Visitors Up 30% : Crash Prompts Boom in Wall St. Tour Business

As the New York Stock Exchange continued to strain under record volume trading, the streets surrounding the exchange were packed with visitors from around the country and the world. They were curious to see history in the making, to keep up what one observer called the stock market’s “deathwatch.”

Mike Dalzell, a financial planner with E. F. Hutton & Co., was in line Tuesday during his lunch hour. He said Black Monday’s record 508-point drop prompted him to make his first trip to the exchange, and he admitted to having a certain ghoulish curiosity.

“I just wanted to see how busy it is, how crazy it is. It’s also a historical event,” Dalzell said. “I’m here just to say we came and saw it and, hopefully, survived.”

His companion, Susan Saitow, also a financial planner at Hutton, said she had been trying to get into the visitors’ gallery every day since last week’s plunge, but the lines wrapped around the outside of the exchange dissuaded her. Finally, she decided to grab her lunch from a nearby hotdog stand and wait in line.

Exchange employees kept the crowds moving quickly and limited their time in the glass-enclosed gallery, so visitors generally waited only 30 to 45 minutes for the chance to peer down into the mayhem of traders and clerks scurrying from booth to booth on the floor of the exchange. NYSE officials estimated that they are seeing 20% to 30% more visitors than usual.

Two New York University business students and one Cornell business student, clad in the Wall Street uniform--dark navy suits, crisp white shirts, freshly shined wingtips and yellow “power” ties--left class to catch a glimpse of the activity on the floor. When asked what their teachers were telling them about the market’s decline, first-year student Kurt Zyla said his accounting professor joked that it was “no big deal. She could always just go home and live with her parents.”

The students did express some concern, however, about their job prospects after graduation. They were scheduled to meet with representatives from several brokerage firms and, although none of their interviews had been canceled yet, they were worried that there might not be as many job openings as this year, when 30% of the graduating class went to Wall Street.

“Talking is fine; it’s the hiring that is important,” Zyla said.

For the past week, the area surrounding the exchange has looked like a movie set. The narrow, one-way streets of the financial district are lined with television vans. Bundles of electrical cables hug the sidewalks and snake up the sides of the exchange building.

While police are no longer necessary for crowd control, curious onlookers continue to gather outside the exchange’s exits, blocking traffic on the narrow streets and forcing weary Wall Street employees to push their way through the crowds to the subway entrances at the close of business.

Nearly all who gather outside the exchange have their own theories of why the market collapsed and when it will stabilize. One man, Jerry Latman, who works for Western Union International, said that studying economic cycles is his hobby. He said he kept telling his wife that there would be a crash, but she would not listen and insisted that they purchase a cooperative apartment on the fashionable Upper East Side.

“I bought at the top of the market, and now I could really be in trouble,” Latman lamented.

Business for the food stalls outside the exchange doesn’t appear to have increased markedly from the influx of visitors, according to concession operators outside the exchange.

“I feed people inside the stock market, but they haven’t been coming out to eat this week and last,” said Asjarf Hafez, who operates a shish kebab stand. He said he thinks his usual customers are too busy to take the time to eat.

His competitor around the corner, Georgios Papaspyrou, who sells hotdogs and soda, agrees that business has suffered.

“My business has gotten worse,” Papaspyrou said gloomily. “People are afraid to spend their money. Hotdogs are only 80 cents, but they don’t want to spend even a couple of bucks.”

However, a nearby Good Humor man, William J. Stelljes, said his business has been good.

“They’re frustrated in there, so they buy ice cream by the load,” Stelljes said. “They come out with their faces all down, so I tell them they gotta tip me good so I can go in and buy some stock. That makes them laugh.”

One couple, Ross and Josie Lazzaro, left Melbourne, Australia, three weeks ago to tour the United States and hadn’t originally scheduled a trip to the exchange. But after shopping in Macy’s, they “thought we might see what was going on on Wall Street,” Ross Lazzaro said.

Unfortunately for the Lazzaros, they had lined up too late to see the exchange. Will they try again? “Of course, we’ll be back tomorrow.”