Finance History | 23 Wall Street — Four Stories and No Name on The Corner

People treat J.P. Morgan as a glass headquarters that always carried the bank's name on the door.

The building that made the firm visible carried no name at all.

23 Wall Street stands at the southeast corner of Wall and Broad, across from the New York Stock Exchange.

Trowbridge and Livingston designed a four-story neoclassical block in Tennessee marble for J.P. Morgan and Co. after the firm bought the old Drexel Building from the Drexel family in 1912 and ordered the tenants out by 1 May 1913.

J. Pierpont Morgan died in March 1913, before construction began.

His son, J.P. Morgan Jr., laid the ceremonial cornerstone in December 1913.

The facade was substantially complete by June 1914.

The house chose four stories on the dearest corner in the district.

Foundations were sunk to take a forty-story tower if one were ever wanted.

None was built.

The unused air was the point.

The banking room occupied almost the whole ground floor under a coffered dome.

Partners sat upstairs.

The exterior was left unsigned because the address was already the House of Morgan.

Neighbors called it The Corner.

The Drexel Building that stood here before it had been the seat of Drexel, Morgan and Co., the 1871 partnership that became J.P. Morgan and Co. after Anthony Drexel's death in 1893–94.

On 16 September 1920 a bomb exploded on this sidewalk.

The firm left the pockmarks in the marble rather than dress the stone.

The building was designated a New York City landmark in 1965 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

It has stood empty for long stretches since the late 2000s.

The sidewalk view is the honest one.

Photo: ChrisRuvolo, 23 Wall Street, January 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.