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).
