Decode Wall Street.

The Dark Foundations of Wall Street

The street got its name from a wall — a twelve-foot-high wooden palisade the Dutch built in 1653 stretching from the Hudson River to the East River, meant to keep out the English and hostile Native American tribes. The wall came down in 1699, but the name stayed. What the maps don't show is what happened at the street's southeastern end, where Wall meets Pearl Street. From 1711 to 1762, New York City operated an official, city-licensed slave market at that corner. Enslaved and free Black people were rented out by the day or sold outright. The city collected the fees. It was the only publicly run slave market in colonial New York, and for decades it was one of the busiest in the American colonies. A bronze marker now sits near the site, easy to miss between the lunch crowds and the delivery trucks.

In 1991, construction workers excavating the foundation of a new federal building at 290 Broadway — two blocks north of Wall Street — hit bone. Then more bone. Archaeologists eventually identified 419 individual skeletal remains belonging to free and enslaved Africans buried between the 1690s and 1794, when Manhattan's Black community used the land as their burial ground. Estimates suggest up to 20,000 people were interred here before the city built over it in the early 1800s. The site is now the African Burial Ground National Monument. Just a few blocks away, Trinity Church's graveyard at Broadway and Wall Street holds a different kind of history: Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, is buried here beneath a white obelisk. The church itself — this version is the third, completed in 1846 — was the tallest building in New York City until 1890.

At noon on September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon exploded in front of 23 Wall Street, the headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Co. Thirty-eight people were killed instantly; 143 others were severely injured. Shrapnel tore into the marble facades of the surrounding buildings. Those scars are still there today, deliberately left unrepaired as a memorial. The FBI investigated for years. The perpetrators were never identified or charged. Walk past 23 Wall Street on any weekday and you'll see the pockmarks in the stone that most tourists mistake for age. A StoryHunt through the Financial District sends you to find them — and the half-dozen other secrets this neighborhood keeps in plain sight.