Federal Hall on Wall Street in 1899, when it was still the Subtreasury. (New York Times)
If, as Professor Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia says, America begins in New York, no place embodies that beginning more than Federal Hall.
Overshadowed today by its towering neighbors, the Greek Revival temple stands on what the New Yorker’s Eric Homberger called “sacred ground for the making of the American republic”—where George Washington was inaugurated, where the first Congress convened, and where the flesh, including what would become the Bill of Rights, was placed on the bare bones of the Constitution (a forty-five-hundred-word document that never mentions the word “democracy”)—during the 531 days when New York City was the nation’s first capital. Even before that, it was the site of John Peter Zenger’s trial, which provided the foundation for press freedoms; the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, where a formal coalition of the colonies was first suggested; and the Congress of the Confederation, from 1785 to 1789.
The building would first be repurposed as a customs house, which, as New York dominated the nation’s maritime trade, would generate most of the federal government’s revenue by the mid-nineteenth century. Then the building would be transformed into a fortified branch of the United States Treasury, whose impregnable vaults would guard the largest repository of gold in the world.
Its triple service—in the names of democracy, commerce, and capitalism—elevate Federal Hall to an unrivaled role in shaping the city’s heritage. It symbolizes, the New York Times said, “America’s turbulent political babyhood and financial manhood.” Decades after the new president and the first Congress reached one agreement after another on the enduring structure of the federal government, the diarist and former New York City mayor Philip Hone delivered a toast to the old Federal Hall that evoked the site’s synonymy with the grand bargain: “It witnessed the greatest contract ever made in Wall Street.”
The national government’s decision to decamp from Philadelphia and Trenton to New York, at least for the time being, was enthusiastically welcomed by the city’s Common Council, which generously agreed to accommodate the out-of-towners by remodeling City Hall at Wall and Broad Streets. (The site was aptly named: Wall Street was the northern perimeter of where the Dutch stockade stood until the end of the seventeenth century; Broad Street was wider than most because it originally accommodated a canal that connected to the East River). Peter L’Enfant embarked on his first major professional project by enlarging and embellishing the seat of the city’s government (from 92 by 52 feet to 95 by 145 feet) and grafting an anomalous two-story Doric portico and a pediment graced with an eagle, stars, and arrows onto what contemporary illustrations depict as a fairly unspectacular red-brick building that dated to 1699 (and supposedly incorporated wood recycled from the Dutch stockade). While Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that public architecture is “the bone and muscle of democracy,” the historian David McCullough called the remodeled Federal Hall “the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style.”
Washington was inaugurated before a great crowd on April 30, 1789, and the city fathers proudly began building an executive mansion fit for a president. But barely a year after Washington was sworn in, Alexander Hamilton sold the city down the river (literally). He traded southern votes in Congress to assume state war debts for northern assent to transplant the capital to a swamp on the Potomac. The ungrateful federal elected officials and their fellow travelers left, first for Philadelphia and, ten years later, for Washington. Still, serving as the capital under the Continental Congress beginning in 1785 and as the first capital of the United States in 1789, however briefly, spurred the city’s recovery after seven disastrous years of British occupation and the 1776 fire. (The city of New York fared far better than L’Enfant. After rejecting George Washington’s initial offer of ten acres of land for his services, L’Enfant later petitioned the city for the land or for the equivalent remuneration. The city offered $750; again, he declined. In 1820, when he desperately appealed for any compensation whatsoever, the city refused to even consider his request. He died penniless.) If historic preservationists registered any outcry at the time, it was not loud enough to save the original Federal Hall, which New York City’s government repossessed when Congress departed. Finished in 1704, it was falling apart by 1812. With barely any recorded objection or a campaign to restore the relic, it was wantonly demolished, to be replaced by the new City Hall farther uptown. A few artifacts were presciently salvaged and dispatched, for reasons unknown, to the grounds of Bellevue Hospital on the East River (where they were preserved by the commissioners of Charities and Correction). Most of the detritus was sold for scrap.
