Before there was Lehman Brothers. Before there was Bear Sterns. Before there was Merrill Lynch. Even before there was AIG. There was:
Brown Brothers Harriman
Private Bankers
59 Wall Street
estab 1818
To say the firm was venerable would be understatement in extremus. Its partners, descended from the Mayflower, went to Yale, and professionally slid back and forth between Wall Street and Washington - making money and making laws. Life was good.
They sat behind roll-top desks and, best I could determine, had a license to mint money. They alone legally operated outside of the restrictive bounds of the Glass-Steagall Act for 75 years. That meant they could act as a commercial bank and an investment bank at the same time. Whoa!
Several years ago, in a fit of irrational exuberance and a tsunami of lobbying pressure, Congress repealed most of the more onerous provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act thereby allowing everyone else to get into the game.
The rest, as they say, is history.
When I arose this morning, the news was of foreign financial markets that had really tanked. Today could be a record setter on Wall Street - not in a good way. As it was yet another matchless fall day I, like a moth to a flame, grabbed my camera, walked across the George Washington Bridge, hopped on the A Train and headed south to Wall Street where (presumedly) the action was.
I once worked on Wall Street, but hadn't been since before 9/11, so I was struck when I emerged at the corner of Broadway and Nassau - struck by what I didn't see. The view in the picture to the right never existed. The towers of the World Trade Center blocked the two buildings behind which were, by the way, built on the landfill created by the World Trade Center's excavation in the 60's.
It was now starting to sink in. This relatively small piece of Manhattan Island had now been an international ground zero twice in less than a decade.
I'd come to Wall Street to snap pictures of modern-day bankers, brows furrowed, shoulders sagging, world at an end. I'd be an invisible observer in the middle of a hurricane.
What I got was beyond what I could have imagined. Wall Street 2008 is a post-9/11 theme park. Most of the street is blocked off, some with those big steel come-out-of-the-road things that you see all over Washington. Flak-jacketed police with machine guns were ubiquitous, including several in front of the formerly sacred grand entrance to the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company which was now slathered with available real estate signs akin to an abandoned waterfront warehouse.
And bankers? I saw these two on the left. Period.
The old Brown Brothers is a Pink shirt retail store (pictured above) and the second floor (where I will now confess my first office was) is a fitness center. The old limestone, granite, and marble bank facades are condos, retail stores (Tiffany & Co.) and a garishly renamed - The Trump building at 40 Wall! Gasp! Gone are the bankers, traders, and age old denizens of the street that once huddled around incoming schooners to transact the nations brokerage business.
Really gone.
Like the rest of tourist New York, it is choked with class trips, foreign tourists, and in Wall Street's case gawkers like me.
The structures remain the same, but all else is changed from the Wall Street that I first saw as a rookie bank trainee in August 1972. The stoic age old institutions that I naively felt worthy of staking my fledgling career, are crushed, dismembered, or significantly altered.
One institution, however, happily remains the same...
"sine 'em up, young man, shine 'em up."
The shoe-shiners in front of the Trinity Church Cemetery on Broadway.
Good Lord, what you have seen.
Thanks fellas.
And thank you for visiting.
Jack
