The Big Apple is volatile like few cities. It serves the comparison with this fruit that identifies it, that if someone has not eaten it from the tree it falls to the ripe ground and is transformed into fertilizer.
This is New York, a mutant city. The question “what was here before?” it arises more than usual when walking around and seeing the irruption of businesses or skyscrapers that supplant others, demolished despite fame or success. There is no law more protective than the law of the real estate market.
Times Square is so called because The New York Times had its headquarters there (the Times Tower, where the New Year’s Eve ball now falls), premises that the newspaper abandoned in 1913, as Gay Talese recalls in his Bartleby and I book. This exercise in memory about a world-famous corner also serves as an application for Wall Street, another bright spot in the atlas, at the time of its farewell.
Let no one exclaim. The name continues to be universally applied to equity and the stock market. The explanation can be found in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, the best showcase in this world, which read: “Wall Street has abandoned Wall Street”.
When John Pierpont Morgan (JP for friends and banking) arrived on Wall Street, then referring only to the street, it was a disorganized jungle of competing interests and one of the country’s many financial centers. When it left this enclave in 1913, due to biological causes, it was a tight-knit group of large companies leading one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.
Mr. JP has died again. America’s largest bank is leaving the street where America’s influencers were born.
JP Morgan Chase has closed its branch at 45 Wall Street, marking the end of 150 years of physical ties between the bank and the street that became the generic term for the global money business.
It is one of the last of the Mohicans, as most of the banks and brokerage firms that once populated this street have moved to new quarters in Manhattan and beyond.
The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, which struck very close and brought down the twin towers that symbolized the economic supremacy of the United States, led to the origin of this exodus. The pandemic further contributed to the spread of this flight from their historical habitat.
The departure of JP Morgan is quite a milestone. One of the pioneers is leaving, which had its initial home at 23 Wall Street overlooking the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). From this point, this firm grew as one of the most powerful banking institutions in the world scene.
The expression has evolved. Talking about a Wall Street bank is equivalent to a financial company with operations and investments around the world, regardless of its location.
Led by Jamie Dimon, another industry shark, JP Morgan opened its headquarters in midtown Manhattan in 2001. It is currently preparing to move in 2025 to a new 60-story skyscraper on Park Avenue. JP’s legacy employs more than 23,000 employees in New York alone and has more than 290 branches.
There is nothing left of his first house. His birthplace, the premises at 23 Wall Street, often has signs that say “for rent”.
Gone are the days of the founder and colleagues. “Wall Street is today the most powerful center on the continent. Its daily transactions are telegraphed to every city in the Union and to the commercial capitals of the world,” wrote Matthew Hale in 1874 in his volume devoted to this street.
Converted into a much more residential neighborhood, tourists do not notice this desertion of the banking center from which one of the New York myths was built. For photos, they already have the statue of Fearless Girl, who looks defiantly at the stock exchange building, and the Wall Street bull.
