Finance History | American Express — The Landmark at 65 Broadway
· 1917-4
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Finance History | American Express — The Landmark at 65 Broadway
kevin
People treat American Express as a charge-card network that appeared already green and already global.
The company that later issued that card kept its New York headquarters on this lot from 1874.
American Express was formed in 1850 in Buffalo as a joint-stock merger of three express firms: Wells & Company, Livingston, Fargo & Company, and Butterfield, Wasson & Company. Henry Wells was president for the first eighteen years. William G. Fargo was in the room. The early product was freight, currency, and valuables moved by stage, barge, and rail.
The first New York rooms were at 10 Wall Street, then 62 Broadway. In 1874 the headquarters shifted into a pair of five-story Harmony-family brownstones at 63 and 65 Broadway, on the west side between Exchange Alley and Rector Street.
By then the profit was less in parcels than in moving money. The firm bought the lots from the Harmony family in 1902.
Plans for a replacement tower were announced in March 1914. After delays tied to the First World War, the twenty-one-story neo-classical building designed by James L. Aspinwall of Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker was essentially complete in April 1917.
The plan is an H, two slender wings around light courts, white brick and terra cotta above a granite base. It closed the masonry wall of the block and helped turn this stretch of Broadway into the canyon later called Express Row.
American Express occupied most of the floors and leased the top six. It remained the headquarters until 1975. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the exterior in 1995.
The travelers cheque and, later, the charge card grew out of an express company that already knew how to move paper that other people would honor. The 1850 merger was in Buffalo. The standing building that still carries the company's name on this block is the 1917 hall.
Photograph from the public sidewalk. The interior is not a museum.
Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.
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