Finance History | 26 Broadway — The Trust Moved Into a Curve in the Street

People treat ExxonMobil as a Houston energy major that later sat in the Dow.

The parent trust ran the American oil trade from this block.

Standard Oil Company of Ohio was incorporated in 1870.

The Standard Oil Trust was formed in 1882 to hold Jersey Standard, Socony, and the rest of the group.

In 1885 the trust moved its headquarters from Cleveland to a new office building at 26 Broadway, opposite Bowling Green.

The first building on the plot was a nine-story granite block.

Floors were added in 1895. The present curved tower, with setbacks and a pyramid modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, was rebuilt in the 1920s by Thomas Hastings.

By 1880 the combination refined on the order of nine-tenths of the oil processed in the United States.

On 15 May 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the trust dissolved under the Sherman Act.

The decree split the combination into thirty-four companies.

Standard Oil of New Jersey later took the name Exxon. Standard Oil of New York became Mobil. The two merged in 1999 as ExxonMobil, an S&P 500 energy name.

The building is a New York City landmark.

The public face is the Broadway curve and the pyramid, seen from Bowling Green.

The mechanism is a holding trust that concentrated refining under one address, then a court order that turned that address into a family of listed successors.

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