Reporter's Notebook: America's dizzying financial crisis finds its midtown Ground Zero

Lehman Brothers becomes the new symbol of Wall Street's woes.

By ALLISON HOFFMAN, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK
lehman bros 224.88 (photo credit: AP)
lehman bros 224.88
(photo credit: AP)
A French tourist couple, clearly doing the full Manhattan, stopped in front of Lehman Brothers this week and brandished a fancy digital SLR camera. The woman carried a shopping bag from New York City Firestore, which offers a wide selection of Ground Zero memorabilia. Her husband had a bag from the NBC Experience store in Rockefeller Center, near the Lehman building. The bright red neon Radio City sign blinked in the background down on 50th Street. The pair fussed for a while, framing and re-framing the shot, fiddling with the zoom. And they were not the only tourists to adopt the building as a place to visit and photograph for the family back home, as if to say, "THIS is where it all happened." One couple, holding hands and dressed in T-shirts and shorts, turned the corner and simultaneously exclaimed, "Oh! Lehman Brothers! You know, that company." Another shyly asked a stranger to photograph him, and to please make sure that the Lehman name was in the frame. For a year, ever since the riptide of defaulted mortgages began exerting its apparently inexorable pull on the underpinnings of the American financial system, people have searched for a symbol of disaster to anchor the dizzying stream of negative numbers and percentages in a single searing image. It fell to Lehman Brothers' modern glass tower to represent of the whole grim mess. Anonymous stucco houses plastered with red "foreclosed" signs or stock footage of screeching floor traders have now been replaced with images of distraught bankers, shirts unbuttoned, walking out the doors carrying the shards of their corporate work life in cardboard boxes. At the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown, patrons at the plush bar sat and talked in funereal tones, getting quieter the more they drank, rather than jollier. One banker, personally unscathed by the day's bad news, worried aloud about his sister's fiance, a junior Lehman banker. No one at the table made the usual noises about how things would turn out for the best. Among the non-banking set, conversations bumped along full of more bourgeois anxieties. A pretty twentysomething in dancer's leggings on a downtown-bound train proclaimed: "My professor says people in my generation will have seven careers! So it's just how things are these days." Her considerably older traveling companions, also dancers, replied they did not feel much like looking for new jobs just now. Writers discussed with each other whether they were safe leaving their relatively meager savings in Washington Mutual or Wachovia, two retail banks that by the end of the week were offering themselves for sale to inoculate against the spreading financial influenza. Brooklyn was, as usual, offered as a balm for the woes gripping Manhattan. "Come across the river, where no one cares," one friend told me, cheerfully. The split between the shell-shocked and the blase did not mirror the sentiment after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when everyone felt equally terrorized by a threat that came, unexpectedly, from outside. This time, we knew we had sown the seeds of our own downfall.