Historians of institutions have long read letterheads, telephone exchanges and street addresses as evidence of how organizations understood their place in the world. The web address is the letterhead of the late twentieth century, and it carries the same kind of information. The 2005 prospectus of The Wall Street Fund, Inc. printed, in the block beneath the fund's name on its cover, a street address at 230 Park Avenue, two telephone numbers including a toll-free line, a web address — http://www.thewallstreetfund.com — and an e-mail address at the same domain. This essay takes that block as its text.
Direct address
The block describes a fund that spoke to its shareholders directly. The adviser, Wall Street Management Corporation, was also the principal underwriter, offering shares continuously to the public with a $1,000 minimum. There was, in this arrangement, one voice: the same firm managed the money, sold the shares, answered the toll-free line and, by 2005, maintained the website and the mailbox. The e-mail address given — a three-letter local part at the fund's domain — bears the initials of an officer rather than a departmental alias, a detail that speaks to the scale of the enterprise. A fund with roughly $17 million in year-end 2004 assets and a staff drawn from an affiliated investment counsel firm communicated the way a small professional practice communicates: through named people.
Carrying the name forward
The name outlived the corporation. When the fund's assets moved in 2014 into a series of Wall Street EWM Funds Trust under Evercore Wealth Management, adviser since May 1, 2010, the series itself was called "The Wall Street Fund" and adopted the corporation's performance and financial history. For seventeen months the name persisted as the label of a different legal person. On March 1, 2016 the series became "Evercore Equity Fund", trading under the symbol EWMCX as the sole series of a trust whose own name — Wall Street EWM Funds Trust — still carries the old words alongside the new adviser's initials.
The successor's current website completes the sequence. It describes the fund as "previously known as the Wall Street Fund," gives the predecessor's former ticker, and states an inception date in December 1945. The successor, in other words, remembers the name as history while operating under another. The layered nomenclature — a trust named for the old fund and the new adviser, a series renamed for the adviser alone, a website that recalls the predecessor — is a compact record of how the industry manages identity across reorganizations: continuity is claimed where it is valuable and set aside where a stronger brand is available.
The domain's second life
The address printed on the 2005 cover is now the address of this archive. The fact is stated plainly because it is the foundation of the archive's editorial position. A domain that once belonged to a fund is a natural home for the documented history of that fund, in the same way that a former bank building makes a natural home for a museum of banking. The obligation that comes with occupying it is one of scrupulous separation.
That separation is expressed in four ways. First, the publisher's identity — Independent Financial History Study and Journalism — sits above the archive's title on every page, so that the reader encounters the institution speaking before the subject spoken about. Second, an independence statement appears within the first screen of the homepage and in the footer of every page, naming the entities from which the publisher stands apart. Third, every historical performance figure is attributed to the historical fund and its adviser of the period, with source, period and fee treatment, so that the record belongs unambiguously to the institution that produced it. Fourth, the archive's calls to action are archival — explore the timeline, examine the primary sources — and its architecture consists solely of records, essays and citations.
Naming and memory in the fund industry
The case is small, and its lessons generalize. Fund names are commercial assets with regulatory constraints, and the moments at which they change are moments at which institutions decide what to remember. The Wall Street Fund, Inc. kept its name for sixty-eight years as a corporation and for seventeen months as a series; the trust that received it kept a fragment of the name; the current fund keeps the memory on a history page. Each choice was rational within its moment, and the sequence as a whole is a record of consolidation — of a small, founder-distributed fund becoming one product among many on an institutional platform, and of the platform deciding, in due course, that its own name carried more weight.
An archive that occupies the old address has one job: to keep the record of those choices legible, cited and separate from the present. This essay is written under that obligation, and so is every page on which it appears.