A Picture Worth a Thousand Memories
I have had an active policy on this blog of NOT using photographs to compliment the stories. I have often written stories in which I embed photographs and made the stories look and feel like magazine articles. Some people ask for photos and I certainly understand the value of a visual aide, but I use this blog to force myself to write and write and write. As I formulated the title to this story, I was tempted to break with that policy because I wasn’t sure it was fair to talk about a picture as the basis of a story and not include the picture. Literally two seconds ago my iPhone beeped with a text from weather.com (now a subsidiary of IBM) offering to show me a new NASA picture of the center of the galaxy. It was described as “Amazing”, so I took the bait and looked. It was mildly interesting, but I would have preferred a succinct description just as much. So, I have decided that I can easily describe the picture and the impact it had on me and why I choose to write about it and the memories it dredges up.
The picture came to me from my old friend and colleague Steven Schneider (a reader of this blog, I am told). Steven worked with me on several iterations and, like me, he is now doing a portfolio of things and while still doing one with a presumed W2 paycheck, gets most of his value accretion from the portfolio of activities. Steven is on the cusp of turning 60 and is thus a half-step behind me on the retirement path. He took the picture while riding his bicycle around a damp and relatively quiet Manhattan on this Memorial Day. How perfect is that? Most of my memories from my business life are from Manhattan and I could certainly find a way to characterize them as “damp” if I need to do so. Steven was making some sort of delivery for his wife, Leslie, and using it as an excuse to get some exercise on his bike. Having lived and biked in Manhattan for many years, I know that a day like today is the perfect time to do that since you are less risking life and limb with the potholes and taxicabs on a National Holiday. As a side-note, Steven and Leslie have another home in Delray Beach, Florida and he tells me he is not a fan of riding his bicycle down there based on the senior citizen drivers and their inability to differentiate right-on-red from left-into-traffic turns. He says he feels safer on the streets of Manhattan (I’m sure the Pandemic slow-down hasn’t hurt that perception). Steven was on Park Avenue north of Grand Central, which is the Park Avenue of Park Avenue and where we first worked together at Bankers Trust Company, located at 280 Park.
Directly to the south of 280 sits 270 Park Avenue, which was built as the Union Carbide building sixty years ago and then became the Manufacturers Hannover Bank building, which became the Chemical Bank Building, and finally the J.P. Morgan Bank headquarters. That sentence alone describes much of the history of my banking career since the theme during those forty years was dominated by consolidation in the banking industry. During all of that, Bankers Trust stayed independent and next door to all that moving and shaking at 270 Park. 270 Park was noteworthy for several reasons. To begin with, it was, when built, the tallest building ever designed by a woman (Natalie de Blois from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill). Then it went through countless renovations and upgrades culminating in J.P. Morgan declaring it the largest Platinum LEED (a measure of environmental friendliness) building in the world. And even in its end-game, 270 has garnered the title as the largest building ever voluntarily demolished. That demolition is now complete and the block between 47th and 48th Street from Park Avenue to Madison is now a vacant lot.
Steven took a picture from the East side of Park Avenue and 48th Street, looking Southwest over the now vacant lot. The picture captures the Southeast corner of 280 Park and follows through over the vacant lot at the big building at 383 Madison Avenue, which sits between Madison and Vanderbilt Avenue (a short mid-block street running north/south from 42nd Street to 47th Street). The entrance to 383 Madison is really at that corner of Vanderbilt and 47th so the picture is centered on the “front” of that large newer building, which is the temporary headquarters of J.P. Morgan while 270 gets rebuilt. That same 383 Madison building began life in 2002 as the new (and final) headquarters of Bear Stearns, the scrappy broker dealer that won acclaim from Fortune Magazine in 2002 and 2003 as the best investment bank in the world. I went to work at Bear Stearns as CEO of Bear Stearns Asset Management in 2004. I walked in through that same door at Vanderbilt and 47th that first morning in June and ended my forty years on Wall Street four years later, walking out that same door.
The amazing thing is that the picture captures the Southeast corner offices I occupied for many years at 280 Park (including my famous “Cafe Office” on the Third Floor, when I first met Steven) and it follows over the wreckage of 270 to the Bear Stearns Building where I enjoyed my most dramatic Wall Street experiences. The irony is that the consolidation that bundled up Manufacturers Hannover Bank and Chemical Bank into J.P. Morgan at 270 ended up being the behemoth that ended up buying Bear Stearns in 2008. The message would seem to be that there is no sidestepping fate when it comes to the avalanche of financial history. There is literally no single photograph that could have captured the start end end of my career as well as that one photograph that Steven snapped on this Memorial Day.
Meanwhile, I am sitting here in my home office, spending the morning outlining and thinking about the Advanced Corporate Finance course I have been enlisted to teach this Fall at University of San Diego. I may actually open that course with a slide of that picture and explain what my old business school professor, Dave Ahlers (rest his soul) explained to me forty-six years ago, that consolidation is inevitable and change is the natural state of affairs in finance and all of life. The course outline is now taking shape via my invitation to a number of people (now including Steven) I worked with over the years to guest lecture as I plot a course from traditional intermediated corporate finance (the role of Wall Street) to decentralized finance (termed DeFi) where the world of SPACs and PIPEs and IPOs are stepping stones to a disintermediated future for finance which will be all about Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. With the mention of those terms, I am sure several of you are ready to stop reading since those are monsters lurking on the horizon that most of us hope do not reach us during our natural lifespans. But suffice it to say that Steven’s picture, which is a picture worth a thousand memories to me will be tranquil by comparison to the picture of the future progression of the finance world and the wreckage of existing structures we all rely on for trust and security. That picture will be a picture worth a terabyte of memories.