Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York, running from Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam called the street Het Cingel ("the Fence"), as an actual wall existed along the street from 1653 to 1699, built on the orders of Governor Peter Stuyvesant at the start of the First Anglo-Dutch War. The English expanded and improved the wall after their 1664 takeover during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, as did the Dutch when they briefly retook the city from 1673 to 1674 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. In 1711, the Common Council established the city's first official slave market at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets; it remained in operation until 1762. In 1789, President George Washington was inaugurated on the balcony of Federal Hall, and the building was also the location of the passing of the Bill of Rights. In 1792, local merchants and traders who had previously gathered at a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street cofounded the New York Stock Exchange, and New York's business community boomed with the opening of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century. In the years between the American Civil War and World War I, New York became second only to London as the world's financial capital. In 1889, The Wall Street Journal was founded with the job of publicizing Charles Dow's stock reports. Wall Street became a symbol of American capitalism, and it was the site of the anarchist Wall Street bombing of 1920 and the 24 October 1929 Wall Street Crash of 1929, which ushered in the Great Depression. Wall Street did not fully recover until the 1960s, and the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s saw Wall Street become flush with money, growth, and a rampant acceptance of cocaine use. The 1987 stock market plunge cost 100,000 jobs in the surrounding area, but, in 1998, the New York Stock Exchange and the city struck a $900 million deal to keep the NYSE from relocating across the Hudson River to New Jersey. The 9/11 terrorist attacks saw 45% of Wall Street's best office space - including the World Trade Center - be destroyed. Wall Street was again met with calamity in 2007 at the start of the Great Recession, which led to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
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