Federal Hall National Memorial occupies a site that served several different governments and buildings. A New York City Hall built around 1700 stood here under British colonial rule. In 1735 printer John Peter Zenger was tried and acquitted in a case long associated with freedom of the press. After independence, the building housed the Confederation Congress, which adopted the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. Those early events occurred in the predecessor building, not in the surviving nineteenth-century stone structure.

Architect Pierre L'Enfant remodeled the old city hall in 1788 for the newly established federal government. Known as Federal Hall, it became the first meeting place of Congress under the Constitution. George Washington took the presidential oath on its balcony on April 30, 1789. Congress passed measures to organize executive departments and the judiciary and sent proposed amendments to the states that became the Bill of Rights. The site thus connects ceremonial inauguration with the everyday institutional work of making a new constitutional system operate.

The federal capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, and the older building later returned to municipal use. It was demolished in 1812, removing the structure associated with Washington's inauguration. The federal government then built a monumental Greek Revival customhouse on the parcel; it opened in 1842. Merchants and officials used it to administer trade and collect duties, a major source of national revenue. Its columned exterior and rotunda present a different era of American public architecture from the lost eighteenth-century hall.

The building subsequently housed a federal subtreasury. The bronze Washington statue placed at its entrance in 1882 marked the approximate balcony location of the original inauguration. Preservation and federal designation eventually turned the structure into a memorial. The site's layers can be confusing because its familiar name refers to the older Federal Hall while its surviving walls belong to the customhouse. Exhibits, documents, and the street setting help visitors distinguish those histories.

Today the National Park Service interprets the constitutional founding, the earlier colonial courtroom, and the later fiscal uses of the current building. Access to the interior depends on posted operating days and occasional closures. A visit can compare the eighteenth-century events represented by the statue and exhibits with the nineteenth-century fabric visitors actually enter. That distinction protects the site's historical meaning: the ground is authentic, but the original Federal Hall no longer stands. A small exhibition can illuminate those successive governments, but the building itself is the clearest evidence of the customhouse and subtreasury chapters of the story.