Wall Street in October 1929: Six Records of the Crash

Crowds gather near the New York Stock Exchange on October 24, 1929. This was the first of the crash’s most notorious sessions. Bankers tried to check the selling that day; the much larger Monday and Tuesday falls were still to come.

Another Associated Press view of the October 24 crowd. People came to the financial district for news as well as business. The photograph records their presence, not their individual investments; it would be misleading to identify everyone pictured as a ruined shareholder.

The crowd spills into the space around Federal Hall, beside the exchange. The recognizable buildings made this corner a shorthand for the crash. The source dates the scene to October 24, rather than to Black Tuesday on October 29.

This view is cataloged to late October 1929 without a precise day. It belongs to the same unsettled period, when crowds and press photographers made Wall Street’s trouble visible outside the trading floor. The uncertain date is retained here.

Brokers at the New York Stock Exchange on October 25, 1929. Trading continued after Black Thursday. The photograph sits between the first emergency purchases by bankers and the renewed collapse on October 28 and 29.

The New York Times front page on October 30 reports the previous day’s market collapse. A newspaper gives the event a contemporary frame, before later banking panics and mass unemployment changed what Americans understood by the crisis of 1929.