Alexander Hamilton and his family, when they returned to New York City in mid-February, 1795, after he resigned his term as Secretary of the Treasury in Philadelphia, did not return to their original local home at 57 Wall Street. Instead, they inhabited several different residences for short periods.

Hamilton was a man persistently mindful of his reputation and bent on upward mobility. He desired a high-status and fashionable address befitting a man of influence and importance. Therefore, the neighborhood south of Trinity Church must have suited his aspirations, for with few exceptions during the late 18th/early 19th Century it played home to a significant number of upper crust individuals and families. Hamilton ally, The Federalist co-author, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and currently-serving New York State governor John Jay, for instance, made his home there.

The block, in Hamilton’s time, also featured a gun shop, a shoemaker’s, and the workshop of a German immigrant candlemaker who would be the grandfather of future Senator from Louisiana John Slidell, who would take the side of the Confederacy in the 1861-1865 Civil War.

All the same, Hamilton, in his writings, does not seem to hold too high an opinion of 26 Broadway. When Hamilton succeeded in getting himself promoted to Major General of the Army in 1798, he clearly believed he deserved a more splendiferous abode. He wrote his friend, Secretary of War James McHenry, “The procuring of a better [house] than I now occupy would be Strictly justifiable but it is not my wish to do it.”

Decades on, the area around 26 Broadway went into decline. Rich people began to move uptown. The lot upon which Hamilton’s home once stood became a coal yard—or at least immediately flanked it.

Real estate along the entire block would start being bought up by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in the early 1880s. The older buildings were demolished to make way for one of the earliest skyscrapers and a capitalistic nerve center for the entire domestic oil business. Today, the building is a registered New York City landmark.