While today it would be unseemly to sit down for a professional meeting with a lawyer at that lawyer’s home, with family members in other rooms, in Alexander Hamilton’s time this was a practice that was still on its way out.

Indoor space came at a premium in Colonial America, and conducting business in one’s home was to a large extent the norm. As commerce and urbanization became more sophisticated, however, this standard was in flux.

When Hamilton first hung out a shingle as a lawyer in New York City, starting in 1786, his home and office were conjoined at 57 Wall Street. This arrangement seems also to have held for his next two residences after returning from Philadelphia and his term as Secretary of the Treasury.

69 Stone Street was Hamilton’s first dedicated law office, which he shared with fellow lawyer Thomas L. Ogden. Hamilton and Ogden sometimes represented the same clients, typically in commercial disputes such as James Brown, Assignee of George B. Dawson, A Bankrupt, v. David Cummings and William Bailie v. United Insurance Company.

Stone Street was the island of Manhattan’s first paved—that is, laid out with cobblestones—street. Prior to that, it had had the Dutch named Brouwer Street due to the fact that it was home to the brewery of Oloff Stevensen Van Cortlandt—the progenitor of one of New York’s most prominent families with many place-named accredited to them today. Evidently, Van Cortlandt’s delivery horses raised so much dust that block residents demanded the dirt street be updated.

Pictured here is an adjacent block of Broad Street, just around the corner from Stone Street, from the early 1900s—not a contemporaneous view.

Today, Stone Street lies in the southern end of the Financial District, home to large hotels, offices, and pubs.