Hallgarten & Company

Lazarus Hallgarten arrived in the United States in 1849. His initial activity was as a note and exchange broker opening an office at 20 Exchange Place in 1850. This yielded a moderate income and enabled him to start as a banker. Initially the firm was called Hallgarten & Herzfeld (the other partners being Joseph Herzfeld, Samuel Neustadt, William Rosenheim and Hallgarten's two sons), which eventually became Hallgarten & Co. from January 1, 1867 after Herzfeld retired. After 1865 the firm developed into a stock and bond dealing house. The founder maintained his connections back in Europe and cultivated the flow of German capital into American railroad investments in the post-Civil War era.

Lazarus Hallgarten died in 1875, and Rosenheim and Neustadt left the partnership. Both retiring partners returned to Germany with Rosenheim (who was married to Maria Hallgarten - daughter of L. Hallgarten) founding Wilhelm Rosenheim & Company in Berlin and Neustadt founding Gebruder Neustadt in Frankfurt. Two of the three sons of Lazarus carried on the New York business with new partners (Bernhard Mainzer and Sigmund Neustadt - Samuel's son). One of these sons was Julius Hallgarten (founder of the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design), who died in Davos, Switzerland in 1883, while the other was Charles Hallgarten (Karl Lazarus Hallgarten) who died in Frankfurt am Main in 1908.

The firm became a member of the New York Stock Exchange on January 1, 1881.

20 Exchange Place (1850–1865),

28 Broad Street (1865-May 1902),

72 Broadway (1902–1903),

5 Nassau Street/7 Pine Street - Hanover Bank Building (1903–1920),

Hallgarten & Company was eventually merged into Moseley Hallgarten & Estabrook in early 1974, which had its headquarters in Boston. The other component firm was F.S. Moseley, a long-established Boston firm founded by Frederick Strong Moseley in 1879. Shortly thereafter Weeden & Company and C.B. Richard Ellis (no connection to the realtors of exactly the same name) were merged into the structure. The holding company for this whole structure was Moseley Securities Corporation which had its stock listed on the NYSE.

Financial problems beset the firm in the 1980s, particularly in relation to the Crash of Black Monday (1987). Shortly thereafter, in November 1987, Moseley Hallgarten & Estabrook announced it would quit the retail broking component of its operations. During 1987, the retail brokerage unit with 30 offices provided just under half of the firm's revenues. About 325 of the firm's 870 employees were retail brokers. In November 1987 the company signed a letter of intent providing for the acquisition by Gruntal & Co. of selected assets of Moseley, including its retail securities brokerage business and related assets, and its investment advisory business, for approximately $15 million in cash. This deal fell through and then the company negotiated a sale of its retail business to both Gruntal & Co. and Fahnestock.

The plan was that Moseley would remain an institutional brokerage but difficult trading conditions and its connections to the so-called Wedtech scandal (the IPO of which it has underwritten) led to the demise of the firm in February 1988.