Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [357]
New York’s ascendancy in finance inspired a burst of architectural assertiveness along Wall Street, which like Pearl Street got a facelift during the 1820s. No longer satisfied with quarters in renovated private residences, some dating from before the Revolution, prosperous bankers and brokers now demanded proper offices of suitable scale and grandeur. In 1825 Martin Euclin Thompson, a carpenter turned architect-builder, finished a monumental Federal-style building for the Branch of the Bank of the United States (its sixty-foot facade now stands in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Two years later, in 1827, the Stock and Exchange Board moved into Thompson’s new Merchants’ Exchange, and he completed a new home for the Phoenix Bank that was the city’s first taste of the new Greek Revival style in architecture, rivaling the BUS headquarters on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.
It was the latter institution, in fact, that presented the only obstacle to New York’s complete domination of the nation’s finances. Although conservative New York bankers applauded BUS commitment to a stable currency, they chafed at regulations constraining their own freedom of action and squirmed when the giant bank undercut their interest rates, putting downward pressure on profits. Most galling of all was the knowledge that the BUS continued to serve as the depository for the revenues of the federal government, although the great bulk of these came from customs receipts collected at the Port of New York. Like Andrew Jackson, the New Yorkers watched and waited for a chance to strike back.
LAND LORDS
Speculation in western lands was an old game for Manhattan merchants with extra money in their pockets, and the very thought of the Erie Canal, lancing toward the Great Lakes through mile after mile of prime real estate, had them quivering with temptation. Every year the canal advanced, tens of thousands of acres along its route were feverishly bought, sold, and sold again by many of the same men who at first shunned canal stock as too risky an investment. The mercantile house of LeRoy and Bayard acquired over three hundred thousand acres; De Witt Clinton himself bought up choice parcels he expected to rise in value with the completion of his big ditch.
None did more than banker Isaac Bronson to make an exact science of the business. Going beyond mere speculation, Bronson employed local businessmen, judges, and politicians to steer him toward the best land. He then resold it to farmers, granting fiveyear mortgages at 6 percent to those whose financial standing his agents had scrutinized and certified. By the early 1820s Bronson owned or held mortgages on property in over half the counties of the state. His enterprise was so solid that conservative bankers like Prime, Ward, and King invested substantial sums with him.
For the adventurous speculator, though, there was still no place like home. Manhattan land values had risen 750 percent between the Revolution and the War of 1812, and with the Erie Canal in place the future looked even more promising. Plenty of land awaited development in the rolling countryside north of 14th Street. But much of it was tightly held—either by assorted Stuyvesants and Brevoorts and Dyckmans, descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landowners, or by merchants and artisans who had acquired their estates in the Revolutionary era and fiercely clung to them as talismans of gentility. Although a few speculators got their hands on parcels here and there during the 1820s, new purchasers often hung on to their lands for rural retreats. Scottish merchant Robert Lenox, for one, bought thirty uptown acres between 68th and 74th streets, put up a country house, and refused to sell or develop his new estate.
Downtown was a different story. Astor, who before the war had amassed substantial holdings just above the settled city, now prepared for new