Bear Stearns parties on

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- While Goldman Sachs Group Inc. scrapped its holiday party for a second straight year and some JPMorgan Chase & Co. bankers had their yuletide gathering in a cafeteria, staffers of Bear Stearns Cos. reunited at a velvet- roped bar that sells bottles of Cristal champagne for $450.

About 100 alumni from the defunct securities firm that JPMorgan acquired in March 2008 assembled Dec. 18 at the Dream Hotel’s Rm. Fifty5 on West 55th Street, described on its Web site as neo-Gothic “surreal luxury.” Courtney Dickinson, a 25- year-old former Bear Stearns employee who organized the event, said the mood was “nostalgic.”

Dozens more former Bear Stearns employees met a few weeks earlier in the upstairs bar at Connolly’s Pub, the watering hole on East 47th Street a few blocks from Bear Stearns’ old headquarters on Madison Avenue, said Justin Brannan, who worked in the firm’s wealth management unit for three years. The affair brought together about 100 people who paid for their own drinks at the Irish pub’s long, wooden bars.

“That’s where we went after we got sold, so it was a pretty fitting place to get together,” said Brannan, 31, who now raises money for the Bnai Zion Foundation, a charity that funds humanitarian projects in Israel and the U.S. “It was cool. It was like a high-school reunion.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aCgeerW..FLY&pos=12

 

....."glory days, they'll pass you by, glory days, in the wink of an eye, glory days"..........