An “Upscale” Immersive Circus Comes to a Wall Street Bank

A circus is coming for 48 Wall.
Photo: Dariusz Gryczka/Shutterstock

As offices sit empty across Manhattan, the first bank to take space on Wall Street could soon become home to a nightly acrobatic show performed in period costume. “Think of this, historically, a bit like if Hamilton put on a circus,” producer Simon Painter told the community board last week. “A big extravagant cirque show — like you’d see in Las Vegas.”

The unnamed show, first reported by the Tribeca Citizen, hopes to open in the former bank and stay long-term, like Stomp on Second Avenue. Painter told the board the show will be “upscale” and “family friendly” — he said he specializes in “3G entertainment,” or entertainment for three generations of one family — and that the neighborhood was itself a draw. “We’re excited about bringing entertainment down to the Financial District.”

11 Times Square
Photo: SJP Properties

Not that the neighborhood doesn’t have it already. As workers continue to stay home and shoppers choose Amazon, huge slabs of empty stores and offices from Fidi to midtown are slowly but surely turning into adult playgrounds. Two blocks away, another immersive show took over another Financial District bank this year: Life and Trust from the creators of Sleep no More. Down the street, Cipriani is open for galas in the former National City Bank building. A few blocks south is a kind of underground theme park for kids (Complete Playground), and the few bankers who still work here can blow off steam at an indoor golf range (Five Iron Golf). Uptown, one of last month’s biggest commercial leases was for an “immersive experience” that hasn’t yet been revealed: The company behind interactive, adult games based on Dungeons & Dragons and Monopoly is taking 50,000 square feet across three floors of the glassy office tower at 11 Times Square, and describes plans to bring Clue: Lifesized to an as yet-undisclosed location in 2025. (So get excited to say it was Colonel Mustard on the ground floor of the DataDog office.)

Large, commercial leases going to “adults wanting to play” are “one of the hot commodities,” says Walter Marin, an architect who is working with developers bringing a series of adult obstacle courses to the city. And a city report, issued last week, boiled changes in retail spaces since 2020 down to “less merchandise and more experiences”: luxe gyms and pickleball, escape rooms and ping-pong courts. In Hell’s Kitchen last month, 80 adults in buggy, plastic VR headsets wandered around a 7,000-square-foot former BMW showroom imagining themselves in ancient Giza scaling pyramids, crawling through tunnels, and rowing down the Nile.

Visitors to 555 West 57th Street, a former car showroom (left), imagined themselves in Giza (right). Excurio .

Visitors to 555 West 57th Street, a former car showroom (left), imagined themselves in Giza (right). Excurio .

The experience — Horizon of Khufu — is the product of a partnership between a French VR developer and a Harvard Egyptologist, professor Peter Der Manuelian, who showed up in a suit and described how the game forced him to think closely about everything he had learned about the day-to-day texture of the world he studied: how ancient Egyptians wore their hair, played instruments, and acted socially. Fifteen years later, he could watch New Yorkers crawling and tiptoeing as they imagined themselves in that world.