The great number of immensely tall office-buildings on lower Broadway,
literally "sky-scrapers," so encompass the street as to give it the
appearance of a deep canyon as one gazes along it between them. The
Bowling Green Building out-tops the Washington Building, and there are
the Welles, Standard Oil and Aldrich Court Buildings, the latter
marked by a tablet of the Holland Society, being erected on the site
of "the first habitation of white men on Manhattan Island." Opposite
it is one of the most curious appearing of these tall structures, the
Tower Building, nearly two hundred feet high and only twenty-five
feet wide. Just above, the tall light sandstone building of the
Manhattan Life Company is surmounted by a cupola three hundred and
fifty feet high. The Empire Building rises twenty stories, and the
American Surety Building at the corner of Pine Street, nearly opposite
Trinity churchyard, twenty-three stories, three hundred and six feet,
being surmounted by the various weather-gauging instruments of "Old
Probabilities." Here are also the magnificent buildings of the Union
Trust and the Equitable Life Companies.
Opposite Trinity Church, Wall Street leads off from Broadway, with
winding course and varying width, down to the East River, following
the line of the ancient Dutch palisade wall which it has replaced.
Here is the financial centre and the domain of the bankers. One block
down, Broad Street enters from the south, and the narrower Nassau
Street goes out to the north. At this corner, on the one hand, is the
white marble Drexel Building, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan's office, and on
the other the United States Treasury and Assay Office. The huge
Manhattan Trust Building also is there, rising three hundred and
thirty feet, and opposite is the Stock Exchange, while across Broad
Street from the latter is the Mills Building, the home of many bankers
and brokers. In Nassau Street is the magnificent building of the
Mutual Life Insurance Company. These financial structures at Broad
and Wall Streets are regarded as the most valuable real estate in the
world. The Treasury and Assay Office contain most of the gold owned by
the Government, and in the latter the kegs of gold are made up that
are shipped to Europe. It holds millions of gold bars that make annual
excursions in fast steamers across the ocean and back again, to adjust
our varying foreign exchange balances. The Treasury is a white marble
building fronted by an imposing colonnade and a broad flight of steps,
and here is a bronze statue of Washington on the spot where he was
inaugurated the first President of the United States in 1789, the
location being then occupied by the old Federal Hall, where the first
Congress met. Farther down Wall Street, the next corner is William
Street, where there is a massive dark granite building with an
elaborate Ionic colonnade. The interior contains a large rotunda
surmounted by a dome supported by eight immense columns of Italian
marble. This building was originally constructed for the Merchants'
Exchange, and it afterwards became the Custom House. It is hereafter
to be the office of the National City Bank, the largest financial
institution of New York. Wall Street goes on to the river, where there
is a ferry to Brooklyn. Down William Street is the broad, low, granite
building, with a columned portico, of the Farmers' Loan and Trust
Company, another financial institution of renown.
It is evident, as Broadway is traversed northward between the huge
office-letting structures, reared skyward, and among them the little,
narrow, crooked streets, pouring their traffic into the main stream,
carrying a vast, surging mass of humanity, that the crowded-in New
Yorker, deprived of lateral expansion, thus seeks needed relief by
mounting upward. Fulton Street here stretches across the island from
river to river, the turmoil from its conflicting streams of traffic
showing the full tide of restless development in lower Broadway. Above
is the white marble Park Bank and the enormous St. Paul Building,
rising three hundred and eight feet, twenty-six stories high. Opposite
is the sombre church of St. Paul, with a tall spire, the oldest
church-building in New York, built in 1756, containing the memorial of
General Montgomery, who fell at the storming of Quebec in 1775, and in
the graveyard a monument to Emmet, the Irish patriot. Just beyond is
the triangular City Hall Park, with Park Row diagonally entering
Broadway. Here can be got an idea of the rush and restlessness of New
York, for two enormous streams of traffic pour together into lower
Broadway, at probably the worst street-crossing in the world.