Federal Reserve Bank of New York
33 Liberty Street, York & Sawyer, Architects, 1919-24
Deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York lies more than one quarter of the world’s known reserves of gold bullion. These tens of billions of dollars’ worth of gold bars, each numbered and weighed, are stored five stories underground in 122 compartments in a vault closed with a steel door weighing 90 tons. Most of the gold at the Federal Reserve belongs to foreign governments and international organizations. They store their gold here for three reasons: first, the Bank’s location in the heart of the U.S. financial center; second, its unrivalled security; and third, the ease of trading when many countries keep their gold in the same building. As countries originally made payments to each other, gold bars could simply be wheeled from one country’s vault to the next – no need to crate them for long ocean voyages, no fear of disaster at sea.
The New York Fed is one of twelve regional Reserve Banks nationwide, part of the Federal Reserve System created in 1913 to supervise American banking. The New York bank’s responsibilities range from executing monetary policies to supporting the financial stability of the country and the world.
The architects of the Federal Reserve Bank modeled it after the palaces of Italian Renaissance bankers, particularly the Medici, to make it look important, intimidating, and secure.
Marker is at the intersection of Liberty Street and Nassau Street, on the right when traveling east on Liberty Street.
Courtesy hmdb.org
