When the National September 11 Memorial and Museum announced a year ago that it had reached its $350 million capital fund-raising goal, it did so with a roster of the top names in finance, including the American International Group and the Starr Foundation, with which A.I.G. was once closely allied; the Merrill Lynch & Company Foundation; Bear Stearns; and Lehman Brothers.
Together, these five institutions pledged $55 million, or more than 15 percent of the total. The memorial had placed a lot of eggs in one basket, but with the exception of Bear, which had just collapsed and been acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Company, it seemed like a pretty sturdy basket.
Five months after the fund-raising announcement, however, Lehman sought bankruptcy protection. Some of its assets were picked up by Barclays Capital, which had already made its own pledge to the memorial. Merrill, on the verge of failure, agreed to sell itself to the Bank of America, which had also made an independent pledge to the memorial. Then the government agreed to bail out A.I.G. with tens of billions of dollars before it could collapse. Meanwhile, its many troubles had depleted the assets of the Starr Foundation, which held a large amount of A.I.G. stock.
You would expect, then, that the memorial would now be staggering from the loss of anticipated gifts.
But Joseph C. Daniels, the president and chief executive, said in an interview this week that the memorial’s finances were actually in good health.
“We are very grateful for the amount of cash we have received,” he said: $220 million to date.
Among the 81 contributors who pledged $1 million or more, Mr. Daniels said, 45 have already fulfilled their commitments or paid at least half of their pledges.
The Starr Foundation, whose donation of $25 million was the largest of all, has already paid $20 million of that pledge and intends to make the final payment this month, said Florence A. Davis, president of the Starr Foundation and a director of the Starr International Foundation of Switzerland.
The international foundation, Ms. Davis said on Thursday, “is contemplating making a gift to help with any shortfalls in the memorial’s funding as the result of one or two donors canceling their pledges, which we understand might be the case.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the chairman of the memorial, said in a statement, “The creation of the memorial is uniquely important to New Yorkers, and the fact that the city’s corporate citizens are honoring their commitments to it despite the downturn is a reflection of that.” (Mr. Bloomberg has already made good on his $15 million pledge, a spokesman said.)
Memorial officials would not disclose the status of any individual donors. But a couple of them spoke for themselves.
“Bank of America’s $10 million commitment has been fully paid,” said Nicole Nastacie, a spokeswoman for the bank. “Merrill Lynch committed $10 million and we will honor that commitment.”
JPMorgan Chase pledged $10 million and Bear $5 million. “We are honoring both the JPMorgan Chase & Company and the Bear Stearns commitments, payable over a multiyear period,” said Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for the bank.
Another $10 million pledge came from A.I.G. “We have paid $4 million of that and intend to meet the rest of our commitment,” said Christina Pretto, a company spokeswoman.
And Barclays Capital has paid its $5 million pledge in full, said a spokesman, Mark Lane.
However, it is clear that memorial officials do not expect to see the $5 million Lehman pledge. On the public list of donors, they have moved the company from the $5 million category to the $1 million category, suggesting strongly that this is how much Lehman Brothers actually gave before declaring bankruptcy.
Mr. Daniels said the foundation had written off $1 million of the $51 million in cash it expected to collect in 2008. About 90 percent is in hand, he said, and the rest is expected. He said the memorial would not need to draw significant amounts from its cash reserves until next year. First, it is using $250 million in federal grants that came through the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and $80 million from New York State for the museum’s plaza-level pavilion.
The principal benefactor of the memorial and museum, the Starr Foundation, takes its name from Cornelius Vander Starr. He founded companies that were combined into the American International Group by Maurice R. Greenberg, who was chairman and chief executive of A.I.G. until 2005. Mr. Greenberg is chairman of the Starr Foundation.
The Starr Foundation of New York has been selling off its large holdings of A.I.G. stock since Mr. Greenberg’s departure, Ms. Davis said, and its two million shares now amount to “a drop in the bucket” compared with diversified assets of approximately $1.25 billion. The Starr International Foundation is far more reliant on A.I.G. stock. The ownership of 290 million shares is being contested by A.I.G.
Ms. Davis said so many Wall Street companies were involved in financing the memorial in part because they were so directly affected by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
“A.I.G.’s headquarters always was downtown and the foundation was located there until 2005,” Ms. Davis said. “I am confident that we would have been major contributors to the memorial in any event, as New Yorkers and as Americans, but Starr’s proximity to ground zero made it feel even more imperative. We were close enough on Pine Street that for many hours we couldn’t leave our building because of smoke and debris. Many of us knew people who died or who lost family members. And we all returned to work on Pine Street to a ghost town, which lasted for many months.”
