31. J. P. Morgan & Co. Building

AKA: Morgan Guaranty Trust Company Building; Downtown by Philippe Starck
Location: 23 Wall Street
Built: 1913-1914
Architect: Trowbridge & Livingston
National Register Number: 72000874
Listed: June 19, 1972
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



This building is the subject of one of the most iconic photos in early modernist photography, Paul Strand's 1915 Wall Street. The relationship of the building and its deeply recessed windows to the people on the street irresistibly summons all manner of potted sociological interpretations in the suggestable. Robert Morse Crunden: "...before these masses scurry buglike humans, mere undifferentiated shadows, all heading like lemmings off to the left, each casting a separate shadow in what seems to have been an early morning sun." Mark Stevens: "The image is a fearful intimation of tragedy, a presentiment of a century of spiritual crisis. You can see foreshadowed the inhuman scale of totalitarian power; the emptying of traditional meaning into the void; the cranking of human beings into the geometric maw of modernity." Keey-rist. The boldness of the black shapes in contrast to the gleam of morning light make it easy to ignore little details, like the guy carrying his walking stick (or umbrella) in a most un-lemming-like way. And, as the photo is so tightly composed, you can't tell from the photo the building's design owes less to "modernity" than to the classical precepts of architecture, and that the building itself is actually only four stories tall.

Even in the smaller scale of 1914's global economy, it is frankly amazing that J. P. Morgan & Co. was headquartered here. It doesn't seem like it'd be enough. Architectural machismo is ordinarily understood in terms of building bigger, taller, wider, but here, the reverse is true. The House of Morgan built it small, defiantly turning down a chance to maximize an investment in some of the priciest real estate in the world, as if to say such potential revenue would be mere straw compared to the moolah made day-in, day-out behind these doors.

It's part of a condo complex now, of course.

30. New York Stock Exchange

Location: 11 Wall Street
Built: 1901-1903
Architects: George B. Post; J.Q.A. Ward and Paul Bartlett (pediment); Trowbridge & Livingston (1923 addition)
National Register Number: 78001877
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



The first and fourth (and presumably the second and third) edition of the AIA Guide to New York City calls this one of "one of the few great architectural spaces open to the public in this city." The fifth won't. Because...well, you know. The terrorists. They ruin everything, don't they? (A warning: there are oceans of ambivalence behind my flipness.) The NYSE offered tours to mere civilians up until 9/11, but now, if you do a search for the word "tour" on the NYSE Euronext site, the first thing that comes up isn't a search result, but a note: "The NYSE is not open for visits or tours." (Obviously a few people are royally sick of being asked certain questions.) The largest stock exchange in the whole effing world, a linchpin of all civilization whether we like it or not, it is too important to be public, perhaps. So it is protected through extraordinary means for the city. The streets surrounding the NYSE are blocked off from traffic, either with checkpoints, retractable barriers, or huge quartz-shaped boulders suitable for sitting on.



And yet, after 9/11, even as the area around the NYSE became a paranoid fortress, it also became more of a tourist destination than it ever was. Largely free of cars, crowds of people mill around on the streets, taking pictures of each other. Even with the guys carrying the machine guns who stand in front of the J.P. Morgan building, it is a cautiously festive place, at least during work hours. There are even little café tables and chairs in the middle of Broad Street where people can sit in front of the NYSE main entrance and wonder what kind of tumult is going on behind its oversized Corinthian columns and overwrought American flag.