The New York Produce Exchange was a commodities exchange headquartered in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It served a network of produce and commodities dealers across the United States. Founded in 1861 as the New York Commercial Association, it was originally headquartered at Whitehall Street in a building owned by the New York Produce Exchange Company. The Association was renamed the New York Produce Exchange in 1868 and took over the original building in 1872.
Between 1881 and 1884, the Produce Exchange built a new headquarters on 2 Broadway, facing Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. The structure, designed by George B. Post, was the first in the world to combine wrought iron and masonry in its structural construction. The main feature of the structure was an exchange floor that measured approximately . The Produce Exchange was profitable following the building's completion. By the 1880s, it had the largest membership of any exchange in the United States, with a maximum of three thousand members. By 1900, the exchange was doing $15 million a day in business.
In the early 20th century, activity on the Produce Exchange started to decline due to competition from other cities. The Produce Exchange sold off its building for development in the 1950s; the headquarters was demolished to make way for a skyscraper called 2 Broadway. The exchange had its trading floor in the skyscraper from 1959 until 1973, when it was restructured as the Produce Exchange Realty Trust, a real estate investment trust.
Origins The New York Produce Exchange's origins date to the New York Corn Exchange, which had been chartered in 1853. At the time, New York City's flour and grain trades were largely outdoors, centered at the intersection of Broad Street and South Street. The Corn Exchange combined four buildings on Broad and South Streets to make an L-shaped gathering room. The temporary headquarters had become inadequate for the exchange's needs by the late 1850s, with at least one thousand merchants crowded into the dingy quarters. Furthermore, a neighboring property could not be acquired for expansion. Accordingly, during the early 1860s, members of the Corn Exchange formed two companies: one to build a new headquarters and another to operate the commodities exchange within that building.
First headquarters
The New York Produce Exchange Company was founded in 1860 to construct a building on the block bounded by Whitehall, Moore, Pearl, and Water Streets. The company had tried to add stories to the existing structures on the block but were unable to do so because of weak foundations. The first building, later known as the Old New York Produce Exchange, was designed by Leopold Eidlitz as the result of an architectural design competition. The structure was completed in 1861 for $95,350. The first headquarters was sold in 1886 to the United States government, which remodeled it as the Army Building on 39 Whitehall Street. The Army Building was itself renovated as an office building called 3 New York Plaza in 1986.
The building occupied the entire city block, which was irregular in dimension. It contained a brick facade with olive stone trimmings, as well as windows topped by tall arches. Inside was originally a double-height exchange room with an open-timber ceiling supported by four piers of brownstone. The structure used iron only in the floor beams and the clerestory walls. The design of the building, with its top story in a cruciform shape, was described by architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler as "a very effective transeptual arrangement".
Creation of exchange On April 22, 1861, seven hundred Corn Exchange merchants formed the New York Commercial Association, which rented out the second floor of the Produce Exchange Building. In theory, the Association was separate from the Corn Exchange, but in practice, all except two merchants from the Corn Exchange had joined the Association as well. The association served a network of produce and commodities dealers across the United States. The organization received a charter from the New York State Legislature in 1862. As part of the charter, the Association was authorized to hold annual elections for a board of managers. At the end of the Association's first year, it had 1,238 members. Annual dues were originally $20 per member, rising to $25 in 1865.; ; The New York Commercial Association was legally renamed the New York Produce Exchange in 1868.
The exchange had grown to contain 2,023 members by 1869, but four-fifths of its $49,000 annual income was being used to pay rent to the New York Produce Exchange Company. Accordingly, the exchange formed a committee in 1870 to determine how much to pay for the building, though no action was taken at first. In January 1872, the Produce Exchange's members voted to impose a $200 fee per member, which would be used to raise funds to buy the building. The Produce Exchange ultimately purchased the building in May 1872 for $265,000 after 1,300 members agreed to pay the fee. Afterward, the Produce Exchange renovated the interior, adding space to accommodate the increased membership and converting the basement into a full story. A board room was installed on the fourth floor. The Produce Exchange also created its own membership certificates and official seals, and membership initiation fees were raised to $300.
