The streets were laid out before the grid and most of them take one lane of traffic. Wall Street and Broad Street have not taken cars since 2001.
What Financial District looks like
The streets here are narrow because they were laid out before the grid. The Castello Plan set them in the 1660s for New Amsterdam, and the 1811 grid stopped at Houston Street. Most of them take one lane between some of the tallest buildings in the city, so the roadway is in shadow most of the day.
stands at the west end of Wall Street, with the Rector Street subway entrance set into the wall below its churchyard. The middle of the district is east of it, where Wall Street meets . The is on one side and the old JP Morgan bank at is on the other. Neither street has taken cars since 2001. The bollards have bronze faces wide enough to sit on.
Open ground is rare and mostly private. stands on about a quarter of its block and the rest is plaza, with Jean Dubuffet's Group of Four Trees on it and Isamu Noguchi's sunken garden below. A plaque at the Pine Street stair says gatherings of twenty five or more are not allowed up there.
is the triangle at Maiden Lane and William Street, the first city space named for a living artist when it opened in 1978. The has the whole block behind it in rusticated stone with barred windows, and its gold vault is eighty feet down on bedrock.
Weekday sidewalks are full and weekend ones are not. Office floors have been going to apartments since 1995. About 61,000 people lived here in 2018.
Films shot in Financial District
The Dark Knight Rises shot its Gotham exchange on Wall Street. Die Hard With A Vengeance put its heist under the .
The Dark Knight Rises, 2012
Wall Street at Broad Street, with the bollards. Street View
The outside of the Gotham City Stock Exchange is the old JP Morgan bank at , on the south corner at . Bane and his men go in at the front of it. The trading floor they take once they are inside is an Art Deco bank hall on South Spring Street in Los Angeles, and the motorcycle chase afterwards is on Los Angeles streets too.
Die Hard With A Vengeance, 1995
Liberty Street along the Federal Reserve. Street View
Simon Gruber's target is the Bank at 33 Liberty Street. The block is harder to recognise now than it was. The Wall Street subway entrance the film puts beside the building was built for the shoot, and the small green park in those scenes has a tower on it.
What Financial District can double for
Financial District can stand in for a stock exchange or a central bank, an American downtown built before 1940 and Gotham City.
