New York: Imagine you could walk up to Bill Gates or even a historical figure like financier J P Morgan and ask them what was the secret to their success. The Museum of American Finance, which is readying new, larger quarters on Wall Street for next year, will allow you to do just that in a 'Great Entrepreneurs' interactive exhibit.
In its current cramped space, the museum can hardly begin to tell the tales of bankers and tycoons, booms and busts that over the years formed the world's largest economy. When it moves, the museum aims to tell its story with a mix of the educational and the entertaining, says Executive Director Lee Kjelleren.
"The challenge is to make a dynamic, engaging and interactive museum yet also not make it Disneyland," Kjelleren said. Today, people are more responsible for their financial well-being and need to understand financial matters more than ever before, he said.
In its new space at 48 Wall Street the museum hopes to fill a need that arose after September 11, 2001, when the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors to visitors for security reasons. The nonprofit museum, located a block away, is talking with the NYSE to have live feeds on large video screens that will show the exchange floor action. Video from foreign stock exchanges may be added later, Kjelleren said.
The 'Great Entrepreneurs' exhibit will feature large mirrors in which, as you approach, an image of an American captain of industry will come to life.
You can pose questions, such as how he or she got started, what were the entrepreneur's background and education, what were the obstacles and what accounted for his or her success.
The entrepreneur will answer and describe the risks and rewards of the particular enterprises. "It's entertainment with a purpose," Kjelleren said.
The museum is moving from rooms a few blocks away at 28 Broadway in what was formerly John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil Building. The new site was once the home of the Bank of New York, the city's first bank, founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, the first US Treasury secretary.
With its grand marble staircase, 30-foot ceilings and Palladian windows, the new site will expand the museum's size tenfold to 30,000 square feet. One corner will be an office furnished in the 18th-Century style that would be familiar to Hamilton. The museum has an early US Treasury note, which features the first use of the dollar sign and was sold to and signed by President George Washington.
Hamilton was instrumental in securing investor confidence in the United States' creditworthiness and advocated tariffs and excise taxes to fund the national government. Richard Sylla, an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, said America's economic success was largely due to Hamilton.
"He managed a financial crisis and injected liquidity into the market back in the 1790s the way (former Federal Reserve Chairman) Alan Greenspan managed our crises," said Sylla.
Fund-raising for the museum has begun with a goal of $10 million. The target to open the new space is spring of 2007.
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