NYTimes ARticle on 1933 Saint
marcmoish
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Nice article on cover of metro section todays NY Times regarding the '33 Saint brought back up to light for all to see. Beth D got a line in too I tried scanning but no can do Nice to see coin related news in this generally left leaning politically incorrect paper of record
On Sunday they had a candid illustration of 5 state quarters - kinda making fun of the designs and what it shouda been - maybe one of the appliance geniuises here can scan that too....
Marc
On Sunday they had a candid illustration of 5 state quarters - kinda making fun of the designs and what it shouda been - maybe one of the appliance geniuises here can scan that too....
Marc
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Interesting! Now I have to go find a copy!
they found the coin posse!!!!!!!!!!!
On View for Public Coveting
By GLENN COLLINS
Published: January 10, 2005
Until last week, the world's most expensive coin was hidden in the world's most valuable gold vault.
That is to say, in the brilliantly lighted blue-and-white stronghold of E Level, the deepest sanctuary of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the city's bank of banks.
The coin was locked in a compartment at bedrock, 80 feet below Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, surrounded by $90 billion worth of gold bars - some 550,000 of them - from 60 foreign institutions. That is more gold than at Fort Knox, and indeed, more than in any other repository.
This exceedingly rare United States $20 gold piece, the $7.59 million 1933 double eagle, will be placed on public display today in the ground-floor exhibition space of the Fed's massive iron-barred neo-Florentine fortress of a building at 33 Liberty Street.
For more than a year the double eagle had been on view there in a free exhibition, "Drachmas, Doubloons and Dollars: The History of Money." But in August the coin was spirited to the subbasement after a sudden Orange Alert from the Department of Homeland Security, which warned of "casing and surveillance activities" against major United States financial institutions.
For the double eagle's return from the underworld, The New York Times was granted rare permission to enter the vault on a recent morning as the coin was transferred, after agreeing not to describe the bank's security arrangements or print the names of its subterranean guardians.
Among those present were: three federal officers with automatic weapons. The archivist of the bank. A senior vice president of the bank. The head of the American Numismatic Society. The coin owner's representative. The coin's historian. A vault keeper. An auditor. A custodian. And yes, the two carpenters who actually did the work.
This, then, was the retinue monitoring the transport of the double eagle, a 34-millimeter-wide, 0.96-ounce stamped disk that is 90 percent gold and 10 percent copper. The length of the journey was but five floors: from the vault to the street-level exhibition space.
The coin-storage compartment - itself guarded by multiple locks - was adorned with a fragile paper seal, "just as I left it on Aug. 2," said Rosemary Lazenby, the bank's archivist. "Afterward, we kept it down here for the Republican convention, and then there was the election."
The doors swung open. The coin winked smartly in the light, along with 11 other rare specimens from the exhibition that had been mounted on a plexiglass display panel. Immediately there were inspections by Ms. Lazenby, the auditors and David Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's, the auction house where the coin was sold for a record price on July 30, 2002. He represents the coin's still-anonymous owner whenever it is moved.
Also scrutinizing the treasures was Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society, which is the co-sponsor of the exhibition, along with the Federal Reserve.
Two carpenters, Cosimo Marolla and Joseph Palus, lifted the coin into a shiny rubber-wheeled steel cart and began trundling it along the dented vault floor. (The dents are from gold bars that were inadvertently dropped by vault wranglers in the decades since the building was completed in 1924. These days, handlers wear steel-toed shoes plus $500 magnesium shoe covers to protect feet from accidentally plummeting 27-pound ingots.)
Soon, then, members of the coin posse began watching the double eagle (and each other) as it was transported in the vault elevator up to the bank's exhibition level.
There, Mr. Marolla and Mr. Palus buffed the inch-thick mounting panel with Precision Glass Cleaner, and hoisted the coins into the hyper-secure centerpiece vitrine in the exhibition room. The total value of the 12 rare coins within - estimated from $15 million to $25 million - makes it, said Dr. Wartenberg Kagan, "without doubt the most valuable coin case in the world."
<< <i>Soon, then, members of the coin posse began watching the double eagle (and each other)... >>
and all this time i thought they were looking for the bad guys........
You know you're talking about a serious coin when the coin has its own staff.
that's weird.
K S