Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [748]
The financial district grew both laterally (it now stretched to City Hall) and perpendicularly (beginning its ascent toward the sky). Hundreds of private banks and trust companies were founded in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and they spawned scores of new headquarters buildings, like Drexel, Morgan’s at Wall and Broad. Brokerage firms multiplied like bees and settled into rented office space; their agents hived together at the New York Stock Exchange, John Kellum’s Tuscan palazzo.
Galvanized by the wartime risks of military service, the life insurance business had surged as well. The assets of New York companies (who controlled some 85 percent of the national market) multiplied eleven times during the postwar decade, rising to nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Growth led to a spate of headquarters construction by the likes of Equitable, Mutual, and New York Life.
The burgeoning office district was not, however, primarily built and tenanted by the corporations directing western development—railroads, mines, oil—but by the host of businesses and professionals that sprang up to serve their needs. Corporate law firms multiplied (by 1870 there were two and a half times the number of lawyers as in the mid-1850s boom). Express firms expanded their outreach. American Express, which had concentrated on transport of goods, currency, and securities in New York State, now offered services nationwide and moved into the former Taylor’s building—the 1850s “restaurant of the age” had closed in 1866—on Broadway and Franklin. Lewis Tappan’s old Mercantile Agency, wholly owned since 1859 by R. G. Dun, soon had twenty-eight branch offices in the nation’s major commercial centers and over ten thousand reporters or investigators handling the five thousand requests for information that poured in each day. The tremendous demand for credit information on ever more distant clients kept the rival Bradstreet Agency booming as well.
Railroad and telegraph revolutions transformed the marketing of commodities too. Old-style cotton factors, who had extended credit to planters, were replaced by jobbers, who bought cotton directly at southern railheads and resold it to British or New England textile mills. In 1870 the New York Cotton Exchange was established, allowing these brokers to collectively standardize grades of cotton, inspect samples, and begin a market in futures, to reduce risk. In 1873 the Butter and Cheese Exchange opened on Greenwich Street, near the railroad terminals where dairy shipments arrived; here too buyers and sellers met to examine products, negotiate prices, and get information on future crop prospects. The New York Produce Exchange similarly let merchants examine samples from individual lots of grain, and in 1874 it established trading pits for such transactions.
All these businesses, and swarms of others, needed two things: proximity to one another—as profitability depended on access to information, markets, and capital resources—and space, for their burgeoning staffs of administrative and clerical workers (Equitable Life, in addition to top management, administrators, and agents, had two hundred clerks processing policies). The only way to achieve both proximity and space, given downtown’s circumscribed terrain and sky-high land prices, was by thinking big and building tall. Before the war, five-stories was the rule, and commercial life was carried on primarily at ground level—in streets and showrooms, at sales counters, on exchange floors. After the war, office buildings went vertical, climbing to unprecedented heights—six stories, seven, eight. “Our business men are building up to the clouds,” one newsman exclaimed.
The elevator made this possible. Lift technology had improved since the vertical screw used at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Now the “steam and drum” method was