Finance History | 65 Broadway — Twenty-One Stories for an Express Company That Had Stopped Hauling Trunks

People treat American Express as a glass tower on Vesey Street and a charge card in a wallet.

For fifty-eight years the company's name sat on this Broadway front.

American Express was formed on 18 March 1850 in Buffalo when Henry Wells, William G. Fargo and John Butterfield merged three express firms into one joint-stock company.

The first New York rooms were at 10 Wall Street, in space Wells and Company had already used.

The firm built a marble depot at 55-61 Hudson Street in 1858, then took brownstones at 63-65 Broadway in 1874.

By the 1880s most of the profit came from moving currency and valuables, not household trunks.

In 1891 the company issued the traveler's cheque, a prepaid draft that could be replaced if stolen.

That paper, not the wagon, is the mechanism that turned an express line into a financial firm.

The present 21-story building rose in 1916-1917 to designs by J. Lawrence Aspinwall of Renwick, Aspinwall and Tucker.

Irving Underhill photographed the new entrance in 1917.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the exterior on 12 December 1995.

American Express left the building in 1975. The sidewalk on Broadway is the public view.

The charge card arrived in 1958 while the firm still occupied these floors.

The listed company in the Dow and the S and P 500 no longer ships parcels.

The terra cotta on Broadway still carries the name of the house that did.

Photo: Irving Underhill, 1917, public domain, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. Entrance of the new American Express Building at 65 Broadway.