Memorial in Manhattan, New York
Federal Hall is a memorial and historic site at 26 Wall Street in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. The current Greek Revival–style building, completed in 1842 as the Custom House, is owned by the United States federal government and operated by the National Park Service as a national memorial called the Federal Hall National Memorial. The memorial is named for an earlier Federal style building on this same site, completed in 1703 as City Hall, which the government of the newly independent United States used as its capital building and called Federal Hall during the 1780s.
The 1703 building had served as New York's City Hall and hosted the 1765 Stamp Act Congress before the American Revolution. After the United States became an independent nation, it served as the meeting place for the Congress of the Confederation, the nation's first central government under the Articles of Confederation, from 1785 to 1789, and the building was expanded and updated. With the establishment of the United States federal government in 1789, it hosted the 1st Congress and was where George Washington was sworn in as the nation's first president. It was demolished in 1812 to make way for another government building.
The current structure, designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, was built as the U.S. Custom House for the Port of New York before serving as a Subtreasury building from 1862 to 1925. The current national memorial commemorates the historic events that occurred at the previous structure. The memorial building is constructed of Tuckahoe marble. Its architectural features include a colonnade of Doric columns, as well as a domed rotunda designed by the sculptor John Frazee. The facade and part of the interior are New York City designated landmarks, and the building is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
First structure.
In the 17th century, the area north of Wall Street was occupied by John Damen's farm. Damen sold the land in 1685 to captain John Knight, an officer of Thomas Dongan's administration. Knight resold the land to Dongan, and Dongan resold it in 1689 to Abraham de Peyster and Nicholas Bayard. Both de Peyster and Bayard served as Mayors of New York.
City Hall.
The original structure on the site was built as New York's second City Hall from 1699 to 1703, on Wall Street, in what is today the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. This structure had been designed by James Evetts to replace Stadt Huys, the city's first administrative center. It measured two stories high, with wings extending west and east. The stones from Wall Street's old fortifications were used for City Hall. Also housed at City Hall was a public library (which had 1,642 volumes by the year 1730), as well as a firehouse with two fire engines imported from London. The upper stories were used as a debtors' prison.
In 1735, John Peter Zenger, an American newspaper publisher, was arrested for committing libel against the British royal governor and was imprisoned and tried there. His acquittal on the grounds that the material he had printed was true established freedom of the press as it was later defined in the Bill of Rights.
City Hall was first remodeled in 1765, when a third story was added. That October, delegates from nine of the Thirteen Colonies met as the Stamp Act Congress in response to the levying of the Stamp Act by the Parliament of Great Britain. Drawn together for the first time in organized opposition to British policy, the attendees drafted a message to King George III, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, claiming entitlement to the same rights as the residents of Britain and protesting the colonies' "taxation without representation". The Sons of Liberty took over the building from the British during the American Revolutionary War in 1775. Afterward, City Hall served as the meeting place for the Continental Congress.
Federal Hall.
After the American Revolution, City Hall was home to the Congress of the Confederation of the United States under the Articles of Confederation. The first meeting of the Confederation Congress took place at City Hall on April 13, 1784.
Design and construction.
The Congress of the Confederation still needed a permanent structure, and the New York City Council and mayor James Duane wished for the city to be the United States capital. Private citizens and the government of New York City contributed $65,000 toward the renovation of the old City Hall. The Patriots felt that the building should be remodeled in a distinctively American architectural style while also preserving the pre-colonial structure. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French architect who had helped the Americans during the Revolutionary War, was selected to remodel the structure.
L'Enfant's expansion was characteristic of Georgian-style designs, although he used larger proportions, and added American motifs. An arched promenade was built through the street-level basement, with four heavy Tuscan columns supporting a balcony. On balcony level, four high Doric columns were installed, supporting a pediment that depicted an American eagle with thirteen arrows (one for each of the original Thirteen Colonies). L'Enfant also created a recessed gallery behind the columns, and he placed decorative swags above the second-story windows. The ground-story room for the United States House of Representatives measured across and about two stories high. A smaller room for the United States Senate was on the second floor. L'Enfant's design influenced the development of what later became the Federal style.
Usage.
The city moved all of its municipal offices out of the building in late 1788, but the New York Society Library's 3,500-volume library remained in the building for the time being. Work progressed quickly between September 1788 and March 1789. The building was renamed Federal Hall in 1789 when New York was chosen as the nation's first seat of government under the Constitution. The 1st Congress met there beginning on March 4, 1789. The first inauguration of George Washington, the first-ever inauguration of a President of the United States, occurred on the balcony of the building on April 30, 1789. Many of the most important legislative actions in the United States occurred with the 1st Congress at Federal Hall. For example, on September 25, 1789, the United States Bill of Rights was proposed in Federal Hall, establishing the freedoms claimed by the 1765 Stamp Act Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 was also enacted in the building, setting up the United States federal court system.
