The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
PRE-1850 HISTORY OF WALL STREET
Wall Street was not always the corner of capital: it had several earlier identities. This series of images pictures Wall Street from its colonial origins in the early 17th century through 1850, when its commercial character was set. The prints are a prequel to the identity of Wall Street as the storied financial district, recorded in the era before photography and before the invention of the elevator and steel-frame construction that would utterly change the architecture of the street and the skyline of New York.
