What was before what is? This column, appearing in the Arch, will apply this question to different parts of our fair city, exploring the lost history and previous incarnations of various sites around town.

We'll begin at what is, in some ways, the beginning. There are certain buildings which are so iconic, so anchored in our collective understanding of New York that we can't conceive of anything standing there before. But, of course, it wouldn't be New York if an earlier building hadn't been razed, with dollar signs dancing in the heads of the destroyers.

One such building is the home of the New York Stock Exchange, located on Broad Street, near the corner of Wall Street. It is, by any measure, an amazing achievement: As R.H.Thomas, the chairman of the NYSE's Building Committee, said when the building was still being planned, ”Where so many of our members spend the active years of their lives, they are entitled to the best that architectural ingenuity and engineering skill can produce.” This ingenuity and skill expressed itself in the trading floor, at the time one of the largest indoor spaces in the world: 109 by 140 feet, the walls clad in marble all the way up -- 72 feet! -- to the ornate gilt ceiling. Also astonishing, is the building’s front, its entire façade made of a single glass window, 96 feet long and 50 feet high. To top it all, the trading floor is crowned by a 900 square foot skylight. The current building is relatively new, its iconic (and now iconically flag-draped) Corinthian columns and massive sculptured pediment, opened in 1903. The exchange itself had humbler beginnings. Indeed, it began on the street - as so much in New York does.

In the eighteenth century stock traders exchanged securities gathered under a buttonwood tree that stood outside of 68 Wall Street. The eventual move indoors, and the formal start of the NYSE, was precipitated by the Buttonwood Agreement, signed by 24 brokers (including the wonderfully named Isaac Gomez) on May 17, 1792. After several moves, the Exchange alighted at its current home in 1865, at the close of the Civil War.

So what was before what is? In this case, a lot -- but the one previous resident that I'd like to focus on has a lot to do with the peculiarities of Broad Street itself. Broad Street is one of those strange lower Manhattan streets where the numbers move, Nile-like, up as you travel south. Thus, Federal Hall, at the corner of Wall and Broad, marks the "beginning" of Broad Street, and it has one of the longest histories of any New York street.

Federal Hall

 In fact, at its creation, Broad wasn't a street at all. A woodcut from about 1650 shows that Broad "Street" actually started as a canal. It was dubbed the "Heere Gracht," or "Gentlemen's Canal," named after a waterway that had recently been built in Amsterdam. Like a crooked finger, the canal started on the eastern side of the island’s southern tip, and then curved to run almost due north. By the 1660s, the Heere Gracht was lined with two, three, and four story buildings that sported the traditional stepped roofs of Dutch architecture, and narrow sidewalks running along either side of the canal. Ships coming in to the harbor could pull right up the canal, and unload their cargo using winches and pulleys that were affixed to the tops of buildings' roofs. Heere Gracht was the largest canal in New Amsterdam, fed in part by a brook that ran from the common lying north of it, called the Shaape Waytie, or Sheep Pasture. A mid-19th century map of the original 17th century Dutch layout had a less prosaic name for the canal: the map termed it "The Common Ditch." This anodyne appellation conveys the canal’s second nature: it also served as an open sewer and stank terribly.

After the British takeover of the colony, the duke of York sent Major Edmund Andros to be its governor. Andros set about improving the waterfront, and according to Gotham, "[i]n 1675 residents along the Heere Gracht were ordered to fill in the old Dutch canal level with the street and 'then to pave & pitch the Same before their dores with stones.'" At the bottom of what now really was Broad Street, Andros ordered a massive, stone pier to be constructed. Known as the Great Dock, the pier helped ensure that Broad Street "was destined to be the city's principal commercial street well into the next century." Indeed, the city's first mercantile exchange was founded at the corners of what are now Broad, Bridge, and Pearl Streets.

By the late 18th century woodworking, then consisting of cabinetmakers and joiners, had become a major industry on Broad Street. This made sense, for several reasons, and demonstrates how both the intrinsic and cultivated qualities of the neighborhood determined the form and character of its uses -- why what was there, was there. First, and most obviously, woodworkers need wood. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fine woodworking utilized several species of wood in a single piece. The "primary" wood, displayed on the faces of drawers and cabinet frames, was usually something naturally beautiful: mahogany, walnut, or cherry. The "secondary" woods, not visible on the face, but used to make the actual drawers, backs, and other supporting parts, came from less exotic, more plentiful woods like white pine, birch, or oak. All of the wood used had to be imported from somewhere, and all of it came by ship. The closer to a major port -- here, the Great Dock -- the easier it was to obtain the necessary raw materials.

Second, a major component of Britain's colonial policy was to ensure that the colonies remained buyers -- and not makers -- of finished industrial products. During colonial times, Britain forbade Americans from opening steel mills, or otherwise making metal parts. Of course, cabinetmakers need steel tools, they needed nails, and they needed brass hardware. So it would be natural for cabinetmakers to set up shop near the major mercantile markets in a town -- again, Broad Street fit the bill well.

Third, a piece of furniture required the skills of a number of specialized crafts, even in the early eighteenth century: joiners, who put pieces together; carvers; turners, who used lathes to form shapes such as chair bannisters from cylinders of wood; gilders; upholsterers; and finishers could all labor on a single finished work. It made sense for cabinet shops to be located centrally with easy access to the various tradesmen, and Broad Street was just such a central location.

At the center of this central location, at the site of what is now the NYSE building, lay what was then known as 2 Broad Street. There, in 1792, a twenty-four year old Scottish immigrant named Duncan Phyfe established his first cabinet shop in New York city. Phyfe had come to America around 1784, settled in Albany, and completed an apprenticeship there. Phyfe's move to New York took courage, as "[c]abinetmaking was a fiercely competitive line of work" at the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the competition was fierce just on Broad Street alone. The well-known cabinetmaker Joseph Meeks worked out of 43, 45, and 50 Broad Street; Edward Holmes and Simeon Haines set up shop at 48 Broad Street, and other contemporaries included famous craftsmen like Michael Allison and Deming & Bulkley. Despite the competition, there was no better place to be at the turn of the century, labor was cheap, abundant skilled journeymen could assist, and the number of patrons able to afford expensive and status-conferring works of furniture grew all the time.

Phyfe became the most successful of all these cabinetmakers, his operation growing to employ over 100 workers. By the time he moved his shop to Partition (now Fulton) Street, he was shipping furniture to customers in New Jersey, Philadelphia and as far south as Charleston. Phyfe's reputation was such that the grandees of New York, including John Jacob Astor, William Bayard and De Witt Clinton, purchased large suites of furniture from him. The emperor of Haiti, Henri Christophe, sought a Pfyfe bed for his bedroom. Even in the early nineteenth century, a large complement could set the buyer back $3,000.00. Phyfe's mature work, beginning around 1820, led a change in the dominant aesthetic from the heavily-carved Chippendale style, which reached its apotheosis in the work of Philadelphia craftsmen, to a new, "Empire" style. Empire furniture used the vocabulary of Greek and Roman architecture to create cleaner and lighter pieces.

At his death, Pfyfe was worth over $300,000, and he was buried in a stately mausoleum in Wood-Lawn Cemetery. Today, Duncan Phyfe's furniture can be seen in the White House Green Room, and the Metropolitan Museum. In November 2009, the Met will open a large retrospective on Phyfe, the first in almost 80 years.

Zack Intrater

Photos by Elizabeth Ralston

Visit Flickr for more photos.

Sources:
http://www.nyse.com/about/history/1022743347410.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_5_167/ai_n13778790/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Phyfe
http://www.picturehistory.com/product/id/1640
Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 (Oxford University Press 1999)