New York Stock Exchange

A single giant flag hangs across the front of the building. It is red, white, and blue, as wide as the wall that holds it. Behind it stand six tall stone columns and a carved triangle of figures at the peak. You have reached the New York Stock Exchange. By the value of the companies traded inside, it is the largest such market on Earth.

The story begins under a tree. In 1792, twenty-four brokers met outdoors on Wall Street, near a buttonwood tree. They signed a short agreement setting simple rules for trading with one another. People still call it the Buttonwood Agreement. From those few handwritten lines grew the vast exchange whose front you are now standing before. Great things can start very small.

For its first century the brokers kept moving from room to rented room. At last they built a permanent home on this corner. The architect was George B. Post, a leading designer of his time. The building opened in 1903. Its grand front actually faces Broad Street, not Wall Street, even though Wall Street lent its name to the whole district of money.

Lift your eyes to the six columns. They are tall and crowned with carved stone leaves, in the style called Corinthian. Above them sits a wide triangle filled with stone figures. The carving has a title: Integrity Protecting the Works of Man. A central robed figure stretches her arms outward, sheltering workers and inventors gathered on either side of her.

The first of those figures were cut from solid marble. But marble cracks in harsh city weather, and over the years pieces began to loosen and fall toward the street. So in 1936 the whole group was replaced with copies made of metal, then painted to look like stone. What you are looking at today is that lighter, safer copy.

Inside, hidden from the sidewalk, lies the trading floor. Once it was a sea of shouting people in bright colored coats. They waved fistfuls of paper slips and closed deals by voice and hand signal. Much of that roar has faded now. Computers carry most of the trading, matching buyers and sellers in a tiny fraction of a single second.

Even so, the floor still keeps its daily rituals. Each morning a bell is rung to open the trading. Each afternoon a bell is rung to close it. Invited guests stand on a small balcony and press the button. A new company, a sports team, a children's charity. Over time, the ringing of that bell has become a kind of stage.

You cannot go inside to see it. After the attacks of 2001, the exchange closed its doors to the general public for safety. So this is a building you must read from the sidewalk alone. The columns, the hanging flag, the carved peak above. They were always meant to impress ordinary people standing exactly where your own feet are planted now.

Stop and think about what moves behind that stone wall. Shares in thousands of companies change hands here every working day. Their prices climb and drop second by second. Money from every corner of the planet flows in and out through this one narrow corner. And yet the front looks like a calm temple, fixed and serene, as if nothing ever stirred.

The streets around you are narrow, short, and very old. They bend in odd ways, following the lines of old paths and a long-vanished barrier. The name Wall Street recalls a real wall, raised by Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century to mark the northern edge of their small town. The wall is centuries gone; its crooked line remains.

Look along the street and you can pick out Federal Hall, with its own row of columns and a bronze George Washington on the steps. Two stone temples face each other across this lane. One was built for the making of laws, the other for the making of money. Together they hold much of the early story of the city and the nation.

It is a strange and fitting pairing. On one side, the place where a republic first swore its oaths. On the other, the place where its fortunes rise and fall by the hour. Power of two different kinds meets on this corner. Stand in the middle of the lane, and you can almost feel both pulling gently at the air around you.

Step back and watch the great flag move in the wind that comes up off the harbor. People hurry past you with coffee cups and phones pressed to their ears. Somewhere behind the wall, numbers are climbing and falling without rest. The building gives away none of it. It simply holds the corner, quiet on the outside, restless within.