There are strewn about in a thousand niches of the city little groups of buildings which seem to have assembled themselves, by some lonesome impulse, into communities. Primarily, of course, these groupings are ethnological, these cities within a city being originally created largely by the timidity of strangers in a strange land. There are little Italys, and Chinatowns, and diminutive Bohemias, all swung together by the action of this great centripetal force of loneliness. The buildings in these communities, inflexible enough in all conscience as regards design, contrive none the less to take on in some way a character and appearance peculiar to their inhabitants; this may be a matter only of red Turkey turbans flapping in the breeze, or perhaps of the haunting aroma of some national staple of food--but certainly it is there. Scattered through Manhattan, from the Battery to the Bronx, these five centers are witnesses as they stand to the effect of circumstance on bricks and mortar. And that there should be this visible effect is no doubt natural enough, for the difference between nation and nation is a salient thing. It would be far stranger were it to fail of effect even on so unimpressionable a thing as a six-story red-brick tenement house. There are forces, however, which prove themselves hardly less potent than this force of fellow-nationality, but which would at first thought be denied any vital molding power over people or over things. These are the trades, and--less distinctive in their outward aspects, at least--the professions. It is not odd that a fishing village or a mining camp should take on a certain character unique to itself, but surely one would not expect a lawyer to impress on his environment a stamp so unmistakable that one could say, observing it from without, "In this building lawyers plot." Superficially there would be said to be scant difference between a lawyer and a broker or a real estate dealer or an insurance man. Yet in New York City, where communities of these professions mesh and intermesh and overlap, there are still streets which are, and which could be, to a trained eye, the habitat of financiers alone, and where at once all other wayfarers are seen to be interlopers, or at best mere visitors at a fair. Such a street is Wall Street, and such is Broad. And on the eastern rim of this same zone runs a street which, despite the countless changes that the years untiringly bring, could not possibly be mistaken for anything but what it is, the great aorta of the fire insurance world. William Street is as distinctly a fire insurance street as any street could possibly be distinctive of its profession.