Bowling Green & The Charging Bull: The King's Fallen Statue

Why is it significant?

Stand right here at the southern teardrop tip of Broadway inside the iron-fenced ellipse of Bowling Green. Consecrated in seventeen thirty-three as a public green for lawn bowling, this is the oldest public park in all of New York City.

Key Facts

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Stand right here at the southern teardrop tip of Broadway inside the iron-fenced ellipse of Bowling Green. Consecrated in seventeen thirty-three as a public green for lawn bowling, this is the oldest public park in all of New York City. Just a few steps north stands Arturo Di Modica's eleven-foot-tall, seven-thousand-pound bronze Charging Bull, installed guerilla-style in nineteen eighty-nine as a symbol of American financial resilience after the stock market crash. Look closely at the heavy cast-iron fence surrounding this green: it holds one of the most violent secrets of the American Revolution. Erected in seventeen seventy-one by royal authorities, every single iron picket was originally topped with a cast-iron crown honoring King George the Third of Great Britain. On July ninth, seventeen seventy-six, George Washington had the newly signed Declaration of Independence read aloud to soldiers and citizens at City Hall. Electrified with revolutionary fury, the crowd surged down Broadway straight to Bowling Green. They hauled down the two-ton gilded lead statue of King George on horseback and smashed it to pieces on the turf. The patriots hauled the lead fragments to Connecticut, where women and soldiers melted the king into forty-two thousand musket balls to shoot at the British Redcoats! Then, angry colonists took hacksaws and chopped off every royal crown from this iron fence. Run your fingers along the rough iron posts: you can still feel the jagged, sawed-off notches where New Yorkers decapitated the king's crowns two hundred and fifty years ago.