American Psycho | Federal Hall — Twenty-Six Wall Street, Standing In for the Whole Machine

Most of the film is Toronto wearing a Manhattan suit. A handful of shots are the real thing, and this is the most quietly loaded of them: Bateman leaving the office, framed against the Greek Revival columns and the bronze George Washington at 26 Wall Street. Mary Harron needed one image that said New York money without a single line of dialogue. She took the building where the country started.

The original Federal Hall stood here from 1703 as New York's second city hall. The First United States Congress met inside it, the Bill of Rights was drafted under its roof, and Washington was sworn in as the first president on its balcony in 1789. That building was demolished in 1812. The one you photograph today is a customs house completed in 1842, later a sub-treasury holding the federal gold reserve, and since the twentieth century a national memorial run by the National Park Service. John Quincy Adams Ward's Washington was set on the steps in 1883, standing roughly where the balcony had been.

Admission is free. It is open on weekdays, and it received 63,314 visitors in 2024 — a fraction of the traffic pouring past it toward the Exchange across the street.

Climb to the top step where the statue stands and turn around. From there you look straight into the pediment of the New York Stock Exchange. Two temples, forty metres apart, both built to be believed in. The film puts its serial killer on the steps between them and lets you do the rest.