Where Washington Took the Oath

The marble building ahead on your right, with its row of Greek columns and broad front steps, stands on the exact spot where George Washington became president. On April thirtieth, seventeen eighty nine, Washington stepped onto a balcony on this site and took the first presidential oath of office under the new Constitution, administered by Robert Livingston, the chancellor of New York, before a crowd packed into the streets below.

The building he stood on was not this one. That earlier structure had served as New York's city hall since the early seventeen hundreds, and it had already seen its share of history before Washington arrived. In seventeen sixty five, delegates from nine colonies met inside it for the Stamp Act Congress, one of the first organized protests against British taxation without representation, more than a decade before independence was declared. The Declaration of Independence itself was read publicly from the site in July of seventeen seventy six. After the Constitution created a new national government, the old city hall was renovated and renamed Federal Hall, briefly serving as the first capitol of the United States before the government moved to Philadelphia and then Washington.

That building was torn down in the early eighteen hundreds. What stands on the site now went up in eighteen forty two as a United States customhouse, built of marble in the Greek Revival style, with a soaring domed rotunda modeled on ancient temples. For decades afterward it held federal reserves as a subtreasury, at times storing a significant share of the nation's gold and silver behind its walls.

Today it operates as a National Park Service memorial, and a bronze statue of Washington stands watch on the steps, marking the ground where a brand new country tested whether its experiment in self government could actually work.