New York City Trust Companies

I am working on a paper about trust company failures in New York State between 1875 and 1925, which I will be presenting at the meeting of the Economic and Business History Society in Montreal. I ran across a bunch of illustrations stored on my computer that I had collected while working on the Panic of 1907. Since they did not make it in to the paper in Business History Review  (here is an earlier ungated version) I decided to post some of them here.

Here are two maps showing the location of trust companies in Manhattan in 1907. They were created by Karen Hogan, who was a Geography major here at the University of Mary Washington. They illustrate the geographic difference between the traditional downtown trust companies and the uptown trust companies that experienced most of the runs.

These two are pictures of runs on the Trust Company of America and the Lincoln Trust Company from the New York Tribune on October 24 and 25, 1907.

Here are two pictures of the main office of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. One shows how it looked in 1893; the other shows how the main branch looked in 1907. They illustrate the rapid growth of the first of the uptown trust companies.

This is an advertisement from the Van Norden Trust Company, the furthest uptown of the uptown trust companies. It illustrates how much their strategy differed from the focus of traditional trust companies on business clients.