Wall Street is a narrow street in lower Manhattan in New York City, running east from Broadway downhill to South Street on the East River. Considered to be the historical heart of the Financial District, it was the first permanent home of the New York Stock Exchange.

The phrase "Wall Street" is shorthand or metonymy for all big business in the United States, whether based in New York or not. The term is also used as a metonym to refer to American financial markets and financial institutions as a whole. Most New York-based financial firms are no longer headquartered on Wall Street, but elsewhere in lower or midtown Manhattan, the outer boroughs of the city, Long Island, Westchester County, Fairfield County, Connecticut, or New Jersey. One exception is Deutsche Bank, which has headquartered its North American operations at 60 Wall Street since November 2001.

The name of the street derives from the fact that during the 17th century, it formed the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement. In the 1640s basic picket and plank fences denoted plots and residences in the colony. Later, on behalf of the West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant, in part using African slaves, led the Dutch in the construction of a stronger stockade. By the time war had developed with the English, a strengthened 12 foot wall of timber and earth was created by 1653 fortified by palisades. The wall was created, and strengthened over time, as a defense against attack from various Indian tribes, New England colonists, and the British. In 1685 surveyors laid out Wall Street along the lines of the original stockade. The wall was dismantled by the British in 1699.

As late as the 1840s, thousands of pigs roamed Wall Street consuming garbage. It was an early sanitation system.

In the late 18th century, there was a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street under which traders and speculators would gather to trade informally. In 1792, the traders formalized their association with the Buttonwood Agreement. This was the origin of the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1889, the original stock report, Customers' Afternoon Letter, became the The Wall Street Journal, named in reference to the actual street, it is now an influential international daily business newspaper published in New York City. For many years, it had the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, although it is currently second to USA Today. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company.

 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_street

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