Cantor Fitzgerald and bgc commemorative box with world trade center steel. This special tribute was given to employees. I'm not exactly sure how many were created or distributed, but this is a striking 9/11 example from corporate America. The steel cube weighs about one pound.
Cantor Fitzgerald's corporate headquarters and New York City
office,[7][8] on the 101st-105th floors of One World Trade Center in Lower
Manhattan (2-6 floors above the impact zone of a hijacked airliner), were
destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks. Seconds after Cantor's
building was struck by the plane, a Goldman Sachs server issued an alert saying
that its trading system had gone offline because it wasn't able to connect with
a Cantor server.[9][10][11] Cantor Fitzgerald lost over two-thirds of its
workforce, considerably more than any of the other World Trade Center tenants
or the New York City Police Department and New York City Fire Department. CEO
and chairman Howard Lutnick, whose brother was among those killed, vowed to
keep the company alive, and the company was able to bring its trading markets
back online within a week. On September 19, Cantor Fitzgerald made a pledge to
distribute 25 percent of the firm's profits for the next five years, and
committed to paying for ten years of health care, for the benefit of the
families of its 658 former Cantor Fitzgerald, eSpeed, and TradeSpark employees
(profits which would otherwise have been distributed to the Cantor Fitzgerald
partners).[12] In 2006, the company completed its promise, having paid a total
of $180 million[12] (and an additional $17 million from a relief fund run by
Lutnick's sister, Edie).[13]
Before the attacks, Cantor handled about one-quarter of the
daily transactions in the multi-trillion dollar treasury security market.
Cantor has since rebuilt its infrastructure, thanks in part to the efforts of
its London office,[14] and now has its headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The
company's effort to regain its footing is the subject of Tom Barbash's 2003
book On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story
of Loss and Renewal.
