Last night, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange’s board members met for one final, extravagant time before the exchange, the nation’s oldest, gets absorbed by Nasdaq-OMX sometime in June. Philadelphia’s financial elite was gathered at City Tavern, a restaurant in old Philadelphia near the spot where the exchange first met, and staffed by waiters in period dress. There was a harp player and a carvery to entertain and feed le tout financial Philadelphia, and a few members of the media, including Reuters.

Though the deal means the Philadelphia exchange will now be taking orders from a New York-based exchange, there was much revelry and merriment. PHLX, now the third largest equities options market in the United States, after the Chicago Board of Options Exchange and the International Securities Exchange, was once moribund. But under chairman Sandy Frucher’s tenure, the exchange staged a turnaroud and was able to fetch the much celebration-worthy price of $650 million from Nasdaq last year, more than ten times what Nasdaq paid for the Boston Stock Exchange, once larger than Philadelphia’s, last fall. Even the mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, who in 1983 was an intern at the PHLX, turned out to pay homage to Frucher and the PHLX leadership, putting on a game face, even if it meant Philadelphia was losing another of its institutions. He tried to put a positive spin on the turn of events, saying he would welcome Nasdaq-Philadelphia, as if it were a merger of two equals, even though Nasdaq has been mum on any renaming or rebranding plans.

When asked what he would do to make Philadelphia a more prominent financial center, he simply said the city has approached venture capital firms in New Jersey to consider opening satellite offices for their Pennsylvania commuters. And then he again called the new exchange “Nasdaq-Philadelphia”.

“That’s what I’ll call it,” he said.