Forty-eight Wall Street. Thirty-two stories of limestone with, right on the top, a little colonial temple with columns and a cupola — as though somebody set a Georgian mansion on the roof of a skyscraper.
Somebody did, on purpose. This was the Bank of New York, and the bank wanted the whole street to remember how old it was.
The Bank of New York opened in seventeen eighty-four. It is the oldest bank in America. It still exists — it's B-N-Y now — and it has been doing business continuously for two hundred and forty years.
It exists because a twenty-nine-year-old sat down and wrote it.
Hamilton had just come out of the war and passed the bar. New York needed a bank — there were only two others in the whole country, and the American economy at that moment ran on foreign coins, handwritten IOUs and barter. So a group of merchants decided to start one and made Hamilton a director. He wrote the bank's entire governing document by hand, alone, in about three weeks.
Then they opened witho
ut a charter. The state legislature refused to grant one, because a lot of New York farmers regarded banks as a conspiracy against agriculture. So the Bank of New York simply operated anyway, unchartered, for seven years, until the legislature gave up.
Five years after it opened, the bank made a loan of two hundred thousand dollars to the government of the United States. The first loan the federa
