Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [479]
Postfire reconstruction started almost instantly, with Arthur Tappan first off the mark. At dawn the day after, he told his clerks: “We must rebuild immediately.” One went to fetch an architect; the rest fitted up temporary quarters. At noon the Journal of Commerce carried a notice announcing the store was open for business as usual, “by the blessings of God,” and by midafternoon workmen began clearing the still warm rubble.
In short order, the new-style high-rise, Greek Revival granite warehouses were going up everywhere, with iron shutters and independent foot-thick brick walls as fire protection. Even buildings still standing were transformed; masons knocked out the old brick and brownstone ground floors and hoisted stylish granite piers into place. Block after block took on a dignified new look. The Delmonicos, whose establishment had been wiped out, bought a triangular plot at the junction of Beaver, William, and South William (formerly Mill) streets. Work started in August 1836 on a three-and-a-halfstory brick-and-brownstone structure with marble trim; in a nicely defiant touch, the marble porch pillars were brought from Pompeii. By December the carpets and gas fixtures were being fitted into the luxurious first- and second-story saloons—of an “appearance far surpassing anything of the kind in the city”—and the third floor had facilities for private dining, evoking Parisian splendor, as did the immense wine vaults for sixteen thousand bottles.
Grandest of all was the new Merchants’ Exchange. Within a week of the fire, the Merchants’ Exchange Company solicited plans, choosing an aggressive Greek Revival design by Isaiah Rogers, with a twelve-columned Corinthian colonnade. A million dollars in subscriptions was raised by February 1836. By April construction was underway on the site of its predecessor, expanded to cover an entire block. Built of Massachusetts granite—not a sliver of wood was used in constructing the floor—it featured an enormous central hall surmounted by a vast saucer dome eighty feet in diameter. When it opened for business five years later, it would include offices for insurance companies, bankers, brokers, the Chamber of Commerce, and, later, the New York Stock and Exchange Board, as well as a reading room stocked with papers from every state in the union and countries overseas, together with a foreign letter office. It was frequently compared to the Paris Bourse.
All along Wall Street, banks and insurance companies began demolishing their former residences—those red brick facades, fanlight doorways, and dormer windows that now seemed so old fashioned—and erecting stone-front porticoed Doric temples. Within a few years, the street boasted perhaps the greatest concentration of classical columns built since the fall of Rome. By the anniversary of the catastrophe, Hone observed, “fine and commodious stores, much improved in their appearance and construction” nearly covered the “burnt district.”
Ramifications rippled outward. The fire expelled much of the dry-goods trade from Pearl Street, making it more strictly a financial center, and many firms shifted west toward the fashionable quarter around lower Broadway. Retail shops—jewelers, watchmakers, bookstores, merchant tailors, hatters, confectioners, carpet and fancy drygoods stores—spread northward up the thoroughfare. Broadway became a business district up to and beyond the City Hall Park area, where numerous publishers, law firms, and newspapers now clustered.
This development touched off a pell-mell flight of the wealthy. Private dwellings were turned into boardinghouses, converted into offices, or torn down to make way for warehouses and shops. A writer in the New-York Mirror in April 1836 reported: “It is said that in one year, there will be scarcely a private residence or boarding house below Wall Street.” He added, “Ladies will, hereafter, scarcely extend their promenades further down than the Park; and what will become of the Battery, heaven only knows.” Some suggested the corporation sell it off to private