|
The Exchange Artist
tells
the story of Andrew Dexter, Junior and the first
American skyscraper. Equal parts entrepreneur and
confidence man, Dexter erected his swagger building, the
Exchange Coffee House, through sheer financial
legerdemain. Weaving together the biography of this
once-notorious, now-forgotten man with the history of
his enormous building and the pyramid scheme that served
as its foundation, The Exchange Artist dramatizes the
birth of modern money culture in the first decades of
the American republic.
The book opens in the 1790s, when the business of
banking was considered “a trackless wilderness” in the young United
States, and paper money was the object of intense
suspicion. The framers of the Constitution, still
reeling from the collapse of the Continental dollar during the
Revolution, had barred the creation of a national paper
currency. And so, every bank issued its own notes,
creating a cacophony of competing values that grew more
dissonant with the founding of each new bank. Though
they hungered for credit and thirsted after liquidity—much like today’s money-men and -women—most early
American merchants looked on bank bills with a jaundiced
eye. Gold and silver were the stuff of real money.
A pioneer in the new age of paper, Dexter set out to
build a tower, and a fortune, out of bank notes.
Beginning in the first years of the nineteenth century,
he embarked on a career as an urban real estate
speculator, financing his hard-won slice of downtown
Boston through the string of banks he commandeered, and
the millions of dollars they freely printed. Upon this
paper pyramid he built the tallest building in the
United States. For two years beginning in the spring of
1807, an army of carters, diggers, masons, carpenters,
carvers, painters, and glaziers swarmed Dexter’s
building site on Boston’s Congress Street, taking their
pay in paper money. Brick by brick they erected the
Exchange Coffee House, which stood seven stories high
(with two more floors below ground) and boasted over 102,000
square feet of interior space. Among its 153 rooms were
a trading floor, a post office, a reading room, offices,
restaurants, meeting spaces, a grand ballroom, and
numerous hotel chambers. Some onlookers said its
enormous height blotted out the sun, and called it a
modern Babel, all hubris and confusion.
In 1809, just as the Exchange was ready for unveiling,
the financial pyramid collapsed. Banks shuttered, and
piles of paper promises were rendered instantly
worthless. Boston’s jails and its poor house filled with
workers who awoke one morning to find their wallets full
of trash. Reviled in the American press, Dexter
absconded to Canada, where he hatched a new crop of
dreams that would see him rise – and fall – several
times more before his death in Mobile, Alabama in 1837.
And in Boston, the building remained, opulent but
largely vacant, a monument to the glories of ambition
and the terrors of failure. When at last it was
destroyed in a spectacular fire in 1818, its implosion provided
the final element in a cautionary fable that offered an
object lesson to the rising young nation.
|