Shortly after the Produce Exchange purchased its building, in 1873, the act of incorporation was revised to allow the exchange to hold up to $1.5 million in real and personal property. The initiation fee was raised to $500 the same year, at which point the exchange had 2,237 members. The initiation fee was raised once again to $1,000 in 1874. By 1875, the exchange had started searching for sites for a new building. The exchange had grown to 2,468 members by 1878. At that point, even the expanded building had become too small to accommodate the exchange. The New-York Tribune characterized it the following year as "insufficiently lighted, poorly ventilated, and generally damp", with its basement prone to flooding during high tides. In 1880, the Exchange updated its bylaws to limit membership to 2,700 and setting the new-member initiation fee at $1,000. Three hundred additional memberships were subsequently issued at $2,500 each. The initiation fee system was ultimately abolished in 1882.
Bowling Green headquarters The second headquarters, or the New York Produce Exchange Building, was developed after the Produce Exchange formed a committee to look for a new building site in early 1879. The site-selection committee recommended that the building be south of Exchange Place, east of Broadway, and west of William Street. In June 1879, the members of the Produce Exchange voted to acquire a site and create a committee for a new building. Initially, the Exchange wanted a site immediately north of the location it ultimately selected. The exchange ultimately acquired land along the eastern side of Bowling Green, between Beaver and Stone Streets, in mid-1880 for $670,000. A section of Marketfield Street, which ran through the proposed building site, was closed to make way for the building, and New Street was extended south to the truncated connection of Marketfield Street.
Design
In October 1880, some members of the exchange formed a new building committee and invited ten architects to an architectural design competition. Seven other architects submitted plans voluntarily.; The designs were required to include features such as ground-floor stores and offices, as well as a trading floor with space for 3,000 members. The drawings were to be submitted to the Produce Exchange's building committee, who would exhibit the plans and hold a ballot among the exchange's members. The committee selected four submissions for further review, which were hung on the trading floor's walls without any names. The members of the exchange requested further guidance from the building committee a week before the formal vote was to be held in March 1881. The committee suggested a design entitled In me mea spes omnis, which The New York Times inferred was a submission by George B. Post.
Exchange members overwhelmingly voted for Post's plan, with 942 in favor of that design, compared to 249 for the other three proposals combined. Post's design had a frontage of about to the west on Bowling Green, to the north on Beaver Street, and to the south on Stone Street. Overall, the building covered an area of .; The upper floors wrapped around a "light court" that was in the center of the building above the third-story trading floor. A clock tower on the southeastern corner of the site, measuring , was added as part of a modification to the design. The building was about tall above its main roof and above its clock tower. Ultimately, Post devised 4,000 drawings for the exchange's headquarters.
Facade The facade was largely made of red brick and terracotta, chosen because the materials were seen as fireproof. Granite was used on the ground-floor entrance terrace and the cellar walls. As a whole, the exterior was designed to appear low to the ground, with this quality being emphasized by strong horizontal lines. At ground level on the western, northern, and southern sides, the entrances consisted of triple arches between sets of paired columns. The remainder of the ground story on these sides contained rectangular storefronts.; On the eastern side, a projecting terrace on New Street led to an entrance without columns. This terrace covered about .
The northern, western, and southern facades each contained two arcades above the ground level, one on top of the other. The lower arcade rose to the ceiling of the third-story trading floor but, due to the inclusion of three additional stories above the trading floor, was the equivalent of four stories high. There were decorative terracotta details on the lower arcade, including state-seal roundels above the windows atop each arch; ship-prow reliefs in the soffits; and a frieze above the arches with animal heads and cereal grains. The upper arcade, directly above the trading floor, was aligned with the lowest two office levels (seventh and eighth stories overall) and contained arches half as wide as the arcade below it. The ninth story contained rectangular openings that were again half as wide as the upper arcade stories. A heavy cornice ran between the ninth and tenth stories, and there were rectangular openings on the tenth story.;
The clock tower had four clock faces, one on each side. It lacked any windows, except where the interior stairways were placed but had large clock faces on each side with balconies. The clock faces on the tower were across, with numerals tall, and weighed . The tower was topped by a heavy cornice similar to that on the main structure.
Structural features
When the building was completed, it was described as having "12,000,000 bricks, 15 miles of iron girders, miles of columns, 2,061 tons of terracotta, of flooring, more than 2,000 windows, and nearly 1,000 doors". The underlying ground contained several layers of quicksand, requiring the structure to be built upon over 15,000 pilings made of spruce and pine. The pilings extended to the layer of hardpan, which was likely feet deep, and their tops were cut off at a depth of , slightly lower than tide level. The basement contained its own coal plant and water pumps, connected by a narrow-gauge railroad track.