The canyons of Wall Street are lined with condos. Dog walkers on strolls outnumber hung-over assistants on cigarette breaks. Gilded-Age moneymaking monoliths now house spas, sushi joints and luxury retailers. What happened? Coming to terms with ­Lower Manhattan's makeover.

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Our fathers might not recognize the new FiDi, but then neither would our forefathers. The southern tip of Manhattan was once rife with mosquitoes, wolves, marshes and rocks. Still, the area ­captivated explorer Henry Hudson, whose report of his 1609 visit to the site sent fur trading flying. His Dutch employers built Fort ­Amsterdam as a trading post in 1625; a year later, Peter Minuit ­famously secured the island from the locals. Thus was born on the bottom of the island a place called New Amsterdam; Pearl and Greenwich Streets were its original shorelines.

A muddy outdoor market of small huts quickly evolved around the main trading post, not unlike the specialist booths of today's Big Board. Dutch auctioneers and dealers transacted loans along a six-foot wooden-plank wall erected in 1653 to protect them from Indians -- not to mention the British and French invaders to the north. That wall fell into disrepair and was ultimately scrapped in 1699, but a street that ran alongside it remained. Come the end of the Revolutionary War, the crude outdoor bourse had moved inside coffeehouses and taverns. Tontine's was a favorite haunt of speculators like William Duer, whose duplicitous bank-stock trading precipitated the Street's first crash in 1792. The fallout inspired two dozen merchants to formalize stock exchanging under a buttonwood tree at what is today 68 Wall Street.

Trading went formal, and inside. Hedge-fund managers of the present are often aggregated as a dubious if not sinister lot. But ­relative to some of their predatory nineteenth-century descendants, today's traders are downright eleemosynary. Not until 1932's trust-busting regulations did things really turn "legit" -- though by then a grinding bear market held the Street in a near–death grip. Then came the Eisenhower bull market, and a slew of other hallmark stock-market surges to follow: the rise of the Nifty 50 in the late '60s, the mid-'80s Reagan rally, the '90s dot-com craze.

Through it all, a sense of community held firm in the Financial District. Explains NYSE floor legend Art Cashin: "That spirit of the Buttonwood 24 brotherhood, that bond between men, has ­always been the Street's lifeblood. If I lament any change, it's the passing of the old way of doing business."

"There will always be a special magic in the canyons of Wall Street," adds Dayton Carr, who runs a private-equity fund. Shortly after founding one of the country's first venture-capital funds in 1968, Carr moved his Financial District office to Midtown, and has not worked downtown since. Still, the man considered the father of the secondary market for ­private equity has not lost an ounce of his appreciation for the Lower Manhattan he once called home.

"Back in my hectic, hurly-burly days as a Smith Barney trainee," says Carr, now 66 and the president and managing director of VCFA Group, a leading purchaser of secondary interests in venture capital, "I would find a lunchtime oasis in places like Trinity Church or the waterfront."

The allure remains undiminished. When friends visit from out of town, Carr takes them on walking or driving tours of his haunts from yesteryear, ­including his personal favorite, Fraunces Tavern.

Power haunts like Harry's and Delmonico's, meanwhile, may have been the center of the universe for the masters of the universe, but in the greed-is-good '80s the American psychos ran wild in the Seaport. Bras hung from the rafters at Jeremy's; "snowstorms" swirled in the restrooms of Bridgewater's, Flutie's and Sweets. It was an era of excesses, a time of naked motorcycle rides through Brooklyn and the occasional clandestine sneaking of strippers onto the floor of the NYSE.

"We used to hit Pipeline and Moran's over in the World Fi­nancial Center," says Gambino, recalling freer days in the '90s. "A hamburger and Coke would turn into a three-martini lunch, and then nobody made it back to their desks."

The center of levity soon shifted toward the Hudson River. There, it was lusty lunches at Saint Charlie's on Albany Street, cocktail blowouts at Pipeline and Moran's, and orgiastic dinners at Morton's before every­body zoomed up to Tribeca and other trendier zones farther uptown. And when the Towers fell, there were those who believed downtown was finished as a major financial center.

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