- Wall Street is a 1.1 km street running 8 blocks, from Broadway to South Street

- NYC is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges: NYSE and NASDAQ.

- Waal Straat (Dutch) 1. from a wall on the boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement (protect against English colonial encroachment - incursions by Native Americans)

- 1626 - slavery in Manhattan, the city's first official slave market for the sale/rental of enslaved Africans and Indians.

- 1789 Wall Street - George Washington took the oath; passing Bill Of Rights

- Alexander Hamilton was the 1st Treasury secretary and "architect of the early US financial system," (the cemetery of Trinity Church)

- 19th century: Wall Street - the "money capital of America"

- the economy changed from "agricultural to industrial to financial

- 1884 Charles H. Dow began tracking stocks beginning with 11 stocks (mostly railroads) and looked at average prices

- 1889 - Customers' Afternoon Letter became The Wall Street Journal.

- it began publishing Dow's expanded list of stocks.

- A century later - 30 stocks in the average.

- September 1929 was the peak of the market but then the market started to slip

- The stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression in which a quarter of working people were unemployed

- 1966 - World Trade Center (being built)

- 1987 - lower Manhattan lost 100,000 jobs

- World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001

- 2006, Goldman Sachs began building a tower near the former Trade Center site

- Standard & Poor's and Moody's sold toxic mortgage-backed securities as solid

- John Paulson and the top brass at Goldman Sachs, spotted what was going on and ruthlessly gambled on a crash.

- Today, landmark buildings include:
NYSE, Federal Hall, The Trump Building, former headquarters of Citicorp, Deutsche Bank (J. P. Morgan's former headquarters)