Coining A New Space
Posted July 31, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Finding parking in New York City is hard enough to come by, finding the right change can be damn near impossible on the fly. Luckily, that change doesn’t even have to be of the American variety.
That’s why one of the world’s most international cities is selling 500 pounds of foreign coins that people have wrongfully, but successfully deposited in its parking metres.
The coin collection has entries from all over the world, the most popular of which are the Greek drachmas, which aren’t even used in Greece anymore since they were replaced five years ago by the euro.
Each year for the last decade New York’s Department of Transportation has been selling the foreign coins it collects to the highest bidder because it’s impractical to exchange them for US currency. In previous years, selling the coins has netted the department between two to four dollars a pound.
It’s true what they say, there’s always time for change.
