Chapter six situates the spectator in the middle of Wall Street, looking west, between Broad and William Streets. Two buildings share the center in this drawing – the Bankers Trust Company Building (in the foreground and slightly right of center), and Trinity Church, here making its second prominent appearance in the book (recognizable because of its distinctive pointed steeple). Also depicted is the statue of George Washington which stands on the steps of Federal Hall – the site where Washington took the oath of office as first President of the United States. And finally, thoroughly relegated to the left margin, is the New York Stock Exchange.

These four structures segment the drawing into four vertical columns, each possessing allegorical properties. The Church represents spirituality, the statue both nationhood and the Masonic fraternity of which Marcus was a part. Together the two represent elements of what Marcus understands as the doomed symbolic order of the nineteenth century. In their opposition, the Trust Company and Stock Exchange represent the structures which have come to take the place of the Church and statue. It is therefor in chapter six that the book begins to make specific claims about modernity’s political content. The two financial centers connect the modern world to economic forces which, in Marcus’ estimation, have begun to supplant religion and nationality as organizing structures for everyday life and aesthetic sensibility. Where the nineteenth century had built monuments to religion and to national heroes, the twentieth builds monuments to money, and the latter are a good deal taller than the former. As represented here, the old and new are able to coexist – an assertion Marcus makes in more than one of the book’s prose sketches – by alternating like hills and valleys, but they are prevented from overlapping too much. Trinity Church is carefully separated from the financial world by subtle strips of light; Federal Hall does overlap with the Trust Company, but the Washington statue is prevented from doing so – it is framed entirely by the columns of the Hall. The old world, as represented here, can only be preserved by complete autonomy from the new one, and that complete separation is shown to be impossible elsewhere in the book (e.g., in the "City Hall" chapter).

Also of interest to Marcus is the swarm-like mass of the big and small financial players who populate the buildings. The crowd of the financial district was, in the 1910s and 20s, a favorite subject for artists. The protocols for its representation were perhaps most clearly laid out by Paul Strands "Wall Street" (1915), which – like Marcus’ drawing – shows anonymous workers towered over by architectural form. But where Strand had emphasized the business men’s shattered individuality by comparing them to the windows of the bank behind them, Marcus attempts to recover that individuality in the chapter’s prose. He concedes the great extent to which participants in the financial world are herd-like in their desire for money, and the unfeeling violence with which they peruse wealth. But within this homogenizing order there are endless possibilities for variation. The rich become poor, the poor rich, and there are endless possibilities in between. Even the range of things that can be bought or sold is spectacularly vast. Each is only a piece of paper, a share of stock, and in this every commodity is the same. Marcus insists, though, on calling the shares by the name of what they represent – a head of cattle or a drum of oil. Wall Streets capacity to reduce everything to a single signifier is challenged here by drawing readerly attention to the differences between the signified objects. But his struggle to humanize (or at least literalize) the abstract and anonymous world of the Stock Exchange cannot ultimately find a way out of dehumanizing logic from which it tries to extricate itself.