Con Heir

The Exchange Artist By Jane Kamensky (Viking, 464 pages, $29.95) With her dramatic history of a building’s—and a man’s—meteoric rise and stunning fall, Kamensky unearths a gem in the tale of America’s first great financial scandal. Wonderfully rendered with all the soot and tallow of the day, her portrait captures Boston in the throes of change, a dazzling place where farm boys became captains of industry. A looming embodiment of that vertically inclined spirit, the seven-story Exchange Coffee House on Congress Street became the tallest building in America in 1809. Its builder, Andrew Dexter, was making a fortune as a speculator in paper money—so-called bank notes that were issued as proxies, or printed promises, for coins minted by the U.S. Treasury. But like Enron and subprime loans, they couldn’t handle their own weight. When banks went under, the notes became worthless. Dexter fled Boston, and his workers were jailed. The Exchange building burned in 1818, and the city quickly built over it, eager to forget its sordid Babel: Years later, in 1848, when excavators working on Congress Street puzzled over the charred and buried heap, an observer noted that they were “remains of a destruction, which they know not of.”