“Trade, Treasure and Travel” by Margie Hughto was originally installed at the Cortlandt Street Station passageway that connected uptown and downtown N/R trains with the World Trade Center concourse. Although the station itself was seriously damaged on September 11, 2001, the artwork was not affected and was later removed for the construction of Dey Street Concourse to the Fulton Center. In 2011, the work has been reinstalled in the new underpass connecting the Cortlandt station with the nearby Fulton Center. 

The artist, Margie Hughto said, at the time, "I thought about all the different peoples, products, objects, and money that passed through the area, and I visualized a treasure vault filled with coins, gems, and artifacts - rich, golden, glowing, and somewhat mysterious." 

The re-installed artwork is comprised of 11 thematically related hand-made bas-relief ceramic tile panels relating to finance and trade - coins, compasses, boats, streetcars, keys, and ships as well as creatures connected to the sea and trade. These consist of real (horses, lions, tortoises, fish) and mythical (griffins and a sphinx) creatures. Central images feature a bull and a bear, the financial world's warring mascots, and a large old-fashioned compass and a chart of stars by which mariners found their way.

Margie Hughto is an internationally recognized ceramic artist who examines ceramics in a non-traditional format, working with the slab or wall-mural format. Her work is characterized by shifts in color, shape and style, with references to landscape and to painterly and natural abstraction. She has an extensive 40-year exhibition record which includes many solo and group exhibitions. Her artwork is included in many private, corporate, and museum collections including IBM, Kodak, Merck, Mayo Clinic, Smithsonian, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and at the Renwick Gallery. For the past 30 years, Hughto has become involved in numerous commissioned site-specific art works and several architectural public artworks. From 1971-1981, Hughto worked at the Everson Museum of Fine art as a part-time teacher, consultant, lecturer and Curator of ceramics. Hughto joined the faculty of Syracuse University in 1971. She is currently a professor of ceramics in the school of Visual and Preforming Arts. Hughto earned a BA from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Hughto lives in Jamesville, New York where she has a ceramics and paper-making studio.