Delmonico's and the Columns From Pompeii

At the rounded corner where Beaver, William and South William Streets meet, the door to Delmonico's sits behind a small portico and a pair of columns. The story goes that they came from the ruins of Pompeii. The Delmonico brothers, Swiss-Italian immigrants who opened a pastry shop on William Street in 1827, built a grand restaurant on this triangular lot in 1837, after the Great Fire, and New Yorkers were told its entrance columns were Pompeian. It is a claim that has been repeated for nearly two centuries, almost always with the word "reportedly" attached. When the family replaced the building in 1891 with the eight-story design by James Brown Lord that stands here now, they kept the portico and set the columns back at the entrance. Regulars made a habit of touching them for luck. The family's restaurants closed by 1923, but others revived the name here in 1926, and it reopened again in 2023.