55 Wall Street/20 Exchange Place

55 Wall Street/20 Exchange Place. . , 55 Wall Street , Isiah Rogers, architect, `1836-14; , McKim, Mead and White, addition, 1910, The enormous Ionic columns supporting the lower level of the Merchant’s Exchange at 55 Wall Street, each cut from a single piece of stone and weighing 45 tons, were floated on rafts from a quarry in Massachusetts and hauled to the site by 40 teams of oxen. The original Merchants Exchange had been founded in 1823 as a convenient gathering spot for the young city’s busy merchants, where they could simply find each other and make their deals. The new Exchange, built to replace he original after its destruction in the Great Fire of 1835, housed a rotunda large enough to hold 3,000 dickering merchants, Over the years, the building served as home to the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Chamber of Commerce and the Unites States Customs House, before being acquired by First National Bank. So taken was the bank’s president with the Wall Street history of the Exchange, that instead of replacing it, he retained McKim, Mead and White to double its size with a second colonnade in 1907., 20 Exchange Place , Cross and Cross, architects, 1931, A magnificent skyscraper that hoped to be the world’s tallest, the City Bank-Farmers Trust Company tower became one of the great spires of the downtown skyline. The enormous new building was created by the National City Bank (predecessor of today’s Citibank), which, from its nine-story classical home at 55 Wall Street, engineered a merger with Farmers Trust Company, and bridged across Exchange Place to build its new skyscraper headquarters. The building’s massive, irregularly shaped base of granite and limestone sits like an impregnable financial fortress on narrow Exchange Place, while above it rises a slender, square tower, designed primarily for its romantic presence in the skyline. ,