By 1815, New York had established itself as the nation’s leading port, due to expansion in maritime commerce that Dutch traders had envisioned two centuries before. By now, New Yorkers were blessed not only by their well-protected natural harbor, but also by the inauguration in 1818 of regular packet boat service between New York and Liverpool, the opening in 1821 of the Erie Canal, the city’s growing role as an intermediary between cotton growers in the South and British manufacturers, and its emergence as the primary gateway for immigrants. The Custom House, lodged in Government House, the structure at Bowling Green that the city fathers had so proudly built to woo the federal government two decades earlier, was by now also showing its age. Meanwhile, by 1828, as a result of the vast spike in maritime trade, the New York port was collecting enough in custom duties to finance the entire federal budget, except for debt service. Finding and constructing a replacement proved to be fraught with personal, professional, and political bickering.
Federal officials finally agreed in 1816 to reacquire the site of Federal Hall (with allowances to tailor the site for through street traffic, which the old building blocked), but it took until 1833 to do so. A design competition was won by Ithiel Town and Alexander J. Davis; William Ross, an English architect, was engaged to customize the interior; and the final plans were attributed to still another architect, John Frazee. Shaped like a parallelogram, two hundred feet long and ninety feet wide, the inside was dominated by a rotunda lined with sixteen Corinthian columns carved from solid pieces of marble to support a dome that evoked the Roman Pantheon and a Doric-columned facade mirroring the Greek Parthenon. Eighteen granite steps span the full width of the building’s southern exposure.
After seven years, the majestic million-dollar Tuckahoe marble building that now stands at 26 Wall Street was completed. Barber and Howe’s 1842 Historical Collections of the State of New York gushed that the new Custom House “surpasses any building of its size in the world, both in the beauty of its design and the durability of its construction.” With “not a particle of woodwork,” the architectural survey added, “it is probably the only structure in the world that has been erected so entirely fire-proof.” The New York Mirror boasted that the building “will surpass every other in the Union, for permanence in the materials and execution, as well as for its classical beauty.” In February 1842, the port collector and his staff moved in, on the 110th anniversary of George Washington’s birth. The bustle began immediately. The rotunda’s marble floor still bears furrows worn by the shuffling feet of impatient ship captains who queued up to pay duties. One guidebook described the daily scene:
Walk around the invoice desks—that scrap of paper came from Smyrna, and the ink of the other lying by it, was perhaps dried by sand of the lava of Aetna, that rough looking man in super-cargo of a vessel around the horn, and that smooth dapper looking individual is a clerk from a great silk house of Lyons or Tours. Every industry, every art finds its representative there, and evidence of treasure now floating on the broad seas is already deposited and being assessed.
Another commentator, observing that Americans “are the chariest people in the world, of their steps,” remarked that most regular patrons of the Custom House use the rear entrance, which is nearly at ground level on Pine Street, rather than trudging up the eighteen steps from Wall Street. In the nineteenth century, much like today, the front staircase attracted an eclectic crowd: “Thus the south steps would be comparatively unappropriated, were it not for the kindness of those peripatetic dealers in puppies and carving-knives, toothache drops and Shanghai fowls, who make it their general rendezvous and point of departure, and whose incongruous collection of wares and merchandise form one of the most characteristic features of the street.”
By the Civil War, annual custom duties collected by Custom House inspectors (Herman Melville was among them) were sufficient to pay off all the interest on the national debt. Goods that passed through the Port of New York accounted for more than half the dollar value of all the nation’s imports and exports—and an incalculable share of political patronage (the New York Custom House was the largest federal office in the nation) and, therefore, of corruption. (In 1838, Samuel Swartwout, the collector of the port, was accused of embezzling $1.2 million; the sum he owed was later whittled down to $200,000. He repaid what he had misappropriated and escaped prosecution.)
By then though, to those who worked there or came to conduct business, it had become clear that classic beauty had taken precedence over practicality in the building’s design. The surge in imports and exports had exceeded the building’s capacity, and in 1862, the Customs Service moved to the Merchant’s Exchange at 55 Wall Street (where it would remain until 1907, when it was transplanted again to Bowling Green).
