Geoffrey from New York

About me I travel to discover how people elsewhere live, how they manage living with low incomes in expensive cities, how they grapple with hard times and failing economies, how they deal with ageing or crumbling families and how they themselves age and adapt. Knowing and loving New York comes from having lived through many of its manifestations while witnessing its changes....
Aug 4, 2025

Wells Fargo NY Office New York

A real stagecoach!

"The "Wells Fargo NY Office" has in its lobby an original stagecoach. Definitely worth a peak when you're sightseeing the old modern skyscrapers..."

In the 1956 Harrison & Abramovitz designed Socony-Mobil Building on East 42nd Street (just east of Madison) --- formerly the only centrally air-conditioned building in the world and the first to be clad entirely in pleated stainless steel panels (and still the largest of that type in the world) --- resides the disgraced Wells Fargo Bank company.

Disgraced, because for more than a decade, until 2015, in order to boost the bank’s stock price, Wells Fargo’s top executives pressured low-level employees to secretly create more than two million unauthorized and false checking and credit-card accounts. Tried. Guilty. Fined 180 Million dollars.

Disgraced a second time because of ‘fraudulent’ loans and sales. Tried. Guilty again (2020). Fined 3 Billion dollars.

A truly unruly, wild west barroom type of scofflaw, Wells Fargo appears to be.

Anyway, in the lobby of this super New York skyscraper is, appropriately, a Wells Fargo stagecoach --- an original, the real thing --- in blood red livery with olive green velvet/velour upholstery, minus the dust and the four horses that pulled it, and the driver and shotgun armed escort --- Wyatt Earp was a Wells Fargo rider and maybe escorted this very coach.

For those to whom a Wells Fargo stage coach symbolizes the wild west and its Indian wars, this is a must see especially if you know John Ford's 1939 western 'Stagecoach', which introduced John Wayne to the world.

Worth a peak when you're sightseeing the Chrysler Building, Grand Central, the Chanin Building and environs like Library Way and ‘Alice and Olivia’.

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About this spot

East 42nd Street 150

US$

free

8008693557

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