Finance History | Hudson and Jay Streets — The Marble Depot That Began as Three Express Books

People treat American Express as a glass tower at 200 Vesey Street that always issued a charge card.

The first company was an express book.

On 18 March 1850 Henry Wells, William G. Fargo and John Butterfield folded three rival freight lines into a joint-stock association they named the American Express Company.

The three books were Wells and Company, Livingston, Fargo and Company, and Butterfield, Wasson and Company.

The articles were signed in Buffalo, New York.

The first New York office sat at 10 Wall Street, where Wells and Company had already worked.

In 1858 the firm opened its first company-owned headquarters at the corner of Hudson, Jay and Staple Streets, in the blocks now called Tribeca.

The marble Italianate block at 55–61 Hudson Street put a freight depot on the ground floor and a Hudson River Railroad spur against the loading doors.

Otto Botticher drew the employee turnout on 21 June 1858 from this corner.

The print shows wagons, a crowd in summer coats, and a working yard rather than a banking hall.

Express, in that decade, meant moving specie, securities and parcels on contract when the Post Office would not take the risk.

By 1862 the association listed 890 offices and more than 1,500 employees on nearly 10,000 miles of rail and road from the Atlantic to Minnesota and Missouri.

California was the argument the board would not take.

When Butterfield and other directors blocked a Pacific extension, Wells and Fargo organized a second company on the same calendar date two years later.

American Express stayed east.

It added money orders in 1882 and traveler's cheques in 1891, after decades of moving other people's paper as freight.

The Hudson Street depot is the place where the freight company became a firm with its own stone.

The later headquarters at 65 Broadway, opened in 1917, is the building most visitors still photograph.

This corner is the older one.

Photo: Otto Botticher, Turn Out of the Employees of the American Express Company, 21 June 1858, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.