The timing couldn’t have been better. The Treasury Department, which was funneling most federal disbursements and other monetary transactions through New York, was becoming alarmed that the millions of dollars’ worth of coins and paper currency flowing past its tellers in the Assay Office was becoming vulnerable to fire and theft. With Congress shifting responsibility for managing the government’s money from commercial banks to the Independent Treasury System, Federal Hall’s five-foot-thick marble walls seemed ideal to securely house one of the six subtreasuries being established around the country to receive and disburse gold and silver. To fortify the already formidable structure, the Treasury’s security experts anchored four vaults on the main floor and one in the arched basement. They installed steel-barred doors and placed iron shutters over the windows. During the Civil War, the roof was transformed into a fortress. Four Gatling guns were hoisted into position and the loft was turned into an arsenal, stocked with rifles, ammunition, and grenades to help secure the one hundred million dollars or so in gold and silver stored there. Whether word circulated that the building was unbreachable or nobody realized what was inside, the subtreasury was never stormed, not even in the aftermath of World War I, when European spending on armaments and other military supplies swelled America’s gold reserves to record proportions and, for the first time, the United States became a creditor nation (between 1914 and 1917, the government’s gold stock doubled). After the war, though, a Red Scare gripped the nation and threatened the totems of capitalism. In 1920, an anarchist bombing that apparently targeted the House of Morgan across the street killed thirty-eight people and wounded four hundred more, though the subtreasury was unscathed. Pockmarks from the shrapnel are still visible on 23 Wall Street.
In 1913, the subtreasury was the first place where New Yorkers could buy a buffalo nickel (the model for the bison lived in the Central Park Zoo) on the building’s last day before its monetary functions as custodian of precious metals was shifted to the Federal Reserve System. The government contemplated razing Federal Hall altogether and replacing it with a replica of the original to house a branch post office, but bureaucrats eventually decided to spare the building.
“History is deep there,” the Times wrote in 1920. “The Subtreasury Building richly deserves to be made a public monument.” Largely relegated to anonymity, though, it was demoted to a warren for miscellaneous government agencies. For nearly two decades the building housed one or another office of the Passport Division of the State Department, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Coast Guard, the Public Works Administration, and the Public Health Service (though plans to house Prohibition enforcement agents in the building were quickly short-circuited after civic-minded New Yorkers complained that the mission was not compatible with the lofty goals of the Founding Fathers). In 1939, on the 150th anniversary of Washington’s inauguration (and in conjunction with the New York World’s Fair), Congress recognized the structure as a national historic site; in 1955 it was proclaimed the Federal Hall National Memorial.
In 2002, Congress reconvened there for the first time since 1790, in a symbolic show of support for the city that hastened its recovery from the 9/11 attack (just as the Confederation Congress had done by making New York the nation’s first capital after the American Revolution). Reverberations from the Trade Center’s collapse, combined with years of neglect, necessitated major repairs, however. The newly renovated Federal Hall steps remain not only a gawking roost (and about the only place in the dense, highly secured financial center to sit), but a bastion of free speech (after all, the First Amendment was approved there). The steps attract eclectic groups, from suffragists to war bond rallies (Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks might have drawn the biggest crowd in 1918) to Occupy Wall Street. The National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy, in collaboration with the National Park Service, which operates the underutilized site, plans to transform Federal Hall into a celebration of democracy and debate.
Meanwhile, the most prominent feature at the intersection of Wall and Broad is the larger-than-life statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall, roughly at the spot where he was inaugurated. The statue, by John Quincy Adams Ward, is a favorite of sightseers posing for photographs and a regular on televised business news broadcasts from the New York Stock Exchange diagonally across the street. In his quixotic 2012 odyssey titled My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan recalled his first visit to Federal Hall, on an anniversary of Washington’s inauguration. He got there just as a reenactor dressed as Henry Knox, the first secretary of war, was giving a talk following an address by a Washington look-alike. Sullivan was euphoric when he came upon the stone that the first president stood on when he took the oath. He stepped outside to share his enthusiasm with a cop, mentioning the anniversary of Washington’s inaugural.
Federal Hall National Memorial today, awaiting its latest incarnation as a celebration of democracy and debate. (George Samoladas)
“You just missed him,” the cop said.
“What do you mean?”
“George Washington—you just missed him.” The cop pointed to the entrance to Federal Hall, the spot where Washington would have been sworn in. “The whole thing ended a couple of minutes ago. He’s upstairs now, having a hot dog.”