Merchants' Exchange Building
In the eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s merchants and traders transacted their business in taverns and coffee shops near the waterfront, first favoring the London Coffee House and then the City Tavern. There they negotiated the sale and purchase of the huge volume of goods that moved through the city.
Following the model of other cities, in 1831 a group of important merchants, including the immensely wealthy banker Stephen Girard, formed the Philadelphia Exchange Company to erect a specialized building for their business. Nine architects submitted proposals, and William Strickland (1788-1854), the city’s leading Greek Revival designer, won the first premium and oversaw the erection of this marble of temple of commerce in 1832-34.
Unlike Strickland’s iconic Second Bank (1818-1824), a recognizable, scaled-down version of the Parthenon in Athens, the Merchants’ Exchange is an imaginative mixture of many elements, reflecting the growing eclecticism of the nineteenth century. The chief inspiration was the Choragic Monument of Lysikrates (Athens, 335-334 BCE), an elaborate round pedestal for a singing competition trophy, but it was freely interpreted. Enlarged, it is the model for the building’s cupola, which rides on the roof of the semi-circular east portico. The portico’s Corinthian capitals are also based on the Lysikrates monument, but there are no Greek precedents for the visually exciting attachment of that portico to the rectangular body of the building, which adjusts the building to fit its triangular site. The other details are modeled on a wide variety of classical sources.
Most of the Merchants' Exchange is blue-gray marble that came from a quarry in Pennsylvania, but the intricate column and pilaster capitals are made of marble from Carrara, Italy. Two of the masons who worked on the building, Pietro and Philippo Bardi, also came from Carrara. The lions installed on the east portico in 1838 are modeled on the animals carved by Antonio Canova for the tomb of Pope Clement XII in St. Peter's in Rome (1783-92). Their sculptors were John Battin and Henry Fiorelli.
Until the Civil War, the building was the center of Philadelphia commerce. There was a restaurant, a large post office, and small offices with street level entrances for traders and insurance companies. Business was conducted in the domed and elaborately decorated Exchange Room, located on the second floor behind the semicircular portico.
As business practices changed in the mid nineteenth century, the use of the building also changed. The Merchants Exchange was dissolved and replaced by the Corn Exchange in 1866, which was in turn supplanted in 1875 by the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, whose predecessor, the Board of Brokers, had moved to the building in 1834.
In 1901, the Stock Exchange simplified and rebuilt the interiors, and the cupola was reconstructed and slightly relocated. The use of the building for financial purposes steadily declined, and in 1922 it was converted for use as a produce market, surrounded by metal-roofed market sheds. These were swept away when the National Park Service acquired the building for use as offices in 1952, and in 1960-64 the exterior was thoroughly restored, and the lantern was rebuilt again and returned to its original position. The historic interiors were not recreated.