David Litterick: America's craze for historic sites now includes Wall Street
You don't have to do much to become an historic monument in America. Being the young country it is, waiting too long for the light to turn green is enough to get a preservation order slapped on you.
It should come as little surprise, then, that there are more than one million buildings in America covered by the National Register of Historic Places.
Some of them would barely warrant a second look, others are so "historic" you can imagine them being branded "modern monstrosities" by Prince Charles and his ilk.
Among them are the Buena Vista Vineyard in Sonoma Valley, the Bertuccini Barbershop in Mississippi and the Hamm Brewery in Minnesota. And now Wall Street.
This week a 36-block area of downtown Manhattan, better known for its sleek modern skyscrapers than its historic houses, was added to the list.
To be fair, Wall Street probably deserves its designation more than most. In the 17th Century the wall from which it takes its name marked the northern boundary of the city, built by African slaves to keep out the marauding Indians.
Later, it was where the Bill of Rights was adopted, George Washington was sworn in as the first US President and where the New York Stock Exchange was founded under a sycamore tree. And of course in 1929 it became synonymous with the crash that sparked the Great Depression, the event that, more than anything else, turned the once-swampy cowfield into the global centre of capitalism.
That Wall Street is now on the Historic Register means little apart from the fact that the city gets to post a load of brown plaques about the place, but it comes as the old heart of Wall Street as a centre of commerce is almost itself becoming a thing of the past.
As more and more of the financial services industry shifts north to midtown Manhattan and elsewhere, the area is emerging as a new residential neighbourhood, with thousands of new apartments. About 10,000 people have moved to the area since 2001.
The sycamore tree is now long gone, along with most of the original Dutch settlement, but Steven McClain, president of the National Architectural Trust, said Wall Street still has the power to "tell us who we are as a nation".
"It's possible that no single area tells the story of America's progression from a primarily rural nation to a diverse industrial society as well as the Wall Street Historic District," he insists, even as the stock market was crashing once again just a few yards away from where he was speaking.
"This designation honours both the history and the architecture of Wall Street."
Whether that architecture will still be there this time tomorrow remains to be seen. Will trading systems collapse and aeroplanes fall out of the sky? ...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
It should come as little surprise, then, that there are more than one million buildings in America covered by the National Register of Historic Places.
Some of them would barely warrant a second look, others are so "historic" you can imagine them being branded "modern monstrosities" by Prince Charles and his ilk.
Among them are the Buena Vista Vineyard in Sonoma Valley, the Bertuccini Barbershop in Mississippi and the Hamm Brewery in Minnesota. And now Wall Street.
This week a 36-block area of downtown Manhattan, better known for its sleek modern skyscrapers than its historic houses, was added to the list.
To be fair, Wall Street probably deserves its designation more than most. In the 17th Century the wall from which it takes its name marked the northern boundary of the city, built by African slaves to keep out the marauding Indians.
Later, it was where the Bill of Rights was adopted, George Washington was sworn in as the first US President and where the New York Stock Exchange was founded under a sycamore tree. And of course in 1929 it became synonymous with the crash that sparked the Great Depression, the event that, more than anything else, turned the once-swampy cowfield into the global centre of capitalism.
That Wall Street is now on the Historic Register means little apart from the fact that the city gets to post a load of brown plaques about the place, but it comes as the old heart of Wall Street as a centre of commerce is almost itself becoming a thing of the past.
As more and more of the financial services industry shifts north to midtown Manhattan and elsewhere, the area is emerging as a new residential neighbourhood, with thousands of new apartments. About 10,000 people have moved to the area since 2001.
The sycamore tree is now long gone, along with most of the original Dutch settlement, but Steven McClain, president of the National Architectural Trust, said Wall Street still has the power to "tell us who we are as a nation".
"It's possible that no single area tells the story of America's progression from a primarily rural nation to a diverse industrial society as well as the Wall Street Historic District," he insists, even as the stock market was crashing once again just a few yards away from where he was speaking.
"This designation honours both the history and the architecture of Wall Street."
Whether that architecture will still be there this time tomorrow remains to be seen. Will trading systems collapse and aeroplanes fall out of the sky? ...