall Street and features 30-ft ceilings, large windows, arched wall panels, and historic murals depicting aspects of commerce and banking. The building’s exterior has landmark status, as does the historic grand mezzanine inside.
“The main space is actually registered with the state historic preservation office, which is significant because it’s not often that interiors are designated,” says Gerald Ruck, project manager at New York-based Wank Adams Slavin Associates, the project’s architect.
The project entailed extra layers of approvals, both because of the landmark status of the building and the changed use of the space from a business to a place of assembly. The layers included safety requirements, such as additional paths for fire exits and features to protect exhibits from fires.
“Public assembly is always scrutinized when it’s in a high-rise building,” Ruck says. “It’s even further scrutinized because it also impacts the egress of the whole building.”
The project faced delays from its original scheduled completion this spring, partly due to the extensive approvals process but also because of renovation tasks that led to unexpected surprises, Ruck says.
“When we were putting in the stairs and elevators, we ran into conditions no one could have anticipated until we opened up walls and made holes in floors,” he adds. “There was a fair amount of structural work to accommodate those additions in the stairs and elevators.”
Preserving the space’s historic integrity was a constant theme, Heyman says.
“First, there was considerable research in testing the materials [to restore and replicate] the original materials and look of the premises when it was first created,” he adds. “There was extensive cleaning and restoration of marble. There also was extensive faux painting to [approximate] marble.”
Another major rehabilitation task was cleaning the eight large murals and four lunettes depicting images related to banking, manufacturing, and international trade. The team restored marble and faux marble capitals, pilasters, and wainscot; repainted the grand mezzanine banking hall; and restored the original brass lantern at the entrance.
New York-based Humphreys and Harding is the general contractor, while EverGreene Painting Studios of New York handled many of the restoration, cleaning, and painting tasks on the interior’s array of metals, stone, canvas, and plasterwork. The tasks included applying 2,500 sq ft of smooth plaster finish on uneven concrete beams; stabilizing capitals and loose or warped acoustical ceiling tiles on the mezzanine ceiling; and repainting the discolored and damaged surfaces of wainscot and pilasters using decorative painting techniques to match the variety of adjacent surfaces and real marble.
For many of the painting tasks, EverGreene had to research and develop new methods, says Kim Lovejoy, vice president of the firm.
“We developed techniques to touch it up,” she says. “Particularly for the faux painting, we worked out color matching and did samples.”
The project also entailed constructing support facilities, such as bathrooms, a kitchen, and a six-section multipurpose room with operable partitions on the lower floors, which also have gallery and exhibit space.
The project’s major infrastructure work included the addition of an entrance from William Street; the installation of an elevator, staircase, and air-conditioning system; and upgrades to the heating system. The renovation effort largely did not interfere with the building’s existing tenants, though the project team saved electrical system work for late-night or weekend hours, Ruck says.
Wiring the space for modern use was one of the biggest tasks, Heyman says. The museum will offer visitors the opportunity to learn about the NYSE and other exchanges on large screens that receive live feeds from the trading floors.
“On the top floor alone, we have put in 63 electric communications floor boxes so that electricity, data, and audio-visual lines can be brought anywhere throughout the floor,” he says. “That will allow the flexibility of setting the museum up in many configurations as its exhibit space changes over time.”
Key Players
Owner: Museum of American Finance
Owner’s Representative: Realinsight, New York
Architect: Wank Adams Slavin Associates, New York
Painting: EverGreene Painting Studios, New York
General Contractor: Humphreys and Harding, New York
Metal Work: Harvard Maintenance, New York
Structural Engineer: Goldstein Associates, New York
Exhibit Designer: C&G Partners, New York
Lighting Consultant: Lite Makers, Long Island City, N.Y. |
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