Tourists Gawk at Lehman Bros. HQ

New York skyscraper draws tourists -- like the Bear Stearns and Enron buildings before it

I must say that I was surprised to read a Reuters news story that began: "Welcome to New York's latest tourist attraction: Lehman Brothers' headquarters (Reuters photo at right). It may be ghoulish, but as Lehman edges closer to a sale or outright failure, its currency as a tourist draw is rising. While regulators and bankers flocked to the New York Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan on Sunday to decide Lehman's fate, shutterbugs descended on the bank's midtown Manhattan headquarters to catch a piece of history before it disappears."

Call it schadenfreude tourism when people want to see a place where a felled giant once ruled. They're the sort who photogaphed the Enron building when that Texas scam operation came crashing down and more recently when Bear Stearns failed. Their latest target is Lehman Brothers' headquarters at 745 Seventh Avenue (between 49th and 50th Streets), conveniently close to Times Square. Lehman Brothers.

"The company's name is affixed in gray, metal letters to glossy black walls flanking the doors.
The nameplates, usually ignored in favor of the massive screens touting swirling, colorful videos, became an object of curiosity on a humid, sunny Sunday morning as people gawked at the home of the latest financial giant to face ruin," Reuters reported in the story called "Lehman Office Joins the New York Tourist Circuit."

Sidewalk gawkers who know the faces of some of the financial world's movers and shakers might have recognized some Citigroup's Vikram Pandit, JPMorgan's Steven Black and others emerging from limousines to deal with the crisis. "Several people posed and smiled next to the nameplates before a security guard shooed them away," the unnamed Reuters reporter added.