Wall Street & the New York Stock Exchange

A street named for a Dutch wall, where the New York Stock Exchange was born in 1792

Local name: Wall Street & New York Stock Exchange

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

Wall Street and Broad Street: the Stock Exchange and the steps of Federal Hall · Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is Wall Street, a street whose name has become a word for money everywhere. In 1653 the northern edge of the Dutch town of New Amsterdam ran here. There was a war with England, and Peter Stuyvesant ordered a wall across the island from the East River to the Hudson. In less than four months a plank fence about nine feet high went up, with a ditch dug in front of it. The wall came down in 1699, but the name stayed. From 1711 to 1762 the city’s slave market stood at the lower end of the street, at the corner of Pearl Street. According to tradition, traders in stocks and bonds used to gather under an old buttonwood tree on Wall Street. On the seventeenth of May 1792, twenty-four brokers signed an agreement on the rules of trading. It is known as the Buttonwood Agreement, and the New York Stock Exchange traces its history to it. Its main columned building, on Broad Street, was designed by the architect George B. Post and built between 1901 and 1903; the corner building at 11 Wall Street was added in 1922. In the pediment are the figures of Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, designed by the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward. They were first carved in marble, but the stone weathered, and in 1936 they were replaced with copies of lead-coated copper. The Exchange says its trading floor made it the first air-conditioned building in North America. On the twenty-ninth of October 1929 came the Great Crash: more than sixteen million shares changed hands in a single day. It helped set off the Great Depression. Today computers help run the trading, but a bell still opens and closes every trading day.

Visiting

Corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, Financial District. The streets around the Exchange are a guarded pedestrian zone with barriers, open at any hour. The Exchange is a working building and is seen from outside. The Wall Street and Broad Street subway stations are nearby.