Hallgarten & Company
| Acquired | |
| Industry | Financial Services |
| Fate | Acquired by Moseley Securities Corp in 1974 |
| Predecessor | Hallgarten & Herzfeld |
| Founded | 1850 |
| Founder | Lazarus Hallgarten |
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
| Products | Investment banking, Brokerage |
Hallgarten & Company was an investment bank based in New York City that was founded in 1850 by Lazarus Hallgarten, a native of Hesse.
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 for oil painting), 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.
The firm was part of the interlinked group of Wall Street investment banks that had been founded in the second half of the 19th century by German-Jewish bankers, sometimes known as the Our Crowd bankers. The group included such firms as Bache & Co., Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, J. & W. Seligman & Co. and Kuhn Loeb.
The "Our Crowd" firms were tightly intermeshed by marriage. As Stephen Birmingham notes in his book “Our Crowd”: “At Hallgarten & Company four principal partners Charles Hallgarten, Bernard Mainzer, Casimir Stralem, and Sigmund Neustadt were similarly intertwined: Hallgarten married to Mainzer's sister, and Stralem married to Neustadt's daughters. Heidelbach, Ickelheimer & Company was founded, in 1876, as the result of a marriage, when Isaac Ickelheimer married Philip Heidelbach's daughter. At a Westchester party recently, a Klingenstein, related to Lehmans, and a Kempner, related to Loebs, were asked if they weren't also related to each other. "I suppose so" was the reply". The firm was also connected to Wertheim & Co., whose founder Maurice Wertheim had originally been a Hallgarten partner.
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