The Big Apple is volatile like few cities. The comparison is useful with that fruit that identifies it, that if someone has not eaten it from the tree, it falls to the ground ripe and is transformed into fertilizer.
This is New York, a mutant city. The question, what was here before?, arises more than usual when walking around and seeing the emergence of businesses or skyscrapers that supplant others, demolished despite fame or success. There is no law of protection other than the law of the real estate market.
Times Square is called that because The New York Times had its headquarters there (the Times Tower, where the New Year's ball now falls), a venue that the newspaper abandoned in 1913, as Gay Talese recalls in his book Bartleby and I. This memory exercise on a world-famous corner also serves as an application for Wall Street, another bright point on the atlas, at the moment of its goodbye.
Let no one put their hands on their heads. The name continues to be applied universally to capital and the stock market. The explanation is found in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, the best showcase of that world, which stated: “Wall Street has abandoned Wall Street.”
When John Pierpont Morgan (JP to friends and banking) arrived on Wall Street, then referring only to the street, it was a disorganized jungle of competing interests and one of the country's many financial centers. When he left that enclave in 1913, for biological reasons, it was a close-knit group of large companies that led one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.
Mr. JP has died again. The largest American bank leaves the street where US influences were born.
JP Morgan Chase closed its branch at 45 Wall Street, a circumstance that marks the end of 150 years of physical ties between the bank and the street that became a generic term for the global monetary business.
It is one of the last of the Mohicans since most of the banks and brokerage firms that once populated that street have already moved to new quarters in Manhattan and beyond.
The terrorist attack of 9/11 in 2001, which hit very close by and demolished the twin towers that symbolized the economic supremacy of the United States, led to the origin of this exodus. The pandemic further contributed to extending this flight of venues from their historical habitat.
The departure of JP Morgan is a milestone. One of the pioneers, who had his initial home at 23 Wall Street overlooking the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is leaving. From that point, this firm grew as one of the most powerful banking institutions on the world stage.
The expression has evolved. Talking about a Wall Street bank is equivalent to a financial company with operations and investments around the world, regardless of its location.
Led by Jamie Dimon, another shark in the sector, JP Morgan opened its headquarters in mid-Manhattan in 2001. It is currently preparing to move in 2025 to a new 60-story skyscraper on Park Avenue. JP Legacy employs more than 23,000 employees in New York alone and has more than 290 branches.
He no longer has any left in his first home. Her birthplace, the location at 23 Wall Street, often has “for rent” signs.
Gone are the times of the founder and colleagues. “Wall Street is today the most powerful center on the continent. Its daily transactions are telegraphed to all the cities of the Union and to the commercial capitals of the world,” wrote Matthew Hale in 1874 in his volume dedicated to this street.
Converted into a much more residential neighborhood, tourists do not notice this desertion of the banking core from which one of the New York myths was built. For the photos they already have the statue of Fearless Girl, who looks defiantly at the stock exchange building, and the Wall Street bull.
