Wall Street Art, Stock Gambling, Gallagher’s Evening Exchange, Harper’s Weekly, Antique 1864

Stock Gambling At “Gallagher’s Evening Exchange”
Harpers Weekly, New York: 1864
Woodblock engraving with later color, 11 x 16 inches
$250

Engraving of top-hatted traders placing their bid orders. Gallagher’s Evening Exchange was a short-lived New York City trading venue described in this late-19th-century account:

The evening exchange was a curious excrescence of the times. March 21, 1864, a Mr. Gallagher opened a luxuriously appointed room opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where men who had spculated all day could speculate all night as well. so injurious was this uninterrupted round of business deemed that in the summer of 1865 the banks of the city, the stock exchange, the “open board” [of stock brokers], and the gold exchange united in an effort to suppress it by forbidding their members to frequent Gallagher’s rooms. As a result the evening exchange was closed in August 1865.

References:

Laughlin, James Laurence and James Alfred Field, eds. The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 6. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1898. p. 285. Online at Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=nK8RAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA285 (26 April 2017).