TONTINE COFFEE HOUSE (MERCHANTS' AND BROKERS' EXCHANGE) Wall and Water Streets (Merchants Coffee House, extreme right) Painting by Francis Guy, c. 1798 The New-York Historical Society carriages, and clang."16 Another was the splendor of its commercial hotels, culminating in the original Waldorf-Astoria, where, early in the twentieth century, Henry James found, "condensed and accumulated," the "characteristic" of the metropolis.17 The frenetic pursuits at the Wall Street Stock Exchange symbolized the role of the metropolis in the realm of finance; while to D. W. Brogan, the magnitude of its commercial activity was symbolized best in the harbor and the port.18 Recognized as the outward sign of New York's preeminence in retail merchandising was the opulence of its fabled shopping centers, which had moved successively northward to Thirty-fourth Street by the eve of World War I, and to the vicinity of the Fifties and Madison Avenue in the expansive postwar era that followed. In the opinion of J. B. Priestley, mid-twentieth-century New York was more than any- 10 Walt Whitman, articles written for Life Illustrated, in New York Dissected (New York: 1936), 199-200. 17 Henry James, The American Scene (New York: 1946), 102. "Denis W. Brogan, American Themes (New York: n. d.), 115. 407 "