The Bull That Police Confiscated

The bronze bull crouched on the street ahead, head lowered and horns forward as if about to charge, was not commissioned by the city, not approved by any committee, and was hauled away by police within hours of first appearing on this street.

In the middle of the night in mid December of nineteen eighty nine, the Italian born sculptor Arturo Di Modica and a small crew trucked the bronze bull, sixteen feet long and weighing roughly three and a half tons, into the Financial District and set it down beneath a Christmas tree the city had just installed outside the New York Stock Exchange. Di Modica had spent two years building it after the stock market crash of nineteen eighty seven, hoping to give New Yorkers a symbol of strength and resilience. He called it a gift to the city.

Stock exchange officials were not amused. They arranged to have the sculpture removed, and it was carted off to an impound lot, treated like an illegally parked truck rather than a work of art.

The public reaction was immediate and loud. New Yorkers wanted their bull back, and the outcry reached parks commissioner Henry Stern, who arranged to have it reinstalled about a week later at Bowling Green, two blocks south, facing up Broadway. Di Modica stayed with the piece that first morning to greet commuters walking past. The bull has stood in that spot ever since, trampled by tourists reaching for a photograph, surrounded for decades now by crowds who have mostly forgotten it began as an act of unauthorized, after hours defiance.