The exchange artist

by Jane Kamensky

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 ea