• Wall Street is not now what it was years back. It started from a street where there was a wall by the Dutch settlers to protect themselves. People go to Wall Street to see it at as the financial capital of the world. Truth is that those places are merely empty halls now. Most of the places have been turned into luxury condominiums.

 

• Daniel Gross writes in his article “Capital of Capital of no more”, every day in Lower Manhattan, tourists stroll along the Capitalism Trail. They might start in the yard of Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary and architect of the early United States financial system, is buried. Nearby, on Broad Street, they amble past the hulking headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange. They might stop for a water break in front of 23 Wall, the fortress like building at the junction of Broad that was the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company and was known in its heyday as the Corner. As John Brooks wrote in his book “Once in Golconda,” the Corner was in the early 20th century “the precise center, geographical as well as metaphorical, of financial America and even of the financial world.” The Corner is now a luxury condominium called Downtown by Philippe Starck. The most common financial transactions there probably involve paying the Chinese delivery guy or tallying bills from the luxury retailers such as Thomas Pink, Hermès and Tiffany have opened outposts down the block.

 

• Wall Street has not been “Wall Street” for a long time. Big investment banks like Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns decamped for Midtown years ago, and the largest securities trading floor in the world — belonging to the Swiss bank UBS — is in Stamford, Conn. The N.Y.S.E., which is transforming into an electronic exchange, has closed all their trading floors few years back. The question today, one being asked with increasing frequency and anxiety in certain quarters  is whether New York as a whole is going the way of Wall Street. Are New York’s days as the world’s epicenter of finance coming to an end?

  

 

• Things have changed in the section of the city that contains the New York Stock Exchange, the World Trade Centre and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Evening in the financial district offers a sight that would have been a rarity four years ago, unthinkable 40 years ago: side by side with the idling black Lincoln Town Cars waiting for their Wall Street fares are casually dressed men and women leisurely returning home from restaurants and grocery stores and walking their dogs.

 

• New museums and hotels are slowly taking place in this area, there are 10 hotels and 13 major museums in the area and more are on the way. But the main engine driving the changes is thousands of new residents who have poured in the last five years.

 

• After the recession of 1990-1991, office vacancy rates in this financial district were persistently high and many of the building were empty. City officials and neighborhood boosters adapted by encouraging office building to put into residential use. In 1995, the city officials started offering tax incentives to owners who converted downtown commercial properties to residential use under the Lower Manhattan Revitalization Plan. Since then, more than 5000 apartments have been created in 51 formerly commercial buildings.

  

 

• The street which represents the American financial industry is no longer the physical home to banks that it once was. Richard Sylla, chairman of the Museum of American Finance said, “Wall Street just got to be the place where you went to do your banking, where you went to buy and sell your stocks and bonds”. The house of Morgan was here, City Bank of New York and the First National Bank was here. Right now the only major bank still on Wall Street is Bank of New York Mellon, though Goldman Sachs is just on the west side of the lower Manhattan. Many of the Grand old buildings that once housed Wall Street Firms have been converted into condos.

 

• Added to all this, the increased use of technology was also a major  factor in the decline of  Wall Street . Right now the only major bank still on Wall Street is Bank of New York Mellon, though Goldman Sachs  isn’t far away on the West Side of Lower Manhattan. Many of the grand old buildings that once housed Wall Street firms have been converted into condos.

 

• Charles Jones, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, says what’s happened on Wall Street has everything to do with technology. Back before the telephone, people who traded stocks needed to be near each other. But the decentralization of Wall Street has really accelerated with computers, he says. At one time, for instance, stocks were traded mostly through the New York Stock Exchange at its iconic columned building on the corner of Broad and Wall streets. Today, however, you can buy and sell stocks from anywhere in the world. Most stock trading now takes place on electronic exchanges, on computers that can be located anywhere. Even the NYSE does most of its trading electronically.

 

• As a result, Wall Street is not going to be the place it once was. Wall Street would soon turn out to be tourist destination only.