Finance History | JPMorgan Chase — A Water Charter That Opened a Bank at 40 Wall Street

People treat JPMorgan Chase as the glass tower at 383 Madison that always ran a consumer branch and a trading book from an S and P 500 listing. The oldest surviving book on that tree opened as a water company. On 2 April 1799 the New York legislature chartered the Manhattan Company to supply the city with clean water after yellow fever summers. The act allowed surplus capital to be used in any other lawful moneyed transaction. That clause was the bank. Directors put only 100,000 dollars of the authorized 2 million dollars of capital into wells, a horse pump beside Collect Pond, and a 100,000-gallon reservoir on Chambers Street. The rest went to an office of discount and deposit. On 1 September 1799 the Bank of the Manhattan Company opened in a house bought on the site of today's 40 Wall Street. Aaron Burr had steered the charter through a Federalist legislature that would not have granted him a bank on its face. Alexander Hamilton sat on the first water board, then helped raise a rival bank next door at 42 Wall. The waterworks sold to the city in 1808. Hollow pine logs from that grid still turn up under downtown pavement. The bank kept the Wall Street lot. Chase National, founded in 1877 by John Thompson and named for Salmon P. Chase, merged with the Manhattan Company in 1955 to form Chase Manhattan. J.P. Morgan and Co., the 1895 successor of Drexel, Morgan and Co., came in later, as did Bank One, Chemical, Manufacturers Hanover and the Washington Mutual book. The firm counts more than a thousand predecessor names. 40 Wall Street is still the address that makes the 1799 clause concrete. A water monopoly was the charter the Assembly would pass. A discount window was what the surplus clause allowed. The tower on the lot now carries another developer's name, but the pin is the same corner where the Manhattan Company bought a house and started taking deposits. Photo: 40 Wall Street, the lot the 1799 bank occupied, via Wikimedia Commons.