J.P. Morgan Building

At the corner of Wall and Broad streets, long a financial crossroads, the House of Morgan stood as the headquarters of the banking company associated with J. Pierpont Morgan Sr., a dominant financier who helped bankroll America’s industrialization and, during the Panic of 1907, orchestrated rescues of trust companies and the New York Stock Exchange. In 1913, the year he died and was succeeded by his son, J.P. Morgan Jr., the company built a new bank on the corner it had occupied since 1873, one of Wall Street’s most valuable sites. Although skyscrapers and land values were rising all around it, the firm displayed its wealth by making the new headquarters only four stories tall, even as its foundations were made strong enough to support a forty-story tower if needed in the future. Luxurious but unmarked, the building was so well known that after a wagon exploded across the street in 1920, killing 30 people, it was widely assumed, though never proven, that an anarchist bomb had been intended for the bank, and the pockmarks left on its Wall Street facade were deliberately left unrepaired and remain visible today.

New York, New York · United States