It was really The Street!

TIL, as they say, that Wall Street was an OUTDOOR AUCTION for a hundred years, and didn’t come inside as an organized exchange until 1921.

The outdoor auction occupied the full width of Broad Street, not Wall Street, with traders shouting bids at each other. After telephones were common, the traders rented offices in facing buildings and kept clerks busy on the phone. The clerks leaned out the windows and stayed in touch with their evil master by hand signals and shouting.

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To Hill, it looked like hell. “Fingers in sets of two, three, and five at a time… shot up vertically or spanned horizontally sideways in mad play,” while in the buildings overlooking the street, “windows were popping with grimacing faces — female, it seemed, as well as male — with grotesque and distorted features… with arms and hands that leaped from a mysterious interior to convey cryptic symbols to the upraised eyes of the leaping creatures in the gorge.” In this mysterious market where men wore garish coats and hats, “demon knew demon by the color of a head-dress.”

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This writer understood the nature of the crime perfectly.

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Irrelevant local sidenote after thinking about street names. Spokane has a Wall Street, which was NOT named after the NYC Wall Street. It was named after Mr Wall, a real estate developer. Until the ’90s, Spokane also had its own stock exchange, left over from the silver mining days. I used to walk past it in the downtown ‘skywalk’. It seemed to be inactive at that time, just a big room with a big TV at the front showing stock quotations. I never saw anyone in the room. As it happens, the stock exchange was in a building on Wall Street.