"It's just sad," one floor trader told GlobeSt.com as he shuffled the last of the items on his desk into a cardboard box shortly before the exchange's bell rang for the last time. "It's a sad, sad day."The roots of the Pacific Exchange go back to the late-1800s, when oil companies discovered that LA had large veins of underground crude beneath its rich cornfields and citrus crops. Banking and oil conglomerates soon formed the Los Angeles Oil Exchange, which was later renamed the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange as the city's economy diversified.

The exchange's first building rose on Spring Street. It triggered LA's first office boom because then-fledging companies with names such as Standard Oil, Edison and Bank of America wanted to be close to potential investors.

The PSE moved to new headquarters on Beaudry Avenue and kept growing until the 1990s, when NASDAQ—its chief competitor at the time--essentially cornered the market for new high-tech companies that wanted to go public and the New York Stock Exchange launched aggressive expansion plans of its own. Hoping to get a bigger share of options traders, the Pacific Stock Exchange dropped the word "stock" from its title and renamed itself the Pacific Exchange.

The exchange's option business has since thrived, but its stock-trading volume has sunk. The closing of its LA trading floor has been planned for several months, and the last Pacific Exchange trading facility—in San Francisco's Financial District—will be shuttered later this year.

A privately held company known as Archipelago Holdings wants to buy the Pacific Exchange and re-name it the Acrhipelago Exchange. The Securities and Exchange Commission must approve the deal first, and an SEC spokesperson won't say whether the SEC is leaning toward approving or rejecting the plan.