Finance History | 30 Pine Street — Five Million Dollars of Paper from a One-Room Desk

People treat Goldman Sachs as a tower that always underwrote industrial issues.

The first office was a one-room shop on Pine Street.

In 1869 Marcus Goldman, born Mark Goldmann in Bavaria in 1821, moved his family from Philadelphia to New York and hung a sign as a broker of promissory notes.

The firm later identified the address as 30 Pine Street, a block parallel to Wall Street among counting houses and sidewalk trade.

Goldman had peddled from a cart and kept a clothing store on Market Street in Philadelphia before he sold other men's short-term paper.

The paper was commercial IOUs from wholesale jewelers on Maiden Lane and from leather merchants and tanners on Beekman Street.

He bought the notes, judged the names, and resold them to banks.

That was the whole book.

The firm's own history records more than US$5 million in commercial paper handled in the first year, 1869 dollars.

In 1882 Goldman invited his son-in-law Samuel Sachs into the partnership and restyled the name M. Goldman and Sachs.

By 1890 the house was turning over about US$30 million of paper a year.

The partners remained intermarried families for nearly fifty years after the founding.

In 1929 the firm announced it would buy the Hanover Fire Insurance Company Building at 34 and 36 Pine Street, next to offices already held at 30 and 32 Pine, and raise a twenty-story headquarters on the same plot.

The firm said the site was the ground of Marcus Goldman's 1869 room.

The 1930 building leased floors after the 1929 crash.

Goldman Sachs left Pine Street for 20 Broad Street in 1957.

The present 30 Pine Street is not the 1869 room.

It is the address the firm chose to keep.

Photo: 56 Pine Street, April 2022, Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The 1869 office stood on this block of Pine Street.