NEW YORK TIMES COVERS ANS MOVE

On the 11th floor of a downtown Manhattan building, just around the corner from the Holland Tunnel, sits one of the world's finest collections of coins. Stored behind a series of locked doors in a massive, climate-controlled vault, the coins tell the story of civilization, from antiquity to today.

A Sumerian clay tablet from about 2000 B.C.E. Early Chinese forms of money shaped like miniature tools. A silver French penny from the age of Charlemagne. A medal given by the Lincoln administration to a Native American chief, pierced by a bullet. More than 800,000 other telltale coins, medals and objects of wonder.

But apart from scholars, members and the occasional enthusiast, almost no one sees this treasure, which is one reason its guardian, the American Numismatic Society, is leaving the city where it was founded in the mid-19th century — and moving to Toledo, Ohio.

The society announced today that it will be making a"strategic" relocation to an Art Deco building on the spacious campus of the Toledo Museum of Art. The $20 million plan, to be completed in 2028, would make possible its long-harbored vision of a state-of-the-art money museum, a dream that has proved elusive in New York.

"One of our members said that this will mean a terrible loss to New York City," the society's executive director, Ute Wartenberg Kagan, said."But if no one uses it, what's the loss?"

Wartenberg Kagan, a scholar of ancient Greek coinage, left the British Museum in 1998 to join the American Numismatic Society and someday establish a proper money museum where one belonged, in the city of Wall Street. But exorbitant costs and space constraints conspired against those plans, as did an apparent indifference to the charms of numismatics.

So: Hello, Toledo!

 
The society's executive director, Ute Wartenberg Kagan

Wartenberg Kagan said that she and several other colleagues are eager to make the 560-mile move west, where the society has already bought the building that will house its collection as well as a library, auditorium and education center. The population of the Toledo metropolitan area is about 650,000, less than one-tenth that of New York City, but there are many buts.

The cost of living is lower. The campus has plenty of space to accommodate the school buses that never pulled up to the current location because there was nowhere to park. And there is the opportunity to work in concert with the museum, integrating collections to produce dynamic exhibits for an engaged community.

"We're not just buying real estate," Wartenberg Kagan said."We're buying a relationship."

A year could be lost in the vault of the American Numismatic Society.

But the society's leased space is too expensive ($1.8 million a year, including taxes), too small to accommodate its ever-growing holdings and not conducive to public engagement. A few years ago, a travel guide included the society among its list of free attractions — open by appointment and closed on weekends — in Lower Manhattan. Even then, only a half-dozen or so tourists might wander in every week.

"This is both a big and a small place," Wartenberg Kagan said."That's one of its problems."

For the last several years, the society — which has 1,400 members, including 265 outside the United States — has searched for more suitable quarters. Plans to move to the University of Chicago fell apart, as did those to move to the University of Pennsylvania, Long Island City in Queens and a warehouse in Fall River, Mass.

Then came a bit of numismatic serendipity. It just so happened that Adam M. Levine, the president and director of the Toledo Museum of Art, had spent the summer of 2009 at the American Numismatics Society, studying the iconography of Justinian II coinage. He contacted Wartenberg Kagan, whom he knew, and suggested that she consider Toledo, where he just happened to know of a four-story building on the museum's 37-acre campus that would soon become available.

A dubious Wartenberg Kagan visited Toledo — and came away persuaded. It checked every box for the society's trustees, including a supportive, good-sized city, reasonable housing costs and proximity to major research facilities.

Other staff members also made the trip to Toledo and liked what they saw. About half of the 17-member staff will be making the move, including Wartenberg Kagan and van Alfen.

"They will be welcomed with open arms," Levine predicted."And they'll have more visitors in their first year than they've had in the last five."

"Probably 10 years," Wartenberg Kagan added.

To read the complete article, see:
After 167 Years in New York, a Priceless Coin Collection Heads to Toledo (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/arts/design/american-numismatic-society-coins-toledo.html)

 

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