By Jared Ebersole in Video 09 Oct 2026

The Small Broad Street Building With a Trillion-Dollar Backstory

Behind a familiar deli frontage at 100 Broad Street lies a chapter in New York’s transformation from paper checks to electronic money.

At 100 Broad Street, the skyline briefly drops its guard. Between Lower Manhattan’s taller buildings sits a low, two-story structure whose food-service frontage gives little away. The address has housed Essen, an everyday stop for something to eat in a neighborhood associated with extraordinary amounts of money. Its earlier occupant explains why this modest building deserves a second look: the New York Clearing House Association.

The connection reaches well beyond the block. The institution that moved here in 1963 developed CHIPS, an electronic payments network that now handles roughly $2 trillion on an average business day. That figure describes money moving through a network, rather than cash stored behind the deli. Still, it gives this small building an unusually large financial backstory. Building history, CHIPS annual statistics.

Where it is

100 Broad Street, between Pearl and Bridge Streets, Financial District, Manhattan, New York City.

The building’s later life as an Essen location is documented in a 2021 neighborhood account. Its interest today extends beyond any particular tenant: here is a former piece of banking infrastructure that can disappear into the ordinary business of buying lunch. Forgotten New York.

To understand what happened here, start with a check. Someone deposits a payment written against an account at another bank. The receiving bank needs to collect from the paying bank, while both institutions need records that agree. Multiply that exchange across a city, and a seemingly simple transaction becomes a substantial coordination problem.

Before New York had a clearinghouse, bank employees carried checks from institution to institution through the streets. In an account cited by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, employees from 60 banks crossed paths on these daily rounds. Every additional relationship meant more travel, more handling, and more opportunities for mistakes. The New York Clearing House, founded in 1853, brought the exchanges into a common organization and reduced that friction. Federal Reserve history of clearinghouses.

The underlying idea was powerful: banks could organize their obligations together instead of treating every encounter as a separate errand. A clearinghouse made cooperation part of the machinery of competition. Banks still competed for customers, but the payments those customers made required shared procedures and dependable daily settlement.

That arrangement also made the clearinghouse consequential. As Bernanke explained, concentrating transactions can reduce costs and operational risks, while concentrating responsibility in a smaller number of institutions. A well-run exchange becomes something other businesses quietly depend on. Its importance is easiest to miss when everything works.

By the twentieth century, the physical burden of checks had become an engineering problem as well as an accounting problem. Paper needed to be sorted, grouped, checked, transported, and handled again as it moved toward the bank on which it was drawn. In 1970, Federal Reserve Governor George Mitchell described this repetitive machinery as a central weakness of the payments system. Faster equipment could improve individual steps, but the document still had a journey to complete. Federal Reserve History.

Imagine the distinction between processing a parcel faster and eliminating the parcel’s trip. Mechanization addresses the first problem. Electronic payment instructions can address the second. That difference helps explain why the story of a building associated with paper clearing eventually becomes a story about a network.

The Clearing House’s move to Broad Street came during this transition. In spring 1963, it left its elaborate headquarters at 77 Cedar Street for the two-story building designed by Rogers & Butler. Some of the old institution’s furnishings made the trip, including marble, carved mahogany furniture, and scales once used to weigh gold dust. The contrast was striking: objects from an earlier financial world installed inside a restrained modern headquarters. Account of the 1963 move.

At street level, that restraint remains the building’s most distinctive quality. Its low profile interrupts the vertical rhythm of the Financial District. Describing it as a bunker captures an impression, but its documented role as a clearinghouse is more revealing. This was an address associated with the work behind banking: exchanging instructions, reconciling obligations, and keeping payments moving.

The decisive electronic development arrived in 1970, when the association began operating the Clearing House Interbank Payments System, or CHIPS. A Government Accountability Office history identifies its original purpose precisely: replacing paper checks used in international dollar payments. That is a narrower and more useful description than saying it replaced everyone’s personal checks. GAO payments-system guide.

International business creates obligations in dollars even when the underlying activity crosses national borders. CHIPS gave participating banks an electronic way to handle those large payments. The broader transition away from paper involved several systems, including the automated clearinghouse services associated with recurring payments. CHIPS occupied the wholesale end of that transformation, where individual transactions could be enormous.

Its modern operation adds another layer of efficiency. The network’s algorithm continually matches and offsets payments, reducing the funding participants need to support the value passing through the system. The Clearing House reported that, in 2024, each dollar of intraday funding supported $29 in settled payments. It also reported that approximately 95 percent of CHIPS payments represented the dollar portion of transfers beginning or ending outside the United States. CHIPS liquidity explanation.

The scale is measurable. In 2025, CHIPS processed an average of 632,419 payments per business day, with an average daily value of about $2.014 trillion. Those totals describe the continuing network, not activity inside the former Broad Street headquarters. Keeping that distinction clear makes the building’s history more interesting: the institution’s financial reach outgrew the physical setting through which we encounter its past. CHIPS annual statistics.

Stand outside 100 Broad Street and the surviving architecture supplies a useful perspective on New York’s financial history. Money once required people to cross streets carrying documents. Then it required increasingly organized systems for handling those documents. Electronic networks changed what had to travel, while preserving the need for banks to agree on who owed what and when payment was complete.

A modest former clearinghouse makes that transformation visible at human scale. The towers tell you that finance is powerful. This small building offers a glimpse of how its everyday work became possible.