From the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street Economics blog:
Bank Street in New York City is a quaint little six-block stretch in Greenwich Village (see this 48-second video) with a huge cultural legacy—but
no banks. Many cities and towns have a Bank Street and often the street
is so named because that's where most of the banks were originally
located. (It is not likely that any Bank Street got its name
because of its proximity to a riverbank.) However, New York City’s Bank
Street is not where the banks were originally located and it's not even
in the financial district—it's in Greenwich Village. Why, then, is it
called “Bank Street?”
Okay, we cheated in that last paragraph. Manhattan’s banks were not on Bank Street originally
but they were indeed there at some point—they moved northward from Wall
Street in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in an
effort to escape yellow fever. A post
on the Forgotten New York website explains how there were two main
waves of the epidemic in the city and that Bank Street was essentially
named for the first bank to relocate, not the set of banks that
eventually moved there:
Though most neighboring streets are named for local personalities in
the Village’s early days (one early burgess, Charles Christopher Amos,
had three streets named for him), Bank Street is named for one of the
oldest institutions in NYC, the Bank of New York, which opened an office
“uptown” after a yellow fever epidemic downtown on Wall Street in 1798
prompted a relocation. Several other banks followed suit in 1822 after a
second outbreak.
One can view this relocation of banks as an early form of corporate contingency (or business continuity)
planning. Think about how important continuity is in banking and how
advantageous it would have been to keep those early New York banks
functioning. In his 1922 book A Century of Banking in New York, 1822-1922, author Henry Lanier describes, in the chapter “The Year the Banks Migrated,” the Bank of New York’s forethought:
Some bankers and others had been more foresighted. As noted, one of the
first deaths in the scourge of 1798 was a book-keeper in the Bank of
New York. "Fearing another visitation of the pestilence, the bank made
arrangements with the branch Bank of the United States to purchase two
plots of eight city lots each, in Greenwich Village, far away from the
city proper, to which they could remove in case of being placed in
danger of quarantine. Here two houses were erected in the spring of
1799, and here the banks were removed in September of that year, giving
their name, Bank Street, to the little village lane that had been
nameless before. The last removal was made in 1822, when the yellow
fever raged with unusual virulence, and the plot which had been
purchased for $500 was sold in 1843 for $30,000."
In this 1842 map of lower Manhattan, you can see Bank Street just to the right of the large “E” of the “Hudson River” label. (Here is a 1933 street view.)
Of course, Wall Street is in the bottom tip of the island. Bank Street
is about 2.7 miles north of Wall Street. Yes, it takes a bit of time to
walk from one to the other—but not that long. How did they know that
this distance would be sufficient to prevent the fever’s spread? They
didn’t know with scientific certainty, but they had an idea (see below),
and the move was indeed sufficient. Scientists at the time were
ignorant of the mechanism of transmission—the mosquito. That discovery and proof thereof did not come until 1900 (see video from PBS’s American Experience
series, which describes the horror of this disease and how three
medical scientists discovered the virus’s means of transmission).
Mosquitoes don’t travel very far by themselves (most don’t travel more than a mile
from where they hatched), so for yellow fever to have spread to Bank
Street, someone would have had to transport an infected mosquito and let
it loose among people on Bank Street, or an infected person would have
had to hang around in the Bank Street neighborhood long enough to be
bitten by a mosquito, of which there were possibly a lot fewer in the
Village. The question of why mosquitos could not have been blown by the
wind from one location to the other is posed
by Henry Lanier in the same book mentioned above. (Lanier also somewhat
answers the question about why people thought the move north would be
sufficient):
Now, it happened that there was at the city’s very door a safe refuge.
From the time of the “epidemical distemper or plague” reported by Mayor
John Cruger in 1742, New Yorkers had discovered they could escape the
infection by fleeing to the village of Greenwich, only two or three
miles away. This haven was considered almost proof even against smallpox
. . .
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