“View of the New York Stock Exchange building on Broad Street at Wall Street. The J.P. Morgan & Co. building is to the left and a crowd of people stand in front of it. Ca. 1900.”

Robert L. Bracklow’s photograph captures two notable buildings at the epicenter of the turn-of-the-century Financial District: the New York Stock Exchange and the Drexel Building.

10 Broad Street (at right) was home to the New York Stock Exchange between 1865 and 1901, when it was razed for the construction of the current building, after years of sustained growth in trading volume.

Across the street at 23 Wall Street was the Drexel Building, the predecessor to the “corner building” headquarters of J.P. Morgan Chase. In 1869, Anthony Drexel and J.P. Morgan became partners in the new Drexel, Morgan & Company bank, and soon afterwards commissioned a grand, marble-clad French Second Empire building at Broad and Wall Streets for its headquarters.

After Drexel’s death in 1893, Morgan renamed the bank and its New York headquarters J.P. Morgan & Co., and set in motion plans for a new building. Morgan died in 1913, months before the Drexel building was demolished. Anticipating its demise, the New York Times observed: “In a few days the most valuable piece of real estate in the United States will be nothing but a vacant lot, surrounded by a board fence.”