3-011-734 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Kerbstone stockbrokers in New York, 1864. 'The prevailing mania just now in the city of New York is that of gambling in stocks...William-street is the great theatre of speculation...[with] innumerable stockbrokers' offices...[whose occupants] have made, are making, or expect to make their millions out of the fluctuations of the stock market. There are three distinct marts...the "Regular Board of Brokers,"...the "Public Stock Exchange,"...and lastly, there is the "Kerbstone" business - the common whirlpool of all persons of speculative tendencies who have not sufficient capital or character to obtain admission into either of the recognised places of Stock Exchange operations...an indiscriminate throng of all varieties of character and grades of rank, from the "Fifth Avenue Swell" to the Jewish dealer in cast-off clothes, besiege the doors of the sale-rooms..."Representative men" of all types shoulder one another, and scream themselves hoarse in eager endeavours to outbid or undersell their loud-voiced competitors. It is a frantic orgie, in which the lust of lucre reigns supreme. Our Engraving represents William-street, looking southward, from its junction with Exchange-place. On the left is the entrance to the Public Stock Exchange'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.