The exchange artist

The Exchange Artist tells the story of Andrew Dexter, Junior and the first American skyscraper. Equal parts entrepreneur and confidence man, Dexter erected his swagger building, the Exchange Coffee House, through sheer financial legerdemain. Weaving together the biography of this once-notorious, now-forgotten man with the history of his enormous building and the pyramid scheme that served as its foundation, The Exchange Artist dramatizes the birth of modern money culture in the first decades of the American republic.

The book opens in the 1790s, when the business of banking was considered “a trackless wilderness” in the young United States, and paper money was the object of intense suspicion. The framers of the Constitution, still reeling from the collapse of the Continental dollar during the Revolution, had barred the creation of a national paper currency. And so, every bank issued its own notes, creating a cacophony of competing values that grew more dissonant with the founding of each new bank. Though they hungered for credit and thirsted after liquidity—much like today’s money-men and -women—most early American merchants looked on bank bills with a jaundiced eye. Gold and silver were the stuff of real money.

A pioneer in the new age of paper, Dexter set out to build a tower, and a fortune, out of bank notes. Beginning in the first years of the nineteenth century, he embarked on a career as an urban real estate speculator, financing his hard-won slice of downtown Boston through the string of banks he commandeered, and the millions of dollars they freely printed. Upon this paper pyramid he built the tallest building in the United States. For two years beginning in the spring of 1807, an army of carters, diggers, masons, carpenters, carvers, painters, and glaziers swarmed Dexter’s building site on Boston’s Congress Street, taking their pay in paper money. Brick by brick they erected the Exchange Coffee House, which stood seven stories high (with two more floors below ground) and boasted over 102,000 square feet of interior space. Among its 153 rooms were a trading floor, a post office, a reading room, offices, restaurants, meeting spaces, a grand ballroom, and numerous hotel chambers. Some onlookers said its enormous height blotted out the sun, and called it a modern Babel, all hubris and confusion.

In 1809, just as the Exchange was ready for unveiling, the financial pyramid collapsed. Banks shuttered, and piles of paper promises were rendered instantly worthless. Boston’s jails and its poor house filled with workers who awoke one morning to find their wallets full of trash. Reviled in the American press, Dexter absconded to Canada, where he hatched a new crop of dreams that would see him rise – and fall – several times more before his death in Mobile, Alabama in 1837.

And in Boston, the building remained, opulent but largely vacant, a monument to the glories of ambition and the terrors of failure. When at last it was destroyed in a spectacular fire in 1818, its implosion provided the final element in a cautionary fable that offered an object lesson to the rising young nation.