Men walk by. Streetcars roll by. Is that road even paved, or is it being torn up and put back down?
By the time this movie was taken, Wall Street had been the financial capital of the United States for at least half a century, with Cornelius Vanderbilt fighting with others for a bigger share of the pie. By the time he perished, it's estimated that Vanderbilt controlled one percent of the wealth of the nation.
If so, he wasn't sharing it with the people in his vicinity, or they had lost most of it by this point. The result is another urban street scene, a standard for the Lumieres' directors.