Probably no tree played a bigger role in New York history than a lone buttonwood that stood on the north side of Wall Street at number 68. between William and Pearl. Twenty-four merchants and brokers convened there on May 17, 1792, and signed an agreement that would become the framework for what emerged in 1817 as the New York Stock & Exchange Board and in 1863 as the New York Stock Exchange. On a single sheet of paper that became known as the Buttonwood Agreement, the brokers agreed to charge commissions of no less than one quarter of a percentage point and to "give preference to each other in our negotiations.The tree lasted under a century--it was toppled by a storm on June 14, 1865 - but the agreement has endured in spirit through mergers and unimaginable expansion for well over two centuries. (The historic tree was an American sycamore with mottled bark, the name buttonwood survives largely as a financial markets column in The Economist.) The signers- a relatively diverse group that included five Jewish brokers--are immortalized in downtown street names, among them Barclay and Bleecker. No current members of the Exchange are direct descendants of the signers. They would meet at the Merchant's Coffee House and later convene at the Tontine, a coffeehouse at 82 Wall, on the northwest corner of Water Street, where they would meet regularly until they outgrew the space in 1817. Brokers met in a trading room on the three-story building's second floor;, but the Tontine also became the haunt of power brokers; traders who bought and sold slaves at the Meal Market across the street; and ship captains who registered their cargo of sugar, coffee, tea, molasses, cotton, and human beings. The Tontine was a nest of gossip, gambling, after-hours trading, and political intrigue- probably where the power lunch was born.According to one eyewitness, it was "filled with underwriters, brokers, merchants, traders, and politicians; selling, purchasing, trafficking, or insuring; some reading, others eagerly inquiring the news. Everything was in motion; all was life, bustle and activity."The Stock Exchange's main building, which opened in 1903 and is a neoclassic national historic landmark, is located at 18 Broad Street, the trading floor at 11 Wall. The six columns of the main building support a pediment adorned by the sculpture Integrity Protecting the Works of Man. On September 16, 1920, during the Red Scare, when fear of Bolshevism and anarchism was rampant, a bomb out-side the building killed thirty-three people, injured hundreds more, and pockmarked the J. P. Morgan headquarters across the street. The bombers were never identified.The New York exchange, known as the "Big Board" and the world's largest stock exchange, merged in 2007 with Euronext, which traces its roots over four centuries to the exchange in Amsterdam, established by the Dutch East India Company seven years before Henry Hudson arrived in the New World.
