Wall Street

Long before it was the world's financial center, New York's Wall Street was literally the city's wall. In 1644, the Dutch governor of what was then known as New Amsterdam ordered the construction of a tree-trunk blockage along the settlement's north boundary to keep the livestock in and the Indians out. As the city expanded northward, the wall was torn down and replaced with a street, which became New York's main thoroughfare and a marketplace where goods from around the world were traded. In the early days of the United States, the nation's capital was moved from New York to Washington, but Wall Street remained the banking and investment capital, the place where fortunes were, and still are, made and lost.