thumb|Street sign|upright=1.2
Wall Street is a street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs eight city blocks between Broadway in the west and South Street and the East River in the east with a length of just under 2,000 feet. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry, New York–based financial interests, or the Financial District. Anchored by Wall Street, New York has been described as the world's principal fintech and financial center.
The street was originally known in Dutch as Het Cingel ("the Belt") when it was part of New Amsterdam during the 17th century. An actual city wall existed on the street from 1653 to 1699. During the 18th century, the location served as a slave market and securities trading site, and from 1703 onward, as the location of New York's city hall, which became Federal Hall. In the early 19th century, both residences and businesses occupied the area, but increasingly the latter predominated, and New York's financial industry became centered on Wall Street. During the 20th century, several early skyscrapers were built on Wall Street, including 40 Wall Street, once the world's tallest building. The street is near multiple subway stations and ferry terminals.
The Wall Street area is home to the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest stock exchange by total market capitalization, as well as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and commercial banks and insurance companies. Several other stock and commodity exchanges have also been located in Lower Manhattan near Wall Street, including the New York Mercantile Exchange and other commodity futures exchanges, along with the NYSE American. Many brokerage firms owned offices nearby to support the business they did on the exchanges. The economic impacts of Wall Street activities extend worldwide.
History
Early years
thumb|The original city map, called the [[Castello Plan, from 1660, showing the wall on the right side]]
thumb|Block-House and City Gate (foot of present Wall Street) 1674, New Amsterdam
In the original records of New Amsterdam, the Dutch always called the street Het Cingel ("the Belt"), which was also the name of the original outer barrier street, wall, and canal of Amsterdam. After the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, they renamed the settlement "New York" and in tax records from April 1665 (still in Dutch) they refer to the street as Het Cingel ofte Stadt Wall ("the Belt or the City Wall"). This use of both names for the street also appears as late as 1691 on the Miller Plan of New York. New York Governor Thomas Dongan may have issued the first official designation of Wall Street in 1686, the same year he issued a new charter for New York. Confusion over the origins of the name Wall Street appeared in modern times because in the 19th and early 20th century some historians mistakenly thought the Dutch had called it "de Waal Straat", which to Dutch ears sounds like Walloon Street. However, in 17th century New Amsterdam, de Waal Straat (Wharf or Dock Street) was a section of what is today's Pearl Street. Fearing an over land invasion of English troops from the colonies in New England (at the time Manhattan was easily accessible by land because the Harlem Ship Canal had not been dug), he ordered a ditch and wooden palisade to be constructed on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement. The wall was built of dirt and wooden planks, measuring long and tall and was built using the labor of both enslaved Africans and white colonists. In fact Stuyvesant had ordered that "the citizens, without exception, shall work on the constructions… by immediately digging a ditch from the East River to the North River, 4 to 5 feet deep and 11 to 12 feet wide..." And that "the soldiers and other servants of the Company, together with the free Negroes, no one excepted, shall complete the work on the fort by constructing a breastwork, and the farmers are to be summoned to haul the sod."
The first Anglo-Dutch War ended in 1654 without hostilities in New Amsterdam, but over time the "werken" (meaning the works or city fortifications) were reinforced and expanded to protect against potential incursions from Native Americans, pirates, and the English. The English also expanded and improved the wall after their 1664 takeover (a cause of the Second Anglo-Dutch War), as did the Dutch from 1673 to 1674 when they briefly retook the city during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and by the late 1600s the wall encircled most of the city and had two large stone bastions on the northern side. The wall and its fortifications were eventually removed in 1699—it had outlived its usefulness because the city had grown well beyond the wall. A new City Hall was built at Wall and Nassau in 1700 using the stones from the bastions as materials for the foundation.
thumb|New York's Municipal [[Slave markets and slave jails in the United States|slave market, located at the foot of Wall Street on the East River, ]]
Slavery had been introduced to Manhattan in 1626, but it was not until December 13, 1711, that the New York City Common Council made a market at the foot of Wall Street the city's first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans and Indians. The market operated from 1711 to 1762 at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets, and consisted of a wooden structure with a roof and open sides, although walls may have been added over the years; it could hold approximately 50 people. New York's municipal authorities directly benefited from the sale of slaves by implementing taxes on every person who was bought and sold there.
In these early days, local merchants and traders would gather at disparate spots to buy and sell shares and bonds, and over time divided themselves into two classes—auctioneers and dealers. The idea of the agreement was to make the market more "structured" and "without the manipulative auctions", with a commission structure.
19th century
thumb|View of Wall Street from corner of Broad Street, 1867. On the left is the sub-Treasury building, now the [[Federal Hall National Memorial.]]
