Like many immigrant children, Ferdinand went to work at a young age delivering milk and newspapers. But he also conscientiously attended the local public schools, graduated from high school as class valedictorian, considered and then rejected a career in the Episcopal ministry, and finally applied to New York Law School, having already clerked for a law firm across Wall Street from the august Morgan bank, an institution so secretive that its imposing building carried no sign or name, only the number 23 on the door.
And in , through connections at Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine of New York, he was appointed an assistant district attorney. Pecora was a natural litigator—tall, strong-jawed, with bountiful, wavy black hair and a penchant for cigars, which he often brandished to dramatic effect during cross-examinations.
He was strikingly energetic and pugnacious if mostly soft-spoken. Early in his career as a prosecutor, he specialized in, among other things, investigating the bottom end of the brokerage business, what were known at the time as bucket shops—sellers of fraudulent securities. Among his early achievements was sending the state superintendent of banks to jail for taking bribes. In , Pecora was a prominent Democratic candidate for district attorney, but to his great disappointment he was nudged aside for a Tammany favorite.
By early , he was settled in private practice and ostensibly out of politics. His withdrawal from public life lasted only three years. The months between the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency, in November , and his inauguration, in March , were among the most turbulent and frightening in American history.
By the end of , unemployment had reached 25 percent. More dangerous, the banking system seemed to be unraveling with remarkable speed, a victim—as many individuals had been—of the stock-market crash, which wiped out more than 80 percent of the value of securities.
Across the nation, small banks were failing at an accelerating rate, thereby helping to bring down larger banks. With a lame-duck and much-reviled president, and a Congress soon to be replaced, the government seemed paralyzed.
Norbeck understood the depth of the crisis, and he made earnest efforts to attract a progressive and weighty figure to serve as special counsel for his investigation. So unpromising did the investigation seem that all three men declined the position. Irving Ben Cooper, a rising lawyer known for his dogged prosecution of fraud, finally accepted the job—but resigned within just a few days, complaining that Senator Norbeck was not giving him enough authority. He assembled a talented group of attorneys and financial experts and quickly plunged into the hearings.
Within weeks of his appointment, Pecora became the unquestioned star of the investigation. The press started calling it the Pecora Commission, which became its quasi-official and enduring name. The records of the commission, now in the National Archives, comprise tens of thousands of pages of documents. But what made the investigation so powerful was not so much the data for which Pecora had a phenomenal memory.
Its greater importance was in the theater of the event, something of which Pecora was brilliantly aware. His cross-examinations produced enormous press attention for months on end. In the course of over a year of public investigations, Pecora cross-examined some of the most powerful and famous bankers and businessmen in America.
He used his subpoena power to put people on the stand for day after day. He bored into what he considered the corrupt if not necessarily illegal practices of the great banks, asking seemingly mundane questions that drew his targets into his traps.
The arrangement fell somewhere between back-scratching and extortion. He was frequently offered stock from customers of the bank at a reduced price, in return for unspecified considerations. Pecora asked Wiggin why he had indulged in such practices:.
John G. Mitchell and J. He became its president in and expanded it into the largest bank in the nation. But not content with ordinary, conservative commercial banking, Mitchell created what was ostensibly an independent investment bank that would allow City to sell securities—a step that led to much the same kind of disaster that many banks experienced after their massive losses in the securities markets in —9.
The boards of the commercial bank and the investment bank were virtually identical, funds from the commercial bank helped finance the investment bank, and investors could buy stock in both companies simultaneously. Mitchell had turned the new investment bank into the largest such institution in America, with almost 2, employees and offices around the world. There are also a few rules you should know before you go. Eating, drinking, smoking, chewing gum and cell phone use are not allowed.
Make sure to silence any technology you may have on you before you enter. Video and photography are allowed. While visitors are not allowed inside, you can get great pictures of the exterior by walking down Broad Street.
A couple blocks south of Trinity Church is the famous Charging Bull. This statue has become the unofficial symbol of the Financial District and is a great photo op for your trip. Just past the bull is the Alexander Hamilton U.
Customs House. This beautiful building is currently home to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, which you can visit for free.
If you have the time, consider buying tickets to the museum for a more in-depth experience. Looking for somewhere to eat? Walk east on Wall Street until you hit William Street. Make a right and continue for a few blocks until you come to Stone Street , home to some of the more unique architecture and delicious restaurants in the city.
