The Museum of American Finance is making its Wall Street comeback next month, a year after exiting its former location so it could move to a bigger one.

The extra space “will enable us to better reflect our mission” of educating the public about today’s financial markets as well as financial history, the communications director for the museum, Kristin Aguilera, said. “There’s a real need to educate the people” about the financial district.

The Museum of American Finance is reopening on January 11 at 48 Wall St., where there will be 30,000 square feet of exhibit, research, and auditorium space — 10 times more than at its former residence in the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway.

That site was so small that the museum had to close for a month each time it put in a new exhibit. The average yearly attendance was about 20,000, and the museum could show the public less than 1% of its holdings, Ms Aguilera said.

The new home occupies three floors of the former headquarters of the Bank of New York. It has room for interactive permanent exhibits on money, the financial markets, and banking, as well as for rotating exhibits. It also features a library, an auditorium, and an archives room. Ms. Aguilera said the museum is aiming for at least 100,000 visitors a year.

Placing the museum at the former headquarters of New York’s first bank forges a strong link to American financial history, Ms. Aguilera said. The Bank of New York was founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, and the museum’s reopening will take place on his birthday. Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary, gets his own room at the museum for an exhibit that highlights his life and accomplishments.

Although the museum’s board members had been looking for more space for some time, they heightened their efforts after the New York Stock Exchange closed its popular visitors’ gallery — one of the many security measures enacted after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“A lot of tourists on Wall Street can’t visit the stock exchange,” Ms. Aguilera said. “We will be the de facto visitors’ center for the New York Stock Exchange.”

A similar attitude about addressing an unmet need led to the museum’s founding in 1988 by John Herzog, then chairman of the Nasdaq market-maker firm Herzog Heine Geduld. (The firm became part of Merrill Lynch seven years ago). Acting a year after the stock market crash of 1987, Mr. Herzog believed “there was no real institutional memory” on Wall Street, Ms. Aguilera said.

Mr. Herzog, the museum’s chairman, donated many documents from his personal collection to jump-start his project. Today, the museum has improved Wall Street’s memory with more than 10,000 items, and it claims to have the world’s largest museum archive of financial documents and artifacts.

The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, in November 2005 signed a 20-year lease for three floors at 48 Wall St. It is spending $11 million on renovating and restoring the site as well as for preparing the exhibits. Most of the money is coming from corporate, foundation, and private donations.