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Mapping Mobility: Spatial and Class Change in the Gilded Age Wall Street Workforce

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Overview In the years after the depression of the 1890s, Wall Street and its capital markets moved to the center of the American financial system. [1] Its smooth functioning generated massive amounts of wealth for bank officials, investment bankers, stockbrokers, corporate attorneys, and other professionals, but depended on tens of thousands of white-collar workers whose labor was either seen in abstract terms or barely acknowledged at all. [2] As part of a broader project on the history of Wall Street in the late Gilded Age (1893-1914), I have sought to recapture the experiences of these workers by searching diaries, correspondence, organizational histories, and the occasional journalistic report. Digital methods have proven to be yet another way of recovering their experiences.

This project maps the residences of more than 100 employees at the New York investment bank Brown Brothers, in 1900 and 1910. Combining salary data from the firm's records at the New-York Historical Society with demographic data from the U.S. Census (digitized by Ancestry.com), I've created an interactive map that can be interrogated using a number of variables, including gender, age, and household structure. Digital mapping allows the scholar to examine facts on the ground at multiple scales rather than being pinned to a single interpretive frame: scanned insurance maps enable an investigation of the kinds of homes, businesses, and institutions that filled the blocks surrounding workers’ homes, while the metropolitan-scale map used as the primary visual device helps both the author and readers position workers in a geographic landscape whose broad contours may be familiar but where details reveal the large scale of development that had yet to occur.

Following a first wave of scholarship that focused on the experiences of the first generation of female office workers, valuable recent studies have examined how masculinity was also part of office culture and argued that gender shaped how men thought about their careers no less than it did the careers of women. At the same time, this scholarship has often stopped short of examining whether family roles shaped how men conceptualized their careers. Similarly, scholarship on companionate marriage, fatherhood, and middle-class suburbanization has often been unable to follow white-collar men into their offices to see how they negotiated gender in both the home and the office.

Mapping the employees of Brown Bros. reveals an answer to why workers in the Wall Street workforce did not feel the same kinds of alienation noted among other members of the rapidly burgeoning urban clerical class. [3] Put simply, men at Brown Brothers and other Wall Street firms saw themselves as part of a trajectory in which their futures as husbands and fathers were valued. They saw themselves as participants in a process of upward mobility that was both monetary and spatial. In the sections that follow, I discuss the history of Brown Brothers, the growth of the white-collar workforce there and on Wall Street in general, the methodology I used to map the white-collar workforce, and how mapping household structures can illuminate how workers understood their careers. I conclude by examining whether Wall Street workers' experiences both in and away from the office might have helped them develop a "metropolitan sensibility" that would go on to shape the New York region's future.
Example of Page with Prospect inserted. Wall Street's operations depended on white-collar workers, and anecdotal evidence indicated that they were largely content with their jobs at a time when many workers in the financial sector, and in the emerging corporate bureaucracies more generally, were experiencing alienation in the face of growing loss of control over their work and limited opportunities for advancement as either independent proprietors or in pyramidal business hierarchies.

At first glance, Wall Street firms seemed to adopt many of the same techniques for providing worker benefits as businesses elsewhere, such as corporate lunchrooms, annual bonuses, and pension schemes. (Mandell; Tone) Closer examination, however, revealed that Wall Street firms were far more generous than most American businesses: where factory workers might receive a Christmas bonus of one or two weeks' pay, for example (1.9–3.8% of wages), Wall Street employees typically received no less than 5% bonuses, and often bonuses in the range of 10% to 20%.