In the first few decades, both residences and businesses occupied the area, but increasingly, business predominated. "There are old stories of people's houses being surrounded by the clamor of business and trade and the owners complaining that they can't get anything done," according to a historian named Burrows. The opening of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century meant a huge boom in business for New York City, since it was the only major eastern seaport which had direct access by inland waterways to ports on the Great Lakes. Wall Street became the "money capital of America".
Historian Charles R. Geisst suggested that there has constantly been a "tug-of-war" between business interests on Wall Street and authorities in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States by then. Generally during the 19th century Wall Street developed its own "unique personality and institutions" with little outside interference. Some of the companies included in Dow's original calculations were American Tobacco Company, General Electric, Laclede Gas Company, National Lead Company, Tennessee Coal & Iron, and United States Leather Company. When the average "peaks and troughs" went up consistently, he deemed it a bull market condition; if averages dropped, it was a bear market. He added up prices, and divided by the number of stocks to get his Dow Jones average. Dow's numbers were a "convenient benchmark" for analyzing the market and became an accepted way to look at the entire stock market. In 1889 the original stock report, Customers' Afternoon Letter, became The Wall Street Journal. Named in reference to the actual street, it became an influential international daily business newspaper published in New York City. After October 7, 1896, it began publishing Dow's expanded list of stocks. At other times, city and state officials have taken steps through tax incentives to encourage financial firms to continue to do business in the city. A post office was built at 60 Wall Street in 1905. During the World War I years, occasionally there were fund-raising efforts for projects such as the National Guard.
On September 16, 1920, close to the corner of Wall and Broad Street, the busiest corner of the Financial District and across the offices of the Morgan Bank, a powerful bomb exploded. It killed 38 and seriously injured 143 people. The perpetrators were never identified or apprehended. The explosion did, however, help fuel the Red Scare that was underway at the time. A report from The New York Times:
The area was subjected to numerous threats; one bomb threat in 1921 led to detectives sealing off the area to "prevent a repetition of the Wall Street bomb explosion".
Regulation
thumb|upright|A crowd at Wall and Broad Streets after the 1929 crash, with the [[New York Stock Exchange Building on the right. The majority of people are congregating in Wall Street on the left between the "House of Morgan" (23 Wall Street) and Federal Hall National Memorial (26 Wall Street).]]
September 1929 was the peak of the stock market. October 3, 1929, was when the market started to slip, and it continued throughout the week of October 14. A few days later, on October 24, The growing national economy and prosperity led to a recovery during the 1960s, with some down years during the early 1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Trading volumes climbed; in 1967, according to Time Magazine, volume hit 7.5 million shares a day which caused a "traffic jam" of paper with "batteries of clerks" working overtime to "clear transactions and update customer accounts".
In 1973, the financial community posted a collective loss of $245 million, which spurred temporary help from the government. Reforms were instituted; the Securities & Exchange Commission eliminated fixed commissions, which forced "brokers to compete freely with one another for investors' business". In 1976, banks were allowed to buy and sell stocks, which provided more competition for stockbrokers.
thumb|left|upright|[[1 Wall Street, at Wall Street and Broadway]]
In 1987, the stock market plunged, Since telecommunications costs were coming down, banks and brokerage firms could move away from the Financial District to more affordable locations.
21st century
In 2001, the Big Board, as some termed the NYSE, was described as the world's "largest and most prestigious stock market". When the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the attacks "crippled" the communications network and destroyed many buildings in the Financial District, although the buildings on Wall Street itself saw only little physical damage. During this time Rockefeller Group Business Center opened additional offices at 48 Wall Street. Still, after September 11, the financial services industry went through a downturn with a sizable drop in year-end bonuses of $6.5 billion, according to one estimate from a state comptroller's office.
To guard against terrorist attacks in the area, Wall Street from Broadway to William Street, and Broad Street from Beaver to Nassau was permanently closed to vehicular traffic and pedestrianized. The intersection of Broad and Wall in front of the NYSE, is a now public square. Vehicle traffic is only allowed for local residents and those with permission from local businesses and the city and only after being subject to a security search. Authorities built concrete barriers, and found ways over time to make them more aesthetically appealing by spending $5000 to $8000 apiece on bollards. Parts of Wall Street, as well as several other streets in the neighborhood, were blocked off by specially designed bollards:
The Guardian reporter Andrew Clark described the years of 2006 to 2010 as "tumultuous", in which the heartland of America was "mired in gloom" with high unemployment around 9.6%, with average house prices falling from $230,000 in 2006 to $183,000, and foreboding increases in the national debt to $13.4 trillion, but that despite the setbacks, the American economy was once more "bouncing back". What had happened during these heady years? Clark wrote: