Finance History | JPMorgan — The Corner at 23 Wall Street

People treat JPMorgan Chase as a midtown tower that absorbed a dozen bank names.

The house that still sits in the name opened here, at the southeast corner of Wall Street and Broad Street.

Drexel, Morgan & Co. was formed on 1 July 1871 by Anthony J. Drexel of Philadelphia and J. Pierpont Morgan. The partnership began in Morgan's cramped rooms at 53 Exchange Place. In February 1872 the Drexel brothers paid what the papers called the highest price yet recorded for city land and put up a white marble mansard building on this corner. It opened at the end of April 1873. Edison switched the building onto the Pearl Street station in 1882; it was the first office on the street to take the new current.

After Drexel's death the firm became J.P. Morgan & Co. in 1895. The marble pile came down. The low limestone building that stands now, designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, opened in 1914 and took the blast scars of 16 September 1920 without a cosmetic patch. Chase National is a separate 1877 line. The corner is not 270 Park Avenue.

The rooms that made the name were a partnership desk on this plot, not a glass headquarters twenty blocks north.