Finance History | Goldman Sachs — The One-Room Office at 30 Pine Street
· 1869-1
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Finance History | Goldman Sachs — The One-Room Office at 30 Pine Street
kevin
People treat Goldman Sachs as a Battery Park City tower that arrived already underwriting governments.
The first sign hung here, on Pine Street, in 1869.
Marcus Goldman was forty-eight, a German Jewish immigrant who had peddled and kept a clothing shop in Philadelphia before his wife pushed the family to New York. He rented a one-room basement office next to a coal chute at 30 Pine Street and put up a board that read M. Goldman, Broker and Banker.
The business was commercial paper. Bank credit after the Civil War was tight and expensive for ordinary merchants. Goldman bought their short promissory notes and walked them a few blocks to commercial banks that would hold the paper at a thinner discount than a storekeeper could get alone.
That walk was the mechanism. He was not lending his own capital so much as making a merchant's IOU liquid in a city that already knew how to discount bills.
Samuel Sachs, his son-in-law, joined in 1882. Henry Goldman and Ludwig Dreyfuss came in a few years later, and the partnership took the name Goldman, Sachs & Co. The firm joined the New York Stock Exchange in 1896.
The original room did not survive the street. On 12 January 1929 the firm announced it would buy the Hanover Fire Insurance buildings at 34 and 36 Pine, next door to offices it already used at 30 and 32, and raise a twenty-story headquarters designed by Archibald F. Gilbert.
Period press put the cost at US$1.5 million in 1929 dollars. The crash arrived before the building was finished. Floors were leased out. A planned squash court became an investment-banking room.
Goldman Sachs worked from 30 Pine Street until 1957, then moved to 20 Broad Street. The present headquarters is at 200 West Street.
The pin is the historical address, not a surviving 1869 interior. Pine Street between Nassau and William still reads as a counting-house block. The 1929 tower is gone from the firm's letterhead. The commercial-paper walk is what started here.
Photo: street fabric on Pine Street near the documented address, via Wikimedia Commons. The 1869 room itself was not photographed for the public record.
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