“What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous – a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!” – Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street

By the time Melville wrote Bartleby, the story of the scrivener whose passive resistance so aggravates the narrator, at least two qualities of the financial district were already evident. The dual nature of the neighborhood was well established—a thriving hive by day, a desert at night and on Sundays. And resistance to Wall Street, passive or otherwise, was clearly useless.

Melville’s birthplace at 6 Pearl Street is perhaps an example of this. The modest house is long gone, and the only trace of Melville’s presence is a plaque and a bust of the author hidden behind plexiglass in a sconce at the base of towering white office building.