They didn’t exactly hire two guys with a truck to secretly move one of the world’s largest and most valuable coin collections over the weekend in Manhattan. But they did use five standard-issue moving vans.No armored-car convoys. No helicopter gunships. No National Guard outriders flourishing automatic weapons. Just sweaty movers, in blue shirts with their names stitched at the front, schlepping 425 plastic packing crates that were filled with treasures trussed in humble bubble wrap and garden-variety vinyl packing tape.
Yes, the New York Police Department provided an escort, but during more than eight hours on Saturday, one of the great hoards of coins and currency on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was utterly unalarmed as it was bumped through potholes, squeezed by double-parked cars and slowed by tunnel-bound traffic during the trip to its fortresslike new vault a mile to the north.
In the end, the move did not become a caper movie.
“The idea was to make this as inconspicuous as possible,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “It had to resemble a totally ordinary office move.”
The collection of 800,000 coins, bank notes, medals, commemorative badges, pins, historic advertising tokens, campaign buttons and other artifacts has been amassed during the 150-year existence of the nonprofit society.
It was transported from the society’s high-security headquarters at 96 Fulton Street, in the former Fidelity and Deposit Company building at the corner of William Street, to its future home, a secure $4 million vault and exhibition space 22 blocks away, on the 11th floor of One Hudson Square, at Varick and Canal Streets.
Even as the moving vans shuttled back and forth, the society’s 14 employees began the endlessly tedious work of unpacking the boxes. They began freeing 12,000 metal trays full of coins from their quarter-inch foam packing, then stacking them in their new locations in custom-built cabinets in a vault erected on the concrete floor of a former printing building.
The society’s holdings rival the comprehensiveness and rarity of those in the Smithsonian Institution and comprise “one of the world’s great collections, the equivalent of those in Berlin, Paris and the British Museum,” said Christopher S. Lightfoot, an associate curator in the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“It is a vast, encyclopedic collection of the highest quality,” he added.
Of the collection’s value, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said, “It is priceless because it has so many unique pieces,” adding with deliberate vagueness that experts had valued it in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The collection “is incredibly valuable, so you can understand why they don’t want to publicize exactly how much,” said Rosemary Lazenby, curator of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
During the move, coded numbers on each sealed crate were checked again and again, and “nothing fell off a truck,” said Andrew R. Meadows, the society’s deputy director.
Society staff members were pledged to secrecy about the timing of the move, and “we didn’t tell our movers what the cargo was until the morning of,” said James McVeigh, operations manager of Time Moving and Storage Inc. of Manhattan, referring to the crew of 20 workers.
“How could you not think that there are crazy people out there who want to do crazy things?” he added, noting that he spent six months planning the move with his brother, Tom, another manager of Time Moving.
And so as bright orange rubber-wheeled crates concealing fabulous doubloons rumbled out onto the sidewalk, pedestrians obliviously headed into the Duane Reade two doors away at 130 William Street.
Amid much shouting and hand gesturing, the moving vans barely squeezed past a parked Duane Reade truck on the narrow street as the drivers maneuvered past water and gas main renovation work on Fulton Street.
Then, before arriving at their loading-dock destination on Watts Street, the trucks had to battle Holland Tunnel approaches clotted with weekenders on the way to the Jersey Shore.
“It’s our first coin collection,” said a New York police detective, Gregory Welch, of Emergency Service Unit Truck One, which shadowed the move with hidden heavy weapons “just in case,” along with patrol cars from the First Precinct. He said his unit was accustomed to protecting Federal Reserve gold transfers and gem shipments in the Midtown diamond district.The numismatic society, which has about 2,000 members, was founded by a group of New York collectors in 1858. Thanks to the discovery and minting of gold in California and the development of new federal coinage, interest in coin collecting — as well as the size of the society’s collection — grew quickly. By 1908, the society had its first permanent home, in a neoclassical building next to the Hispanic Society of America on Audubon Terrace at 155th Street and Broadway.
Portions of the collection — which grew through donations from the society’s members and officers — were long on view. But a decline in its finances starting in the 1970s resulted in a whittling down of the staff, and the society considered shutting its doors, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said. However, she added, an infusion of new board members and wealthy donors has given it a current endowment of $45 million.
In 1998, the society bought the seven-story Fulton Street building for $6.5 million and reopened its doors to scholars in 2004, but the growing cost of renovations in the antiquated structure proved too great to provide an exhibition space, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said.
So the society lent hundreds of its rarest and most valuable holdings to a museum in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as some 250 gold and silver coins to the Metropolitan.
The society sold its building this year for $23.9 million, “which was mostly for the endowment, and some for the build-out in the new space,” Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said.
The oldest item in the society’s “cabinet” (the coin-maven word for collection) is one of the first coins ever produced, made of gold-silver alloy and issued around 650 B.C. by a Lydian king who was an ancestor of Croesus.
There is also a 2,000-year-old gold aureus coin of the Roman Emperor Augustus; a gold stater of Alexander the Great, dating to about 330 B.C. (minted in Babylon from Persian loot); and one of the rarest examples of Confederate States currency, a $1,000 note printed in Alabama in 1861. Fewer than 700 were printed.
The society also has a library of 100,000 books, pamphlets, manuscripts, catalogs and other items, which will open to the public in September.
The new, 20,000-foot space, with its 14-foot ceilings, has panoramic views north to the Chrysler Building and west to the Hudson River and will have a climate-controlled rare-book room, conference and lecture spaces, administrative offices and an exhibition hall.
“Our collection is amazing, and much of it has not been on view,” Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said. The first exhibition, celebrating the society’s 150th anniversary, is to open in October.
The society “deserves a new home, where its holdings can be displayed to the public,” said Ms. Lazenby of the Federal Reserve, which has exhibited parts of the society’s collection in recent years in the bank’s admission-free coin museum, in its massive iron-barred neo-Florentine building at 33 Liberty Street.
All day Saturday, after the movers put the crates in place, workers quietly and steadily unpacked the coins, some golden and gleaming, others dulled by the centuries. For long stretches, the only sounds were the popping of tape and bubble wrap, the squawk of trays sliding into cabinets and the very occasional ring of a coin bouncing on the concrete floor, accidentally tipped from its tray. Instantly work would cease as the errant coin was hunted down and restored to its niche, undamaged.
Finally, after the massive doors and gates of the vault slammed shut, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan expressed gratitude to the police and the heroic efforts of her staff, and gave the order for the alarm to be armed. “To say I’m relieved,” she said after the lockdown, “is putting it mildly.”
Source:nytimes.com
