“I mean, where would I put big wooden doors?”
— Kristen Andersen, a great-granddaughter of Arthur E. Andersen, told the Wall Street Journal about the time she was offered the double doors to Andersen’s Chicago office after the accounting firm’s demise but turned the offer down.
Instead, Kristen Andersen, who worked as a senior manager at Arthur Andersen in the 1990s, has an oil painting of her great-grandfather in her Illinois home that for years hung on a wall at the firm’s global training facility in St. Charles, IL.
The wooden double doors from the Chicago office, as well as various other memorabilia from Arthur Andersen, are on display at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Wall Street Journal noted. Other items, mostly documents and photos, are stored at Northwestern University.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of when the Big 5 firm stopped auditing public companies and wound down its operations as a result of the Enron scandal.
Arthur Andersen’s Legacy, 20 Years After Its Demise, Is Complicated [Wall Street Journal]