Finance History | 30 Pine Street — Marcus Goldman Sold Other People's Notes

People treat Goldman Sachs as a Battery Park City tower that later joined the Dow.

The firm began as a one-room office on this street.

In 1869 Marcus Goldman, a German immigrant then 48, hung a sign as broker and banker at 30 Pine Street.

He bought promissory notes from wholesale jewelers on Maiden Lane and from leather merchants on Beekman Street, then resold the paper to commercial banks.

The official firm history records more than 5 million dollars of that paper in the first year, in 1869 currency.

Samuel Sachs, his son-in-law, joined in 1882. The name Goldman Sachs & Co. followed in 1885.

The partnership became a New York Stock Exchange member in 1896.

In 1929 the firm announced a 20-story headquarters on the same Pine Street lot, on the site Goldman had used from the start.

It left 30 Pine for 20 Broad Street in 1957.

The partnership stayed private until May 1999, when The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. listed on the NYSE under the ticker GS.

The mechanism on this block is discounting.

A merchant's short IOU became a transferable claim a bank would hold, and that claim became the inventory of an investment bank that still reports from New York.

The present sidewalk is public. The 1929 building is not the original one-room shop.

Photo: Jay Gorman, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.