Finance History|23 Wall Street — The House of Morgan Opened Without Morgan

People treat 23 Wall Street as if J. Pierpont Morgan ran the country from this lobby. He never worked a day in it. The seven-sided lot at Wall and Broad had already been the firm's corner since 1873, when Drexel, Morgan & Co. took rooms in the older Drexel Building. In 1912 the partnership bought the site for a reported $3 million in 1912 dollars, then the dearest real-estate figure quoted on the street, and tore the Drexel pile down. Trowbridge & Livingston filed plans in February 1913. Morgan died in Rome on 31 March 1913, weeks before demolition finished. His son, J. P. Morgan Jr., laid the cornerstone that December. The new house opened on 11 November 1914. It was four stories of limestone, with no firm name on the facade. The partners bought an entire Tennessee marble quarry for the interior. They left the exterior unsigned on purpose. Everyone on the block already knew the address. The banking room sat at sidewalk level behind those unlettered walls. From the public pavement a visitor still sees only the corner, the cornice, and the scars later left by the 16 September 1920 bombing on Wall Street, a separate story. J.P. Morgan & Co. stayed in the building for seventy-five years. The 2000 merger with Chase Manhattan produced today's JPMorgan Chase, an S&P 500 constituent whose headquarters now sit elsewhere in Manhattan. The Corner remains a landmark without a nameplate. That was the point in 1914, and it is still the fact on the sidewalk. Photo: Irving Underhill, public domain, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.