Vintage 1990s Peekskill Financial Stock Certificate 📜 Baltimore Ravens and Buffalo Bills Sponsor NY NJ Eagle Vignette Scripophily

How Did a Peekskill Thrift End Up on an NFL Stadium? 🦅 A Vintage 1990s Peekskill Financial Corporation Stock Certificate, Eagle Vignette

Size: 12" x 8"

A real, issued COMMON STOCK certificate of PEEKSKILL FINANCIAL CORPORATION, INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF DELAWARE, par value $.01 a share, CUSIP 705385 10 2. A bald eagle spreads its wings at the top in black engraving over a blue border, the facsimile seal reads PEEKSKILL FINANCIAL CORPORATION CORPORATE SEAL 1995 DELAWARE, Registrar and Transfer Company of New Jersey countersigns, and the President and Secretary's printed signature is William J. LaCalamito's. The printer's line says © SECURITY-COLUMBIAN UNITED STATES BANKNOTE COMPANY 1960 - that's the date of the stock eagle plate, which banks were still ordering thirty-five years later. Each one was filled in, signed, stamped and punch-cancelled.

📅 The 1990s

Peekskill Financial only existed from 1995 to 2000, so that's the window for every one of these. The one you get will carry its own date, number, owner, share count and stamps, and may look a little different from the one in my pictures.

🏦 A depositors' bank goes public

Behind the holding company was First Federal Savings Bank of Peekskill, a mutual savings bank - owned, in effect, by the people who kept their savings there - with its main office on Park Street and three branches serving northern Westchester and Putnam Counties. Peekskill Financial was formed in 1995 to take it public. The conversion went through at the very end of December 1995, the company sold just over 4.09 million shares at $10 apiece, and the stock went onto the Nasdaq under the ticker PEEK. By the spring of 1996 the bank had about $194 million in assets.

It made its shareholders money. In February 2000 Sound Federal Bancorp agreed to buy the company for $22 a share in cash, about $41.7 million, more than double the $10 offering price, and the deal closed on July 18, 2000.

🏈 How a Peekskill thrift ended up on a stadium

Here's the thread the title promises. In 2006 Hudson City Bancorp of New Jersey bought Sound Federal, then fourteen branches across Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Fairfield County, for about $265 million. In 2015 the Federal Reserve approved M&T Bank's purchase of Hudson City. M&T is the name on the stadium where the Baltimore Ravens play and the official bank of the Buffalo Bills - so the depositors' little bank on Park Street ended up, three mergers later, inside the bank on an NFL stadium. William LaCalamito, whose signature is on this certificate, rode the whole chain himself: president, chief operating officer and secretary of Peekskill Financial from 1995 to 2000, then a regional manager at Sound Federal until 2006, then a senior vice president at Hudson City.

🌊 Peekskill

Peekskill sits on the east bank of the Hudson where the river cuts into the Highlands, and the name goes back to the Dutch trader Jan Peeck and his kill, Dutch for a creek. It was a stove and iron-plow town in the 1800s, a village from 1816 and a city from 1940. When Abraham Lincoln's train came down the Hudson on its way to his first inauguration in February 1861, it stopped at Peekskill and he spoke a few words to the crowd at the depot.

🖨️ The printer

Security-Columbian came out of the 1957 merger of the Security Banknote Company and the Columbian Bank Note Company, which dated to 1904, and the United States Banknote name on this imprint shows it after it joined the bigger banknote combine. Their stock eagle is the same handsome bird you'll find on certificates from the 1960s right through the 1990s.

🦅 About these

They're 12 by 8 inches, on heavy security paper. Frame one for a Peekskill or Westchester banker, a Ravens or Bills fan who likes a good trivia question, or a wall of hometown history. The supply is finite - Peekskill Financial has been gone since 2000, paper stock certificates have gone the way of passbooks, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.