Wall Street is a small narrow street in lower Manhattan in New
York City, leading from Broadway to the coast of the East River.
It is considered the historical center of the city's Financial
District. The main attraction of the street is the New York
Stock Exchange. In a figurative sense, this is how they call
both the exchange itself and the entire US stock market as a
whole. The financial district itself is sometimes also referred
to as Wall Street.
In the USSR, the name of the street
was a household name in a frankly negative sense and was used in
the media as a synonym for US foreign policy.
Next door
to the New York Stock Exchange, at 1 Wall Street, is the office
of BNY Mellon, the successor to the oldest bank in the United
States, founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, the Bank of New
York. Other sights of the street include the building of Federal
Hall, where in 1789 the inauguration of the first US President
George Washington took place.
Most of the major New York
financial institutions no longer have their headquarters on Wall
Street, having moved to other areas of lower and mid Manhattan,
to the states of Connecticut or New Jersey. So one of the
financial mastodons that had an office on this street, JPMorgan
Chase sold its building on Wall Street to the German bank
Deutsche Bank in November 2001.
The name of the street comes from the city wall, which in the 17th
century was the northern border of the Dutch city of New Amsterdam (one
of the first names of New York). In the 1640s, a palisade and a board
fence fenced off the inhabitants of the colony. Later, by order of the
West India Company, the governor of the Dutch colony Peter Stuyvesant,
using slave labor, built a stronger palisade. By the time of the war
with England, the fortified 12-foot (approx. 4 m) wall of wood and earth
was reinforced by palisades created in 1653. The built wall protected
the settlers from attacks by Indian tribes, New England colonists and
the British army. In 1685, the residents built a road along the wall,
which they called Wall Street, which literally means "street of the
wall." In 1699 the wall was destroyed by the British.
At the end
of the 18th century, at the beginning of the street, a plane tree grew,
near which sellers and speculators traded in securities. In 1792 they
decided to secure their association with the Buttonwood Agreement. This
was the beginning of the New York Stock Exchange.
In 1889, the
stock report "Customers' Afternoon Letter" became known as The Wall
Street Journal, taking its name from the street. This influential
business daily is currently published in New York City and owned by Dow
Jones & Company.
The financial district of Manhattan is one of the largest business
centers in the United States and the second largest in New York after
Midtown. At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the
city was actively building skyscrapers (competing with Chicago). The
Financial District is even today a skyscraper in its own right—separate
from Mid-Manhattan to the north, but soaring at the same height.
Built in 1914 and known as the "Morgan House", 23 Wall Street was the
most important address in the American financial system for many years.
On the afternoon of September 16, 1920, a bomb exploded at the entrance
to the building, killing 40 and injuring about 400 people. Shortly
before the explosion, a warning letter was planted in a mailbox at the
corner of Broadway and Cedar Street, which read: “Remember, we will no
longer tolerate each other. Release the political prisoners or be sure
you will all die. American Anarchists. Although there were many versions
of who did it and why, 20 years later, the FBI closed the case in 1940
without finding the perpetrators.
1929 brought the so-called
"Black Thursday" - the financial crash on the stock exchange and the
Great Depression that followed it. Between October 24 and 29, share
prices on the stock exchange collapsed, causing panic among traders. The
Dow Jones index returned to its value only in 1955. During the Great
Depression, the area fell into a state of stagnation. The construction
of the World Trade Center in 1966-1970, financed by the government, was
precisely intended to encourage economic development in this area of the
city.
With the opening of the World Trade Center in 1973, many
large and powerful Wall Street companies moved into these buildings. In
the future, this neighborhood attracted other large corporations to the
area. The September 11, 2001 attacks caused business activity to drop in
the area, and as a result, business began to move to other areas of the
city, as well as to neighboring states and other business centers of
America, such as Chicago and Boston.