Adjoining the Sub-Treasury in Wall Street, is the UNITED STATES ASSAY OFFICE, a branch of the Mint. This squat and dingy building which stood here so long has been supplanted by a modern structure. Here are great refining furnaces, where $50,000,000 worth of the precious metals are melted in a year; hydraulic press, with a pressure of 200 tons to the square foot, which compresses the refined gold into $20,000 cheeses; delicate scales, which register weights ranging from a thousand pounds to a single hair from one's head, and piles of gold bricks.

Further down the street, on the opposite side, is seen the National City Bank Building, with its double tier of immense granite columns. This is the old Custom House, which was built at a cost of $I,800,000. No longer serving for the growing volume of the customs business, it was sold by the Government for $3,500,000.
The streets which are near Wall Street and open out from it—Cedar, Pine, Broad, Nassau, William, Exchange Place and lower Broadway—are in all essentials a part of it. The term "Wall Street" as meaning a financial center includes them all.

Though we enter the Stock Exchange from Wall Street, the Exchange fronts on Broad Street. Opposite the Sub-Treasury at the corner of Broad and Wall is the white marble Drexel Building, with the offices of J. P. Morgan & Co. Next to it on Broad Street is the Mills Building. South rises the twenty-story Broad Exchange, and in floor space were one of the largest office buildings in the world. Notable structures on the west of the street are the twenty-one-story Commercial Cable with its twin domes, the fifteen-story Johnston and the Edison, deserving of attention for the richness and dignity of its facade. Turn which way we may from Wall street, we shall find ourselves in a maze of deep and narrow canons, for here we are in the heart of New York's high buildings.

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