American banks are leaving Wall Street

The largest bank in the United States has pulled out of the street where the American financial industry was born.

JPMorgan Chase on Friday closed its Wall Street branch, ending more than 150 years of physical relationship between the bank and the street synonymous with the world’s money business.

The move will not be felt by most tourists visiting the area, writes The Wall Street Journal. Most of the banks and brokerage houses that once populated Wall Street are gone, finding new homes around Manhattan or elsewhere. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, just blocks away, sparked an exodus that the Covid-19 pandemic helped accelerate.

The final departure of the giant JPMorgan is a milestone given its history in the old quarter. A little further down the street, at number 23, directly across from the New York Stock Exchange, J. Pierpont Morgan and his son transformed the company into one of the most powerful banks in the world. In the process, they help make the US the center of the global financial industry.

Today, a “Wall Street bank” is defined as a financial institution with commercial operations that span the globe and whose investment bankers advise senior managers. The actual street location of is relevant.

Meanwhile, historic Wall Street buildings are empty shells with empty storefronts and “For Lease” signs on their facades.

“You used to see men in double-breasted suits smoking cigars walking up and down the street, and limousines would be waiting in front of the big bank buildings to pick them up,” said Peter Tuchman, a NYSE broker. “It had an old-school Wall Street vibe that just hasn’t been there for a while.”

Banks take up several hundred square feet on the street, says John Santora, chairman of New York at real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. By 2000 alone, this figure was nearly 465,000 square meters.

Tourists still come to photograph the historic buildings and the nearby statue of the Fearless Girl. The famous Wall Street bull is also nearby. But bankers are rarely seen on the streets.

“Nobody comes here anymore,” complains Sunil Raleigh, who has owned a newsstand on Wall Street since 1991.

Raleigh is considering closing its booth as foot traffic has dropped by more than 50% since the pandemic. The tourists help but don’t make up for the loss of workers who were customers five days a week, he says.

Towering above it is a 55-story building built in the 1980s and occupied first by JPMorgan and then by Deutsche Bank. And from 2021 it is empty.

The busiest street

In the late 19th century, Wall Street drove the evolution of the US from a rural country into the world’s preeminent financial center. New York usurped London’s place as Wall Street banks helped finance America’s rapid industrial growth and later loaned billions to finance the armies of Europe.

The street became synonymous with American finance because of the stock exchange at the corner of Broad Street and Wall Street, as well as the banks headquartered there, such as JP Morgan & Company, the Bank of New York and the National City Bank, a predecessor of Citigroup.

“Wall Street is today the busiest street on this continent,” wrote Matthew Hale Smith in an 1874 book about the street. “Its daily transactions are telegraphed to every city in the Union, and to the capital of every business city in the world.”

Then the banks outgrew the street. Mergers created corporations with large commercial activities that needed larger spaces than the skyscrapers of 1920s Wall Street could offer.

JPMorgan left No. 23 in the 1980s and later moved to midtown Manhattan in 2001. The bank had explored buying the building at 23 Wall Street, executives said, but was never shy of a deal. The lender is now building a glitzy new office tower for its headquarters on Park Avenue, a few kilometers to the north.

Mausoleum and luxury gym

Tuchman, the NYSE floor broker, is seeing firsthand how the Street is changing. He began working there in 1985, writing telegraphic stock orders for Cowen & Co.

“The moment I walked down the street, I knew this was the place for me,” he says, adding, “There was energy, adrenaline, and chaos.”

The NYSE floor is much quieter now, full of buzzing computers and CNBC anchors. Outside, the presence of young professionals living in luxury apartment buildings is causing changes in historic financial landmarks.

High-end gym chain Equinox occupies the former Bankers Trust headquarters on Wall St. 14, the upper part of which was designed to resemble the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. The chain of department stores TJ Maxx is in the basement.

Tuchman remembers when it was a real bank.

“There were huge ceilings and every teller’s counter was made of beautiful hand-made bronze,” he says. “It was really amazing.”