Inside the Chamber > A Home for the Chamber
“While the Chamber of Commerce has been a great New York institution, it has been an institution without a home.” Thus griped the Architectural Record in 1903. “Nothing could have been more Bohemian than its early career. It wandered around from tavern to exchange and from exchange to coffee-house in the informal and somewhat undignified fashion of so many American associations.”
In 1768, the Chamber's first meeting had been held in the Long Room above Fraunces Tavern, a rollicking smoke-filled publick house at the intersection of Pearl and Broad streets.
Within a year, the new institution transferred to the Great Room in the Merchants' Exchange on Broad Street. The meeting space had been designed to grandiose proportions, with a cupola and ceilings “not exceeding fifteen feet in height, and not less than fofurteen ... arched from the height of the said fourteen feet." The Chamber rented this room, from 1770 until 1775, for twenty pounds per year. Here, it hung the first portrait - of Cadwallader Colden, the British lieutenant governor - in what would grow to be a major collection.
After the War of Independence, the revived Chamber established itself at the Merchants' Coffee House, on the southeast corner of the meeting of Wall and Water streets. And then, in 1817, when this establishment began to decline from respectibility, the monthly meetings - and a growing collection of paintings, which now included a portrait of Hamilton by Trumbull - were shifted over to the Tontine Coffee House, across the street.
In 1827, the Chamber's president informed his members that "The Merchants Exchange Company have appropriated a convenient apartment in the New Exchange for the accomodation of the Chamber of Commerce; and the Board of Trurstees have directed me to offer ... to the Chamber the gratuitous use of the same." The new building, on Wall Street, appeared to represent a long-term answer to the problem of location, and it was free. The members accepted "with great pleasure" the opportunity to occupy the "suitable and elegant apartment."
Less than a decade later, the building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1835.
In 1850, the Chamber occupied makeshift quarters in the directors' room at the Merchants' Bank, at 42 Wall St. A decade later, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the Chamber had moved to 63 William St., where its now-large portrait collection occupied every inch of the limited wall space and threatened to encroach onto the floors and ceilings.
Then, in 1883, the Building Committee recieved "a proposal from the Mutual Life Insurance Company to lease to the Chamber for a period of five years with the privilege of a five years renewal at the annual rent of $6000.- three rooms containing an area of about 3500 square feet, or nearly three times our present space, on the fourth floor of their new fire proof building now in course of erection on Nassau Sreet."
These new rooms, the committee declared, "are ample for the present work of the Chamber, centrally located, and are easier of access to a larger number of members than any of the other premises offered."
By the turn of the century, however, even these ample quarters were becoming inadequate. The merchants and industrialists had rented for too long; it was time to buy. The Chamber of Commerce of New York - the most prestigious business group in the nation's greatest city - deserved, at last, a home to call its own.