This is the street that gave global capitalism its address, and your walk starts here. The name comes from a real wall, a twelve-foot palisade of wooden planks the Dutch built across the island in 1653 to keep out the English and the Lenape. The English knocked it down in 1699, but they kept the street, and the street kept its name.
Trading began informally beneath a buttonwood tree nearby, and in 1792 twenty-four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement, the founding document of what would become the New York Stock Exchange. The Neoclassical temple before you, with its six marble Corinthian columns, was built in 1903 to house that exchange. On September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn cart loaded with iron weights and dynamite exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad, killing thirty-eight people in the worst terrorist attack in American history at that time.
Look at the Morgan Bank building to your right; the pockmarks in its granite facade from that blast were deliberately left unrepaired as a memorial.