In 1790, the United States capital moved to Philadelphia. What had been Federal Hall was turned into quarters for the state assembly and courts. The Federal Hall building was one of the few structures in the area to survive an 1804 fire that caused $2 million in damage (equivalent to $ million in 2023). With the opening of the current New York City Hall in 1812, the New York City government no longer needed Federal Hall, and the building was demolished. Part of the original railing and balcony floor, where Washington had been inaugurated, is on display in the memorial and was at one point held by the New-York Historical Society. Nassau Street had originally curved around the building to the west, while Broad Street had run to the east. Nassau Street was straightened after the building was demolished, and it runs to the west of the modern Federal Hall National Memorial.
Second structure.
The current Greek Revival structure was the first building that was specifically constructed for the U.S. Custom House for the Port of New York. The Custom House previously had been located in Government House, a converted residence on Bowling Green. The old building was described as "ordinary and inconvenient", and it had become overcrowded, prompting the federal government to lease additional space in 1831. Samuel Swartwout, the Customs Collector for the Port of New York, advocated in 1832 for "spacious, safe, secure" accommodations. Land for the new building had been purchased incrementally in 1816, 1824, and 1832.
Custom House.
The firm of Town and Davis, composed of Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, won an architectural design competition for the new Custom House building and was awarded the contract for the building's design in August 1833. Town estimated that the plans would cost $250,000 if the Custom House building was made of granite, or $320,000 to $350,000 if it was of masonry, brick, and marble. The original design called for a colonnade of eight columns facing Wall and Pine Streets, square pilasters on Nassau Street, a massive coffered dome protruding above the roof, and a cruciform floor plan. The building would have also been decorated with details such as acroteria, metopes, and triangular pediments. Town suggested that Samuel Thomson, architect of the Administration Building at Sailors' Snug Harbor, be named the construction superintendent.
Work on the Custom House began in January 1834, but the Customs Service then requested that the plans for the new building be downsized due to increasing costs. As a result, the dome was reduced in size and the original double colonnade on the facade was changed to a single colonnade. Thomson resigned in April 1835, taking the plans with him. Sculptor John Frazee was named the superintendent in Thomson's stead; he worked to piece together Town and Davis's original plans. Frazee influenced the design of the interior and decorative details, and he modified plans for the attic to a full-height third story. Frazee got into a dispute with building commissioner Walter Bowne and was dismissed in 1840, although he was rehired in 1841.
The Custom House building opened in 1842 at a cost of $928,312 (equivalent to $ million in 2023). Importers would perform their business at a counter in the building's central rotunda. The building came to be associated with political patronage. "The Seven Stages of the Office Seeker", an 1852 print by Edward Williams Clay, satirized how Democratic Party patronage under New York governor Martin Van Buren was centered around the Custom House. By 1861, the structure had become too small to accommodate all of the customs duties of the U.S. Custom House for the Port of New York. The U.S. government decided to move the customs offices one block to 55 Wall Street, then occupied by the Merchants' Exchange. The federal government of the United States signed a lease with the Merchants' Exchange in February 1862, intending to move into the building that May. The customs offices were moved to 55 Wall Street starting in August 1862.
Subtreasury.
After the relocation of the Custom House, 26 Wall Street was transformed into a building for the United States Subtreasury. The Subtreasury desks were arranged around the rotunda of the building. Gold and coin storage vaults were placed along a passage near the north side of the rotunda. Bars were stored to the west, or left, and gold certificates and coins were stored to the east, or right. A vault for small change was also provided. A coin division was on the east side of the building, on the floor of the rotunda, toward Pine Street. Silver was stored in the northwest corner of the building, in the basement. An armory was placed on the upper stories, and various fortifications were mounted at the top of the building to protect the money. Adjoining the Subtreasury to the east was the United States Assay Office, a branch of the United States Mint that performed all Mint functions except creating the coinage. At its peak, the Subtreasury building held seventy percent of the federal government's money.
In 1883, John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze statue of George Washington was put up on the Subtreasury's ceremonial front steps. The statue "mark[ed] the exact height Washington stood when taking the oath of office on the balcony" of the eighteenth-century edifice, overlooking the crowds filling Broad Street up to Wall Street. By 1903, the building held over $275 million in gold, silver, and various other types of money; this amounted to nearly one-tenth of all of the United States' money at that point. A plaque memorializing the Northwest Ordinance was dedicated at the Subtreasury in 1905.
By 1917, the Subtreasury building held $519 million worth of gold and several million dollars more in coins. In the Wall Street bombing of 1920, a bomb was detonated across from the Subtreasury at 23 Wall Street, in what became known as The Corner. Thirty-eight