History

South William Street is named for William Beekman, who came to New York with Peter Stuyvesant and served nine terms as mayor. It is one of the oldest streets in New York and is on the Gastello Plan of New Amsterdam. On the southern half of our hotel site, landowner Weasel Evertsen built a house (c. 1660) for Poser Levy. He was a Jewish butcher and moneylender. He successfully fought for permission from the town “to keep guard with other burghers” despite his fellow townsmen's disinclination to serve with Jews. Levy retained the property for ten years, then conveyed the house and lot to Jan Herberding. He later leased land on the west side of today’s South William Street to Congregation Shearith Israel for its synagogue.

From the mid-1600s until 1730, Congregation Shearith Israel rented space on Beaver Street and subsequently on Mill Street (today known as South William Street). In 1730, they built the first structure in America designed and constructed to be a synagogue on the property that now houses The Wall Street Inn. They replaced it with a larger structure on the same site in 1818. In commemoration of this, South William Street has been co-named “Mill Street Synagogue/Seixas Way."

At the northeast corner of the site Jacob Haey, a prosperous trader in Curacao and Santa Cruz erected a comfortable house (c. 1648). His widow continued to live in the Stone Street house until at least 1686. The lane adjacent to this property was very narrow and remained so for a century. In 1754, residents petitioned to widen it since it was the “only passage thro Mill Street Commonly Called the Jews Ally […] to Duke Street.” The Haey/Jochems house and its garden were sacrificed for the widening of the lane.

A new building was erected on this site in 1836 and occupied by various importers. In the 1920s, insurance executive William H. McGee remodeled the site for his insurance firm. At mid-century, Lehman Brothers occupied the building (then known as 9 South William) as an annex to its larger building across Mill Lane. Originating as a mercantile trade and commodities firm before the Civil War, Lehman Brothers established a base in New York in 1868 and soon shifted to investment banking. The only such firm to survive the Great Depression with its prestige intact, they financed many successful businesses such as Hollywood studios and large department store chains.