Being Stalked From The Past

Once again, one of Angel Rizzuto’s photos, this one from 1954, gets very close to us. This is the intersection of Whitehall and Stone Street looking east. (For once, the logic of the street grid and the actual cardinal points align exactly.)

Almost every building in this view has been demolished and replaced in the last 70 years, with two exceptions on each side of the street. The low-rise building at the end of the block on the left, which was originally a cigar store, is still there and is now a bar. The building immediately next to it on the left is also still there. The building on the right with the big BAR sign is still there and is still a bar. And the tall building on the end of the block on the right, just to the right of the shepherd’s crook lamppost, is still there and that’s where our office is.

The very ornate building in the left foreground, on the corner, is the 1884 New York Produce Exchange, a building that is not widely known today but was one of the great proto-skyscrapers that George Post designed before he got around to designing real skyscrapers. The stair down is the entrance to the Whitehall Street station on the BMT subway (now the W and R lines), which is still there but altered a bit. The newsstand at the entrance was replaced by a modernized version about ten years ago, but closed during Covid and has been removed.

Not only have most of the buildings been replaced, but the next block of Stone Street, past Broad Street in the distance, was demapped when the current 85 Broad Street was built in the early 1980s.