Around 1699, de Peyster donated part of his garden for the construction of a new city hall. That building was later renamed Federal Hall, which briefly served as the first capitol of the United States, and the site of the first inauguration of George Washington as president. It was replaced in 1842 with the Greek Renaissance structure that stands there today.

John Peter Zenger was a German printer and journalist in New York City. Zenger printed The New York Weekly Journal. He was accused of libel in 1734 by William Cosby, the royal governor of New York, but the jury acquitted Zenger, who became a symbol for freedom of the press. In 1733, Zenger began printing The New York Weekly Journal, which voiced opinions critical of the colonial governor, William Cosby. On November 17, 1734, on Cosby's orders, the sheriff arrested Zenger. After a grand jury refused to indict him, the Attorney General Richard Bradley charged him with libel in August 1735. Zenger's lawyers, Andrew Hamilton and William Smith, Sr., successfully argued that truth is a defense against charges of libel.John Peter Zenger trial would lead the way for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, which reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The building was renamed Federal Hall. Peter L'Enfant embarked on his first major professional project by enlarging and embellishing the seat of the city's government (from 92 by 52 feet to 95 by 145 feet) and grafting an anomalous two-story Doric portico and a pediment graced with an eagle, stars, and arrows onto what contemporary illustrations depict as a fairly unspectacular red-brick building that dated to 1699 (and supposedly incorporated wood recycled from the Dutch stockade). While Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that public architecture is "the bone and muscle of democracy," the historian David McCullough called the remodeled Federal Hall "the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style."Washington was inaugurated before a great crowd on April 30, 1789, and the city fathers proudly began building an executive mansion fit for a president. But barely a year after Washington was sworn in, Alexander Hamilton sold the city down the river (literally). He traded southern votes in Congress to assume state war debts for northern assent to transplant the capital to a swamp on the Potomac. The ungrateful federal elected officials and their fellow travelers left, first for Philadelphia and, ten years later, for Washington. Still, serving as the capital under the Continental Congress beginning in 1785 and as the first capital of the United States in 1789, however briefly, spurred the city's recovery after seven disastrous years of British occupation and the 1776 fire. (The city of New York fared far better than L'Enfant. After rejecting George Washington's initial offer of ten acres of land for his services, L'Enfant later petitioned the city for the land or for the equivalent remu-neration. The city offered $750; again, he declined. In 1820, when he desperately appealed for any compensation whatsoever, the city refused to even consider his request. He died penniless.) If historic preservationists registered any outcry at the time, it was not loud enough to save the original Federal Hall, which New York City's government repossessed when Congress departed. Finished in 1704, it was falling apart by 1812. With barely any recorded objection or a campaign to restore the relic, it was wantonly demolished, to be replaced by the new City Hall farther uptown. A few artifacts were presciently salvaged and dispatched, for reasons unknown, to the grounds of Bellevue Hospital on the East River (where they were preserved by the commissioners of Charities and Correction). Most of the detritus was sold for scrap.

Thanksgiving has been celebrated nationally since 1789, with the first proclamation by President George Washington after a request by Congress. The Continental Congress, the legislative body that governed the United States from 1774 to 1789, issued several "national days of prayer, humiliation, and thanksgiving", a practice that was continued by presidents Washington and Adams under the Constitution, and has manifested itself in the established American observances of Thanksgiving and the National Day of Prayer today. As President, on October 3, 1789, George Washington made the proclamation and created the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the national government of the United States of America. On the day of thanksgiving, Washington attended services at St. Paul's Chapel in New York City, and donated beer and food to imprisoned debtors in the city.

After the Revolutionary War, America`s First Congress met in City Hall (Federal Hall) from 1785 to 1790, the Bill of Rights was written and ratified. New York City was the first capital of the United States once the Constitution was ratified. George Washington took the oath of office to become the first President of the United States from the balcony of the old City Hall.Pierre L`Enfant renovated the building from the former British colonial city hall.

