Stock Market History: What—and Where is Wall Street?

Most people have heard of Wall Street as the place where the nation's most well known financial transactions take place. We've seen it in movies—brokers in suits screaming, sucking down cold coffee and shouting into a telephone in each hand. Wall Street is in New York City, and has been, in fact, since 1644, when the inhabitants of Manhattan built a wall across Manhattan Island to keep the marauding British at bay. In one way or another, Wall Street has been protecting Manhattan against invaders ever since.

In the early days of the country, Boston, MA was the major shipping center and the national center of commerce, with commodities and bonds financing the growth of the young economy. In the late 1700s, Wall Street was the center point of commerce in New York City, but as yet did not have a defined place indoor for transacting financial business. Merchants sold shares to their friends and associates out of their warehouses or places of business. In 1792, where Battery Park now stands, two dozen leaders of the financial community created the first stock exchange, called the Stock Exchange Office. The SEO became the New York Stock Exchange in 1863. There are other, smaller stock exchanges in other cities such as Chicago, but the NYSE is the most widely-known.

The second most widely-known exchange also began in New York as the Curbstone Brokers. Because the NYSE had minimum limits set on the number of shares companies had to sell in order to qualify for auction, the Curbstone Brokers sold shares for companies that were too small to meet the 100-share minimum required by the larger organization. The Curbstone Brokers met and auctioned shares for a century before taking their outdoor auction indoors. In 1953, this hardy organization became the American Stock Exchange, which still operates today.

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