59. Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Location: 33 Liberty Street
Built: 1919-1924
Architect: York & Sawyer
National Register Number: 80002688
Listed: May 6, 1980
Visited: December 1 and 29, 2007; March 7, 2008
Additional Documentation: Official website



Timely. (Well, always timely.) And yet, even now, my idea of what the Fed actually does isn't any more expansive than a thumbnail sketch you can get on the internet: it is the central bank of the United States; it directs the country's monetary policies; sets interest rates, and so on. It's both steering and ballast for the American economy. Beyond that, it's beyond me.

Likewise, this building, which houses the FRB's New York area operations, defies attempts at comprehension, or even apprehension. It takes after the palazzos of the Italian Renaissance--imposing buildings themselves--in form and detail, but on a much grander scale. (It looks like it could eat an old school palazzo.) Unlike most other massive buildings in the city, it's low and wide rather than high and thin; the building is so near the ground and, thanks to the narrow streets, so near other buildings that either you're too close or can only see a part, if at all.

The guided tour of the facilities I took a few weeks ago was a little anticlimactic, given how little one saw of such an enormous building, and how I needed to reserve my ticket a month in advance. A couple of videos and exhibits about American currency--all of which were quite good, actually, as I'd never found any reason to get emotional over coins before--then an elevator down five floors, down to Manhattan's bedrock, down to the vault that just happens to store more gold than anywhere else in the world. It looked like a storage facility, the kind where you rent a little locker on a per-month basis...albeit one so impenetrable that you have to access it via a ten-foot tunnel in a revolving 90-ton steel cylinder.