You could say with great assurance that George Washington stepped here, "here" being the second-floor balcony of what is now the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street. Washington was inaugurated as the first president there on April 30, 1789, after Peter L'Enfant renovated New York's old City Hall into the nation's first Capitol.&nbsp;In keeping with the city's early commitment to recycling, the century-old building was razed in 1812 and sold for $450 in scrap after Congress decamped first for Philadelphia and then for the swampy banks of the Potomac. (The first City Hall had stood at 71 Pearl Street and was sold in 1699.) Among the few relics salvaged from the second City Hall was a brownstone slab, nine feet by four feet, on which Washington stood during the ceremony. (It is on display at Federal Hall, along with a portion of the original balcony railing and the Bible with which he took the oath of office.)The inauguration marked Washington's triumphal return to New York. When the city was the capital under the Articles of Confederation (from 1785 to 1788), he dubbed New York "the Seat of the Empire"-which is believed to be the source of its nickname, the Empire State.The city he returned to as president was poised for imperial promise. "One of the great advantages of the Constitution over the Articles of Confederation," Harvard Professor Edward L. Glaeser wrote, "is that the Constitution significantly reduced the barriers to interstate trade. As these barriers fell, the possibility for interstate trade rose and the advantage of a location near the center of the colonies increased." That augured well for the proposed Potomac site that Washington favored. After 1790, New York would no longer be the capital city, the role it played under the Constitution from March 4, 1789 through December 5, 1790. Instead, it would become the city of capital. Historians still debate whether Alexander Hamilton shortchanged the city when he agreed to relocate the capital in the South in exchange for federal assumption of the states' Revolutionary War debt. Columbia's Kenneth T. Jackson, for one, doesn't think so. "New York became the mercantile and financial capital first of the nation and then the world," he said, "and maybe its excitement and vitality derive from the fact that it lacks the boring buildings and boring people who are part of the permanent bureaucracy' James Madison and Thomas Jefferson wanted a Southern capital. Hamilton wanted the new federal government to assume the debts of the states, incurred mostly in the North. After Jefferson ran into Hamilton at Washington's house on Cherry Street in Lower Manhattan, the three Founding Fathers agreed to meet for dinner at Jefferson's home at 57 Maiden Lane. There, they compromised. In July 1790. the Residence Act was passed, followed by the Assumption Act, and the capital decamped for a Southern, racially segregated city after an interim stay in Philadelphia. "When all is done," Abigail Adams wrote prophetically, "it will not be Broadway.<br>&nbsp;

Overshadowed today by its towering neighbors, the Greek Revival temple stands on what the New Yorker's Eric Homberger called "sacred ground for the making of the American republic" —where George Washington was inaugurated, where the first Congress convened, and where the flesh, including what would become the Bill of Rights, was placed on the bare bones of the Constitution (a forty-five-hundred-word document that never mentions the word "democracy") —during the 531 days when New York City was the nation's first capital. Even before that, it was the site of John Peter Zenger's trial, which provided the foundation for press freedoms; the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, where a formal coalition of the colonies was first suggested; and the Congress of the Confederation, from 1785 to 1789.The building would first be repurposed as a customs house, which, as New York dominated the nation's maritime trade, would generate most of the federal government's revenue by the mid-nineteenth century. Then the building would be transformed into a fortified branch of the United States Treasury, whose impregnable vaults would guard the largest repository of gold in the world.Its triple service-in the names of democracy, commerce, and capitalism-elevate Federal Hall to an unrivaled role in shaping the city's heritage. It symbolizes, the New York Times said, "Americas turbulent political babyhood and financial manhood. Decades after the new president and the first Congress reached one agreement after another on the enduring structure of the federal government, the diarist and former New York City mayor Philip Hone delivered a toast to the old Federal Hall that evoked the site's synonymy with the grand bargain: "It witnessed the greatest contract ever made in Wall Street." The national government's decision to decamp from Philadelphia and Trenton to New York, at least for the time being, was enthusiastically welcomed by the city's Common Council, which generously agreed to accommodate the out-of-towners by remodeling City Hall at Wall and Broad Streets. (The site was aptly named: Wall Street was the northern perimeter of where the Dutch stockade stood until the end of the seventeenth century; Broad Street was wider than most because it originally accommodated a canal that connected to the East River).&nbsp;

The current building was constructed in 1842

This sculpture depicts the moment after President Washington took the oath of office, which he did at Federal Hall on Wall Street in 1789. The pedestal was designed by Richard Morris Hunt.<br />

