Finance History | 23 Wall Street — Four Stories at the Corner They Called the House of Morgan

People treat JPMorgan Chase as a glass tower and a ticker in the Dow.

The partnership that became that bank built a four-story marble box on this corner and put no name on it.

J.P. Morgan and Co. bought the old Drexel Building and the Mechanics and Metals National Bank next door, then cleared both lots.

Trowbridge and Livingston filed plans with the New York City Department of Buildings in February 1913.

John Pierpont Morgan died on 31 March 1913, before the demolition crews finished the site.

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

The facade was substantially complete by June 1914, when the scaffolding came down.

The building opened on 11 November 1914.

The bank's departments moved in through that month from temporary rooms.

The lot sits at the southeast corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, across from the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall.

In an age of new towers, the House of Morgan rose only four stories.

The foundations were built to take a much taller stack if the partners later wanted one.

They did not.

The unused air was the point. The low limestone and Tennessee marble block read as a firm that did not need height to be found.

No lettering on the exterior was required. Brokers already called the intersection the Corner.

The chamfered entrance faces the acute angle of Wall and Broad. Jack Morgan asked for a door on that corner.

On 16 September 1920 a bomb exploded on this sidewalk. The pockmarks in the marble are still visible from public ground.

The 1920 attack is a separate memory. This pin is the house that opened in 1914.

Morgan Guaranty Trust later occupied the Corner with 15 Broad Street. The 2000 combination with Chase Manhattan produced today's JPMorgan Chase, a constituent of the S and P 500.

The building itself is a New York City landmark (1965) and has been on the National Register since 1972.

It has stood empty of the bank for years. The public view is the Broad Street and Wall Street sidewalks. Do not treat the interior as open.

The mechanism is concentration made visible: a private partnership bought the dearest corner on the street, then refused the skyline.

Photo: ChrisRuvolo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.