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128 6 “the WeaK liNK iN yoUr ChaiN” Monday morning, April 29, 1901, hundreds of members of the New York Stock Exchange led by President Keppler marched in two columns five blocks south down New Street from their shuttered building on Broad, through the east entrance of the New York Produce Exchange at 2 Stone Street, up a short, narrow stairway on the south side, and onto the expansive second-floor trading hall, their temporary home for the next two years. The hall was 221 by 140 feet, larger than any arena in the city except Madison Square Garden, staked out with the trading posts and the giant quotation board moved from the old Exchange. The hall’s expanse of a fifth of an acre was bathed in sunlight from its huge arched windows and its skylight of stained glass sixty feet above. On the north end of the hall several long marble tables held displays of large bowls of flour, one of the commodities of the Produce Exchange. The traders , boys at heart, could not resist, and flour throwing erupted. The Produce Exchange members joined in and soon all were caked in billowing white dust, anointing the guests in their new home. The stock traders found their space cramped and congested. Their allotted portion of the floor at the south end measured about 12,000 square feet, 200 smaller than their old home. They were separated from the Produce Exchange trading by a thin, heavy wooden partition eight feet high. Spectators crowding the public gallery above would have to crane their necks even for an obstructed view of stock trading because they were at the north end of the hall overlooking the wheat pit. The stock traders’ old home had entrances onto the floor on three sides with plenty of room for brokers, clerks, messengers , and customers to pass. Their temporary space at the Produce Exchange had only one entrance, on the east. There was abundant light and air, something the traders didn’t have in their old home, but when the sun beat down through the huge skylight on “THE WEAK LINK IN YOUR CHAIN” 129 a warm day it could melt the starch in a trader’s collar and drench his shirt in sweat. Since the stock market had become national entertainment, it was fitting the Produce Exchange still used old calcium lights. They flamed bright with the same cylinders of calcium quicklime used in theaters and music halls. Stock trading truly was in the “limelight.” It had taken six weeks to install wiring for the Exchange’s 450 private broker telephones and 650 Western Union cables. Over the weekend workmen used a thirty-foot crane to reassemble on the east wall the huge, electric “annunciator” board that alerted any of the five hundred members on the floor by assigned number, with electronically operated flaps, when they were wanted on the phone or at their office. The Exchange employed “annunciators” who operated the electronic buttons, signaled by an attendant who stood at the entrance and called out members’ numbers. A new service was added outside: automobiles for transporting brokers and traders to and from their offices. Befitting the noble aspirations of the American market, the Exchange was a masterpiece of commercial architecture. Its campanile clock tower was visible for miles, a beacon for at least the ideal of “just and equitable principles of trade.” Designed by George B. Post and opened in 1884, the Exchange faced the Bowling Green and Battery Park with grace and elegance, standing where two and a half centuries earlier there were cattle sheds with roofs of straw, thatch, and old Dutch tiles that served as the Market-velt-Stegie, the embryo of market trading in New Amsterdam. The building evoked the Italian Renaissance in dark red brick with light-toned granite, in terra cotta bas-relief on its façade were shocks of wheat, ears of corn, and windrows of oats. Chairman Kennedy stood at the podium high above on the Whitehall Street side of the building, “like a swallow’s nest on a cliff,” as the seconds ticked toward 10 a.m. The small gallery for spectators on the north wall was jammed, a sea of messengers in Confederate gray uniforms lined the trading floor. Among the observers was a distinctly American touch: “Reddy” the bootblack, a familiar presence at the old Exchange for more than forty years, was given a prominent post at the rail. At 10 a.m. Kennedy...

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