The Great Blizzard of 1888, Great Blizzard of '88, or the Great White Hurricane (March 11&ndash;14, 1888) was one of the most severe recorded blizzards in American history. The storm paralyzed the East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine, as well as the Atlantic provinces of Canada. Snow fell from 10 to 58 inches (25 to 147 cm) in parts of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and sustained winds of more than 45 miles per hour (72 km/h) produced snowdrifts in excess of 50 feet (15 m). Railroads were shut down and people were confined to their homes for up to a week. Railway and telegraph lines were disabled, and this provided the impetus to move these pieces of infrastructure underground. Emergency services were also affected.In New York, neither rail nor road transport was possible anywhere for days, and drifts across the New York&ndash;New Haven rail line at Westport, Connecticut, took eight days to clear. Transportation gridlock as a result of the storm was partially responsible for the creation of the first underground subway system in the United States, which opened nine years later in Boston. The New York Stock Exchange was closed for two days.Similarly, telegraph infrastructure was disabled, isolating Montreal and most of the large northeastern U.S. cities from Washington, D.C. to Boston for days. Following the storm, New York began placing its telegraph and telephone infrastructure underground to prevent their destruction.

On the afternoon of April 8, 1918, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks decided to do their part in the fundraising and made their way to the Sub Treasury Building. Between 20,000 and 30,000 people turned out to see their antics, the largest crowd ever assembled on Wall Street up to that time. <br />Chaplin threw himself into the war effort, embarking on a nationwide tour to promote the sale of bonds. That year he would make a propaganda film called 'The Bond'. But there may have been a bit of self-promotion in his appearance at the Sub Treasury. His film 'A Dog&rsquo;s Life' would conveniently open in movie theaters five days later.<br />People weren&rsquo;t used to hearing their movie stars speak in 1918. &ldquo;I never made a speech before in my life,&rdquo; he proclaimed through a megaphone that noon, standing in front of the statue of George Washington. &ldquo;But I believe I can make one now.&rdquo;<br />Fairbanks &mdash; known for swashbucklers and romances &mdash; happily broke character, goofing around with Chaplin to the delight of the crowd. &ldquo;Folks, I&rsquo;m so hoarse from urging people to buy Liberty bonds that I can hardly speak.&rdquo;<br />

As a symbol of Wall Street excesses, 23 Wall Street, the Bank of JP Morgan, was the target of a bomb attack on September 16, 1920. 33people were killed and more than 400 were injured. The perpetrators were never found. The facade also suffered significant damage. The pock marks from the explosion are still visible in the marble facade.One of the mobs which pushed everywhere trying to get word of friends or relatives following the bomb explosion in the office of J.P. Morgan &amp; Co. at Broad and Wall Streets which killed at least 15 and injured hundreds

On "Black Thursday", the economic bubble of the Roaring Twenties finally burst. Triggered by an overconfident public who were actively trading stocks purchased with easy credit, a raise in the interest rate by the Federal Reserve, low wages, the proliferation of debt, a struggling agricultural sector and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated. Stock prices fall sharply on a day of heavy liquidation. The following Monday, "Black Monday", the stock market falls 22.6%, the highest one-day decline in U.S. history. The crash triggers similar declines in markets around the world. The next day, "Black Tuesday", panic sets in as investors all try to sell their stocks at once. Over 16 million shares of stock were sold, setting a market record of over $14 billion in paper losses. Stock tickers could keep up with the heavy trading volume. At the end of the day, the market was down 33 points, more than 12.8% and the Great Depression began.Panic set in, and on October 24, Black Thursday, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. ... Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929), in which stock prices collapsed completely and 16,410,030 shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day

