Federal Hall: When the Republic Swore Before Stone

Before Wall Street became a temple of numbers, its site held colonial New York City Hall, linked to the trial of the printer John Peter Zenger, and this book follows the place as it became Federal Hall, remodeled under Pierre Charles L'Enfant to receive the new federal government. On its balcony George Washington took the oath, a commander of revolution now entering a different struggle, the struggle to build a state, and inside it the new Congress met, organized departments and the federal judiciary, and proposed the amendments that became the Bill of Rights. The capital then moved to Philadelphia and the original building was demolished, leaving memory where the walls had stood, until a Greek Revival temple rose on the site as the United States Custom House, like a fragment of Athens fallen into Manhattan. The house of the oath became a sub-treasury with gold and silver in its vaults, and Washington returned in bronze on the front steps, the republican temple behind him and the capital of finance before him. Speaking at last in its own voice, Federal Hall says its body died and another rose over the same memory, and the book ends with the Republic as something we deserve when we preserve it, and with architecture as its memory.