Visitors Line Up for View of Trading Spasms on Floor

Scores of tourists lined up early today outside the New York Stock Exchange, hoping to get an eyewitness view of the trading spasms on the vast floor where brokers feared another Black Monday panic.

“I feel like I’m watching a car accident,” said John Egan, 24, a New Yorker waiting to get into the visitors’ gallery.

About 100 people queued by the visitors’ entrance to the nation’s biggest stock market, where on Friday the Dow Jones industrials tumbled 190.53 points to 2,569.26, its biggest point loss since the October, 1987, crash.

NYSE officials did not immediately allow anyone into the gallery however, and tan-coated exchange sentries guarded the building’s entrances amid the skyscraper canyons of southern Manhattan. About 20 New York police on motorcycles and horseback were deployed nearby.

Dozens of press photographers stood outside and television news crew vehicles were parked on Wall Street on the cool, foggy morning.

“No matter how you see it, something sudden and very important happened on Friday,” said John van Rosendaal, 26, a Columbia University journalism student who was waiting in the visitors’ gallery line. “Something big’s happening and I want to be there when it does.”

Across the street, about 15 scraggly anarchist squatters from a nearby park carried placards that read “sell today, jump tomorrow.” A few shouted, “Watch for falling stockbrokers!”

Nearby a man claiming to represent jailed political extremist Lyndon LaRouche roamed around, handing out leaflets that said, “Lyndon told you so.”

“Where there’s dead meat, there’s the flock,” said Laura Januzzi, 26, a tourist from Cincinnati who said she worked in the marketing department of McDonald’s Corp.