Overshadowed today by its towering neighbors, the Greek Revival temple stands on what the New Yorker's Eric Homberger called "sacred ground for the making of the American republic" —where George Washington was inaugurated, where the first Congress convened, and where the flesh, including what would become the Bill of Rights, was placed on the bare bones of the Constitution (a forty-five-hundred-word document that never mentions the word "democracy") —during the 531 days when New York City was the nation's first capital. Even before that, it was the site of John Peter Zenger's trial, which provided the foundation for press freedoms; the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, where a formal coalition of the colonies was first suggested; and the Congress of the Confederation, from 1785 to 1789.The building would first be repurposed as a customs house, which, as New York dominated the nation's maritime trade, would generate most of the federal government's revenue by the mid-nineteenth century. Then the building would be transformed into a fortified branch of the United States Treasury, whose impregnable vaults would guard the largest repository of gold in the world.Its triple service-in the names of democracy, commerce, and capitalism-elevate Federal Hall to an unrivaled role in shaping the city's heritage. It symbolizes, the New York Times said, "Americas turbulent political babyhood and financial manhood. Decades after the new president and the first Congress reached one agreement after another on the enduring structure of the federal government, the diarist and former New York City mayor Philip Hone delivered a toast to the old Federal Hall that evoked the site's synonymy with the grand bargain: "It witnessed the greatest contract ever made in Wall Street." The national government's decision to decamp from Philadelphia and Trenton to New York, at least for the time being, was enthusiastically welcomed by the city's Common Council, which generously agreed to accommodate the out-of-towners by remodeling City Hall at Wall and Broad Streets. (The site was aptly named: Wall Street was the northern perimeter of where the Dutch stockade stood until the end of the seventeenth century; Broad Street was wider than most because it originally accommodated a canal that connected to the East River).&nbsp;

Protesters set up camp in Zuccotti Park bringing economic inequality into the national spotlight spawning a worldwide Occupy movement. The Canadian anti-consumerist and pro-environment group/magazine Adbusters initiated the call for a protest. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption, and the undue influence of corporations on government&mdash;particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to income and wealth inequality in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.

The Lower Manhattan Historical Association ("LMHA") holds a parade through Lower Manhattan every year starting 2015.This parade is part of a resurgence of patriotic activities in Lower Manhattan on July 4, after a long hiatus from 1976 to 2015. It is in recognition of the recent growth of Lower Manhattan as one of the City's fastest growing residential neighborhoods and as one of the City's major centers of historical tourism.The parade, which traverses Wall Street and passes many of the historic monuments in Lower Manhattan - is designed to provide marchers and spectators with an understanding of the tremendous historic importance of Lower Manhattan.

An art installation of 50 distressed flags collected from each of the 50 states.The American flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Artist Mel Ziegler journeyed through all 50 United States between 2011 and 2016 and exchanged distressed American flags flying at civic and private locations&mdash;city halls, post offices, hospitals, homes, and schools&mdash;for new flags. The 50 decayed flags form a work, Flag Exchange, that spans the geography of our union, and represents the spectrum of our allegiance. Ziegler`s work is the catalyst for A Living Thing, which seeks to create space for common ground within our increasingly fractured civil discourse. A Living Thing offers a sanctuary for conversations, performances, debate, and acts of solidarity and resistanceFlag Exchange offers a powerful reminder that artists do new and vital things for our public life, even when nothing else works. Art finds the common ground that we've otherwise lost.

The massive sculpture is a brick facade of a canal house reminiscent of those that would have been found in 17th century, New York City`s Dutch colonial history. The one-ton hand-painted sculpture, is a 40-foot-high facade of a 17th-century gabled Dutch canal house.When George Washington was inaugurated at Federal hall in 1789, the New York City that had survived the brutal seven-year British occupation was still peppered with vestiges of the homes that 17th century settlers from the Low Countries had left behind.But those slender, gabled canal houses with their Flanders-brick facades were hardly the only legacy of 40 years of Dutch rule, from 1624-1664. What made New York unique among the American settlements was that the Dutch also instilled the values of religious freedom and free trade, well over a century before the first Congress enshrined those freedoms at Federal Hall, in what became known as the Bill of Rights.Originally Commissioned by curator Jan Hoet for his exhibition titled &ldquo;Over the Edges&rdquo; in Ghent, Belgium, Tolle replaced the fa&ccedil;ade of a 17th-century Flemish canal house with a three-dimensional version of its reflection in the water below, blurring the border between architecture and its environment.Tolle named the facade &ldquo;Eureka&rdquo; for the exclamation of discovery often attributed to Archimedes