The Exchange Artist: A Tale Of High-flying Speculation And America's First Banking Collapse

摘要

The Exchange Artist, an expansive biography of the speculator Andrew Dexter (1779-1837), is an unusual choice for review in these pages. But it is warranted, first by the central role played by the Boston Exchange Coffee House, once the tallest and most ambitious building in the United States, and second, in consideration of the skill with which the author, Jane Kamensky, has embedded the story of the building, as both fact and metaphor, so engagingly within Dexter's biography. In a prologue and six chapters The Exchange Artist reveals Dexter's audacious scheme to amass a fortune by manipulating the unregulated American banking practices of the early nineteenth century. Dexter employed vast quantities of specious notes issued by his own far-flung banks to finance the construction of the Boston Exchange Coffee House, a seven-story brick building containing 153 rooms surrounding an interior atrium and "Change Floor" that was intended to function as tbe center of financial activities in Boston. The building also provided an unprecedented array of hotel rooms, restaurants, shops, and numerous additional meeting rooms and services to its customers.