5 Things To Know About Touring the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Even though New York City is the financial capital of the United States, thousands of tourists, workers, and locals walk by the most important bank in the world every single day without ever realizing it.

That’s because the home of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, despite being one of the most important buildings on the planet and the keeper of the largest hoard of gold in history, is also hard to visit.

However, I recently managed to tour the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, including its fabled gold vault. Here’s what I learned that you should know.

1. It’s Hard To Get In

As I said, you can’t simply walk into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (also called the New York Fed) and ask to see the gold. It’s heavily guarded by its own security staff, and for obvious reasons, access to the gold vault is strictly limited. For less obvious but also understandable reasons, access to the bank’s museum and learning center, which takes up much of the western wing of the building’s first floor, is also strictly limited.

And, no, you can’t go online and reserve a time for a tour ahead of time. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York simply doesn’t offer tours to the hoi polloi currently.

There are only 2 ways to get a tour of the New York Fed.

One, be a student or teacher on a scheduled class tour arranged via the New York Fed website well ahead of time. Bonus points if your school is in the Second Federal Reserve District (New York state, northern New Jersey, southwestern Connecticut, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). Seventh grade and up only, please!

Two, go on a friends and family tour, which is what I did. If you’re eligible to go on a friends and family tour, you already know who to talk to. Otherwise, it’s time for you to go back to school, whichever side of the desk you’re sitting on. Note that even employees of the New York Fed who want to see the gold vault but aren’t directly involved in its operations have to do it this way, too — on our tour, one of the visitors was a New York Fed employee who, after the tour ended, simply went up the elevator and back to work.

2. It’s Not on Wall Street

Though Wall Street is synonymous with (a metonymy or synecdoche for, even) America’s finance industry and economic health, its most critical financial institution is not actually on Wall Street but a couple blocks up, at 33 Liberty St. It takes up a whole block and, despite its looming, monolithic presence, is actually kind of easy to miss, as it blends into the institutional monotony and claustrophobia of the Financial District.

3. It’s More Impressive on the Inside

Though the outside of the 14-story building is impressively huge, it’s also about as pretty as a giant, limestone brick. In other words, it’s just a big ol’ block of stone, really, and you could be forgiven for passing by it and assuming (as I had on several occasions) that it was just another generic federal administrative building in lower Manhattan. Only a relatively understated cornerstone on the other side of the main entrance and the presence of a federal agent at the door hint that this is more than possibly a place to get your passport renewed.

Inside the museum, however, the building really comes alive, with gorgeous arched ceilings and designs inspired by Italian Renaissance palaces like Florence’s Palazzo Pitti, Palazzo Vecchio, and Palazzo Strozzi. (There was a conscious decision to eschew the art deco “fad” of the time in favor of an architectural style the men in charge thought conveyed stability and timelessness.)

Some 100 years later, the ornamental teller cages, decorated with giraffe heads on top and smiley faces on the door latches, are still in place, as are many of the original chandeliers and other design elements. A lot of the fun of the museum is just walking around and looking for the fun details hidden throughout.

4. All Your Photos Will Have This in Common

Notice anything about all the interior shots in this story? Go ahead, scroll up, look at that first interior photo again, then come back down to this one.

Now check out the next (and last) interior photo:

Figure it out yet?

No, it’s not that all the photos were taken by me (they were). It’s that all the photos were taken by me sitting at the exact same spot in the middle of the orange bench you see in the last photo. The first photo is facing roughly south, the second roughly west, and the third roughly north.

This seat is the only place where you’re allowed to take photos anywhere in the interior of the New York Fed building. (You can’t even take pics of your sandwich if you’re invited to lunch at the cafeteria upstairs.) The security is dead serious about this, and if the guards catch you taking photos anywhere besides from the orange bench, they’ll confiscate your phone, take your whole group outside, and put you through a whole rigmarole that will end the tour and ruin the rest of your day.

