City Hall to U.S.Capitol / Money Men / Nassau Changes Scale

New York’s second City Hall was completed in 1700 with stones salvaged from the demolished wall that gave Wall Street its name, on a site donated by Abraham De Peyster, whose gift also increased the value of his nearby Wall Street lots; its first floor served as a prison, its second contained courtrooms, and stocks, a pillory, and a whipping post stood outside after being moved from the old Stady Huys on Coenties Slip in 1703. In 1788–89 the building was extensively remodeled into the first U.S. Capitol, where George Washington received the presidential oath of office from Chancellor Robert R. Livingston on April 30, 1789, and where his cabinet included Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph. By the nineteenth century the area had become identified with finance: Junius Spencer Morgan placed his son J. Pierpont Morgan with Anthony Drexel’s Philadelphia brokerage and banking firm, and a six-story white marble office opened in 1871 as Drexel, Morgan and Company; J.P. Morgan remained the dominant figure in American finance until his death in 1913. Speculator Jim Fisk, a colonel in the 9th Regiment of the New York Militia, was associated with the 1869 Black Friday gold corner carried out with Jay Gould. Nassau Street took its name from William III of the House of Orange-Nassau, the present royal family of the Netherlands, whose line dates back to Charlemagne and who became King of England in 1689. By 1880 and into the early twentieth century, buildings such as the Hanover Bank and, later, the Bankers Trust Building reflected the rising scale and value of the district, with the thirty-nine-story Bankers Trust Building, erected in 1910–14, among New York’s tallest on completion and standing on land said to have reached the world’s highest price per square foot.

New York, New York · United States