Bowling Green is North America's oldest park. It is located on Manhattan in the Financial District. It was used initially as a cattle market. It gets its name because the first Dutch settlers used it for lawn bowling. The park is a pleasant place with a small patch of green. benches, flowers and a round fountain. You can sit, have a sandwich and rest your feet. Just north of Bowling Green Park you'll see a massive bronze statue of a bull.

The bronze bull that stands in Bowling Green poised to charge up Broadway first appeared in front of the New York Stock Exchange December 15, 1989. It was created by Italian-born Soho artist Arturo DeModica who deposited the 7,000-pound bull in front of the Exchange in the middle of the night without permission. The next morning Financial District workers were confronted by a sleek, 16-foot-long bronze bull, head down, nostrils flaring. In a flyer distributed that day, the artist stated that the stock market crash of 1987 was his inspiration. He created the bull as a symbol of "strength, power and hope of the American people for the future."

However, the New York Police Department was not pleased. NYPD said it obstructed traffic and had no permit. The New York Stock Exchange hired a truck to have it hauled away that afternoon. It was penned in a police impound lot.

Even though the bull had been seen for less than 8 hours, the public wanted it! After a few days in its "pen", New York City Parks Department Commissioner Henry J. Stern arranged for the Bull to be given a temporary stomping ground at the north end of Bowling Green Park. It remains there today as an icon embodying the bullish strength and determination of Wall Street.

In 2003 the artist tried to get the city to pay $300,000 for the huge bull. They refused. A Las Vegas hotel decided they'd buy it. Henry Stern, who was no longer a Parks Commissioner, led the campaign to keep it in New York. It is still there on a temporary basis - as a "gift" from the artist.

Today the "Charging Bull" is an accepted NYC landmark and is a favorite stop for tourists. Those seeking to make their fortune in the stock market will rub the bull for luck.

This bull has 3 names:

• Bowling Green Bull
• Charging Bull
• Good Luck Bull

Wall Street with Bowling Green Park on the right

16 feet long

7,000 lbs of BULL!

Why is a bull and a bear symbols of the stock market?

Oxford English Dictionary gives no earlier usage of "bull" in this sense than in the combination "bears and bulls," cited in a 1714 publication. Bulls may have been associated with bears because, from the sixteenth well into the nineteenth century, a popular entertainment in England was the baiting of bulls and bears, which involved putting one or the other in a pit and letting dogs loose on them, to see which animals survived. Thomas Nast, famed nineteenth-century cartoonist, popularized the image of bulls and bears in the U.S.stock market.