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On April 21, 2010, The Skyscraper Museum in New York City will open The Rise of Wall Street, an exhibition that charts the architectural evolution of one of the world's most famous locales. "Wall Street" is a broad metaphor for the American center for global finance and a real place with an inordinately rich history layered into every lot of its nearly half-mile length, stretching from Trinity Church on Broadway to the East River.
From colonial times, when the first bastions were erected to mark the edge of town, Wall Street has been continuously transformed, both in function--from commercial and residential to financial–as well as in scale. Row houses were replaced by low-rise banks, then by massive high-rise office buildings. The skyscrapers that line Wall Street today represent the climax species of an intense urban process. A unique feature of the exhibition is its monumental graphic collages, the “Vertical Wall Street” murals that document successive buildings from Broadway to Pearl Street from 1850. These 11-foot tall murals dramatically illustrate the cycles of growth that shaped the financial district over time, charting both the evolution from small to tall and the growing girth of buildings enabled by new technologies and slow, but savvy site assembly.
Wall Street's high-rise history illustrates and exaggerates the typical story of skyscraper development expressed by the value of land and the demand for prime locations. As the district became the center of finance in the mid-19th century, Wall Street lots became the richest dirt on earth, selling at the highest prices per square foot ever recorded. The multiplicity of small lots and continuous occupation for more than 300 years also meant that Wall Street's big buildings represented the most expensive and challenging engineering and construction projects of their time. The exhibit explores how high stakes in architecture paralleled financial speculation at the heart of the capital of capitalism.
The exhibition documents this continuous urban transformation through a rich array of drawings and prints, models, historic photographs, and film. The installation features unique items from the Museum’s large collection of construction photographs of the Bankers Trust Tower at 14 Wall Street and the Bank of Manhattan Company Building at 40 Wall Street; marketing brochures; drawings and engravings; commemorative books; historic street views and postcards. A magnificent architectural rendering of 1 Wall Street, the original Irving Trust Bank, an Art Deco masterpiece by architect Ralph Walker on loan from the successor firm HLW and a 1930 hand-made folio promoting 40 Wall Street as “Designed for Business” are two highlights, as well as a models of the massive Postmodern tower of 60 Wall Street designed by Kevin Roche and of a proposed, but unbuilt, new home for the New York Stock Exchange, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 2000.
The exhibition will continue at The Skyscraper Museum through October.
Click here to visit official website.
A lecture series on the history of the architectural evolution of Wall Street will accompany the exhibition in the summer and fall.
The Rise of Wall Street is presented with support from Deutsche Bank, a legacy institution of downtown New York’s financial district, still located on Wall Street.
The Rise of Wall Street is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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