New York City in the 1880s

"Wall Street. looking west toward Trnity Church past the Washington statue on the steps of the Sub-treasury building on May 14, 1884, when a brief panic was caused by the sudden failure of the Grant and Wood Bank." From Harper's Weekly, May 24, 1884.

Between 1882-1886, an economic depression struck the American West and slowed the growth of the broader American economy. The depression was not as severe as the major financial panics of 1873-78 and 1893-97, however, and the American economy continued to evolve over the decade. The completion of an intercontinental railroad and the partial reconstruction of the South brought large amounts of raw materials intoan expanding northern industrial economy.

The depression adversely effected New York City, but not enough so as to keep the 1880s from being a decade of sustained growth. New York City continued to occupy a central role in American economic life. In addition to its traditional role as the primary port of access to and from the Atlantic world, and its mid-century emergence as a center of manufacturing, the city had become over the previous decades the financial hub of the country as well. Industrial expansion depended on capital, and the New York Stock Exchange–dominated by industrial titans such as Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, and William Vanderbilt– generated that capital. While businessmen traded and speculated on Wall Street, only blocks away new immigrants, principally from Ireland, Italy, and Germany and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, streamed into the city in increasing numbers, feeding the city's growing demand for new laborers in the construction, transportation, and manufacturing trades and establishing New York as a "city of the world." As the city evolved economically and demographically in the three decades after the Civil War, it quickly became the most technologically advanced city the nation and the world had ever known.