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NEW YORK EXCHANGES. WALL STREET
The last of the great exchanges is the Consolidated, on the corner of Pearl and Beaver. It is essentially similar to the regular exchange, except that it deals more largely in small and odd lots—a sort of retail annex, as it were.
The building derives additional interest from the fact that it stands on the site of the residence of Lord Sterling, who commanded the American troops at the disastrous battle of Long Island, but saved them from capture by brilliant maneuvering. He is buried in Trinity.
There are a number of tablets in this vicinity which we might look at before returning to Wall Street and starting uptown. At Broad and Beaver is one to Marinus Willet, which marks the site of the seizure of arms by the Sons of Liberty from the British in 1775.
At 73 Pearl Street is one to mark the site of the first City Hall erected by the Dutch under Governor Kieft, known as the Stadt Huys (1653). The weather vane on this old building was saved at its destruction in 1699 and finally came into the possession of Washington Irving, who kindly bequeathed it on his death to the Society of St. Nicholas, in whose custody it now is. This old Dutch City Hall was succeeded by the one already described on the corner of Wall Street and Nassau.
At No. 90 is a tablet commemorating one of the most destructive fires that ever visited any city-the great fire of 1835, which destroyed over twenty million dollars worth of property, an almost unbelievable sum for these days. How New York ever survived such a calamity is hard to understand.
This fire, however, did much to hasten the construction of the Croton Aqueduct, whereby running water in houses became possible, a public benefit which ultimately proved of greater value in many ways than the huge loss caused by this fire.
The rather wide street at Coenties Slip is now a small public park—the Jeanette, named after the Herald's Arctic Expedition ship. In the filling-in process of this slip, part of the original fleet of canal boats lie buried, that came from Buffalo to New York Harbor bringing casks of Lake Erie water to mingle with the Atlantic.
The magnificent building on the corner of South Street is the far famed Seaman's Institute, which looks after the welfare of Jack ashore. It has been of inestimable benefit to this element, and its admonition to "WRITE HOME," which greets you on almost every floor of the splendid building, is only one of the really practical good things it has done. A magnificent lantern, on a tower of the roof, discernable thirty miles from shore, is a tribute to the fidelity of the officers and crew of the ill fated Titanic. A tablet records the main incidents of this saddest of all sea tragedies.
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