A little more than 2 years ago, Lehman Brothers Holdings Incorporated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. While financial experts and historians may quibble, most of us see the collapse of Lehman as the symbolic start of our current "Hard Times". Lehman's NY headquarters office was located at 745 Seventh Ave, literally right around the corner from our offices (AMA) on Broadway.
The week leading up to the failure, TV trucks from every major cable news channel were camped on the street. Platoons of video crews were shooting live "on location" updates on the sidewalk. You couldn't get over to "Hale and Hearty Soups" without walking through at least 5 viewfinders. Depressed young besuited Lehmanites nervously smoked cigarettes out on the street. It was very strange, kind of like watching one of those slow motion film clips of the demolition of massive building.
For a bit more than a week, employees who were let go, regularly, in spits and spurts, walked out of the building with their one box of personal belongings and wandered zombie-like away from the site. The depression was palpable.
In the weeks and months that followed, many other companies made the move to downsize.
Lehman is never coming back. But we look back on the past 2 years, and wonder if anything else will of those better days.
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