American Stock Exchange
New York, USA · Established 1908
This site requires authorization to access.
To request access, contact
william.goetzmann@yale.edu
The American Stock Exchange traces its roots to the late 18th century, when "curbstone brokers" traded securities outdoors on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, dealing in stocks too speculative or too small for the New York Stock Exchange. During the California Gold Rush, curb brokers made markets in mining shares; later, oil and small industrial stocks joined the mix.
The 1930–1931 Art Deco expansion on Trinity Place features exterior metal relief sculptures by Rene Paul Chambellan, the leading architectural sculptor of the American Art Deco movement, whose commissions also included Rockefeller Center and the Chanin Building (as documented in the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report LP-2515, 2012). The limestone facade incorporates perforated rectangular metal panels flanking the trading floor windows that depict symbols of the types of financial activity conducted on the exchange, while small metal grilles at the thirteenth story represent “frozen fountains,” a widespread Art Deco emblem of prosperity. The outdoor curb market that preceded the building was itself the subject of notable artworks: Joseph Pennell’s 1904 etching Stock Exchange (held by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) depicts the curbstone brokers clustered on Broad Street in the foreground of the NYSE, and Joseph Petrocelli’s 1921 bromoil print The Curb Market -- New York (Brooklyn Museum, accession 45.31.38) captures the chaotic open-air trading in its final year before the move indoors. The interior of the 1931 addition features a coffered plaster ceiling and sixteen-foot-high Botticino marble wainscoting on the trading floor, reflecting the lavish decorative programs typical of interwar financial buildings.
The American Stock Exchange building at 86 Trinity Place occupies an L-shaped parcel extending from Trinity Place to Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan’s Financial District, its fourteen-story Art Deco tower rising directly across from the graveyard of Trinity Church and clearly visible from Broadway. Situated only blocks from the New York Stock Exchange on Broad Street, the building’s location embodied the AMEX’s historical role as a complementary but independent marketplace: as historian Robert Sobel documented in The Curbstone Brokers: The Origins of the American Stock Exchange (Macmillan, 1970), unaffiliated brokers first gathered on the sidewalks near the NYSE to trade securities the larger exchange refused to list. Ann Daly’s 2018 essay for the Gotham Center for New York City History, “The New York Curb Market… Which has No Organization Whatever,” describes how the outdoor curb market occupied Broad Street’s sidewalk, colloquially termed “the gorge,” with copper stocks traded on the north section and gold stocks on the south. Lower Manhattan’s natural harbor geography — the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers at the island’s tip — concentrated shipping, banking, insurance, and securities trading within a half-square-mile area, a spatial logic explored in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1998). The building survived the September 11, 2001, attacks on the adjacent World Trade Center, though trading was disrupted for days; the exchange continued operating at 86 Trinity Place until NYSE Euronext’s 2008 acquisition closed the floor.
In 1908, Emanuel S. Mendels and Carl H. Pforzheimer established the New York Curb Market Agency, developing formal trading rules. A constitution followed in 1911, creating the New York Curb Market Association. On June 27, 1921, the curbstone brokers finally moved indoors into a purpose-built exchange at 86 Trinity Place, designed by Starrett & Van Vleck. The original Renaissance Revival building facing Greenwich Street was expanded in 1929–1931 with a 14-story Art Deco limestone addition on Trinity Place.
Renamed the New York Curb Exchange in 1929 and the American Stock Exchange in 1953, AMEX became known as a venue for smaller-cap companies and was a pioneer in exchange-traded funds — the SPDR S&P 500 ETF began trading there in 1993. In 2008, NYSE Euronext acquired AMEX. The building, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978 and a New York City Landmark in 2012, remains one of the most distinctive financial buildings in lower Manhattan.
Images will be added as the project develops. Photographs by Larry Ng and from research sources.