The parts of the museum that you can’t see from this vantage point include a series of exhibits about how the Fed sets monetary policy for the United States (including essentially setting interest rates), the New York Fed’s outsized role among the 12 Federal Reserve Banks of the U.S., its history as the country’s third central bank, its creation in reaction to an early 20th-century banking panic that almost destroyed the U.S. economy, how the gold vault door works, an example of one of the New York Fed’s big cash trolleys, and more.

5. It Holds $500 Billion in Gold

But all you really retained from that long list just now was the part about the gold, right?

The New York Fed safeguards the largest depository of monetized (that is, not raw or made into jewelry) gold in the world — over half a million gold bars weighing about 7,700 tons, or about 10% of the entire world’s gold reserves. At today’s value, that’s over half a trillion worth of gold.

Some of the gold is owned by the U.S. (Fort Knox famously holds much of the U.S. gold reserves, about 5,000 tons), but the rest of the precious metal in the New York Fed is the property of undisclosed owners, including many foreign governments — many of them European countries who shipped their gold to New York City as it became increasingly clear World War II was about to break out. (Though that, of course, could change.)

The U.S. government holds and protects these gold deposits for no charge. Because gold bars vary in weight, shape, and exact makeup from refinery to refinery, they come in different forms, but the average bar is about 27 pounds. (Gold is so dense that it feels much heavier, however.) According to institutional lore, the smallest individual gold account at the New York Fed is a single gold bar that occupies its own little shelf.

Guards monitor the gold day and night with cameras, motion sensors, listening devices, and other, undisclosed security devices even most of the Fed staff isn’t privy to. The vault itself, 80 feet below street level, sits on the building’s lowest level on Manhattan’s massive bedrock, making it all but impossible to tunnel into.

So what does it look like when you go into the world’s largest gold vault?

Once we got off the elevator to the lowest level, we were in a small corridor. To the right was a small office that looked like an empty administrative room, but during our visit, it was where an attentive-looking guard was hanging out with another Fed worker. Straight ahead from the elevators, and just past the little office, however, was the main attraction: the door to the gold vault, a massive, 90-ton, stainless steel disc with a man-sized tunnel bored through it.

Once a day, for an hour or 2 at a time, the vault door rotates so that the tunnel aligns with the opening to the hallway and the opening to the gold vault, creating the hallway workers and visitors use to get into the vault. It’s airtight, so if the door closes while you’re still inside, then … well, don’t get stuck inside.

Inside the gold vault itself, we stayed in a small lobby and looked through a cage wall and gate into the approximately 120 vault compartments. These compartments were individual cages that lined the walls and were mostly closed off from view — it didn’t look like Smaug’s hoard or the scene from “Goldfinger” with all the gold bars just stacked up like cinderblocks at Lowe’s. One of the deposit cages was at the front, and its contents, including a large gold bar, were openly displayed.

In the front of the vault, not all of which was visible because of internal walls and cabinets, was the measuring equipment for the gold, which looked laboratory grade and took up its own large desk. Whenever gold is taken in or out of the vault, it has to be measured for weight and purity, for obvious reasons, and when any gold is deposited, it must get an official seal from a Fed auditor. The Fed workers who handle and transfer the gold, by the way, have to wear special metal covers over their feet because dropping a gold bar on your foot is a guaranteed bone break. Anything involving the gold has to be overseen by 3 Fed workers at the same time.

We got a few minutes to stare at the gold and the vault, then went back upstairs to the ground floor and the museum. Our whole tour lasted a little over an hour.

Did we get to touch the gold? Nope. Did anyone make a Scrooge McDuck joke? Surprisingly, nope. Did everyone get a free, souvenir squishy gold bar to take home afterward? Yes!

Final Thoughts

If you’re interested in economics, are a history buff, or just like the concept of a ridiculous amount of gold sitting in a single place, then you should jump at the chance to tour the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — if you’re lucky enough to get such an opportunity.