At 2pm on May 23, 1914, a group of men wearing cocked hats, white wigs, and knee-breeches, emerged from the Fraunces Tavern, walked slowly up Broad Street, and then turned down Wall Street towards the river, accompanied by the steady beat of a Continental drum corps. “Had George Washington’s statue on the steps of the Sub-Treasury come to life,” remarked one witness, “he would surely have thought that the old Revolutionary days had returned.”  But it was merely the advance guard of a parade celebrating lower Wall Street’s importance not just as a center of the tea and coffee trade, but also as a birthplace of the revolution.