Entrance to Federal Hall is free of charge. The museum is open Monday-Friday from 9 a. Yes, but if you wish to visit Federal Hall and are using a wheelchair, make sure to enter from the back door located at 15 Pine Street, between Pine and Nassau street. Once inside, there are elevators available to both the upper and lower floors. Current update: At this time, the rotunda in the mail hall is closed for restoration.
All visitors are required to enter the building via the entrance at 15 Pine Street. The Washington Bible will not be on display while the restoration work is taking place in the rotunda. Though Wall Street trading continued to expand both before and after the Civil War, little from this era remains on Wall Street. In , the growth of the New York Stock Exchange led the exchange to finally build its own building, which was erected on Broad Street just below Wall.
As the volume of the exchange continued to soar in the Gilded Age, this building also proved inadequate, and in it was torn down so that George B. Post could design a new home.
Opened in and expanded in the s, it continues to be the home of the exchange today. Above the multistory Corinthian facade, a limestone pedimental sculpture by J. In , Morgan, an early proponent of incandescent lighting, had Thomas Edison wire the building—and much of Wall Street—with electricity, ushering in a wave of technology.
A new House of Morgan opened in , just after J. It was a pointedly low-rise building in a neighborhood that was otherwise embracing the skyscraper. For years, land on Wall Street had fetched the highest price in the city. As tensions in New York grew during the era around World War I, the city was on high alert for German saboteurs, anarchists, Bolsheviks, and labor unrest.
Though Morgan had been dead for six years, a gunman burst into his parish church, St. On September 16, , a bomb exploded from a wagon parked across the street from the House of Morgan. Timed to go off at noon, when many workers were on their lunch break, the shrapnel from the bomb killed 38 people and injured nearly more.
Though anarchists claimed credit for the explosion in an anonymous note, no one was ever prosecuted for the crime. Today, the side of the House of Morgan continues to bear the pockmarks from the blast, but these are the only visible reminder of what was, until the bombing in Oklahoma City, the deadliest terror attack on American soil.
Skyscrapers had proliferated downtown since the story Tower Building had gone up at 50 Broadway in Murchison were soon joined by a new crop of buildings during the post-World War I building boom.
Designed by H. Craig Severance, this was the building that was racing against the Chrysler Building in to be the tallest in the world. Forty Wall lost the contest. The stock market crash on October 23, , the same day the Chrysler Building topped out, brought most construction on Wall Street to a halt for decades.
Presumably, my tenth great-grandfather Nevius, who gave up this parcel of land in the s, is still rolling in his grave somewhere. When the market crashed, construction had barely begun, but the skyscraper still went up quickly, being finished in March As the Depression deepened, very little happened architecturally on Wall Street—with the exception of the replacement of J.
No doubt realizing the horrible symbolism, the Stock Exchange moved in to replace it with an enduring cast-metal copy. The latter, badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, was converted in into the WeLive apartment complex. Morgan and now occupied by Deutsche Bank. Until , this was the best public space on Wall Street.
After the World Trade Center attack, all streets surrounding the stock exchange were barricaded, and over the last 17 years what were originally haphazard road closures have been replaced with equally haphazard, semi-permanent public amenities: decorative bollards, tables and chairs, a historic timeline along Broad Street noting its former use as a canal, and post holes on Wall Street marking sort of the path of the original defensive palisade.
With the streets cordoned off to traffic and more tourists visiting New York than ever— The Downtown Alliance is wading into this fray with plans to remake the street as an even more pedestrian-friendly zone. This seems like it could become a case study in induced demand; indeed, the point of pedestrian-centered architecture is not merely to accommodate existing walkers, but to encourage more people to take to the streets. Considering that the bull is among the most visited and photographed sites in New York, moving it to Wall Street will surely draw even more visitors.
The New York Stock Exchange has long been tied to its rituals and traditions; the market was born on Wall Street and has stayed remarkably close to the site of its founding for over two centuries.
But as the nature of trading changes, will the exchange need to maintain such an antiquated physical presence on Wall Street—or even in the city at all? What if it moves now? If Wall Street loses the exchange, the banks and brokerage houses will follow, freeing up more residential space.
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