Bowling Green: The First Park, the First Transaction, the First Mistake

Bowling Green is small. It is an oval of grass at the foot of Broadway, fenced in wrought iron, surrounded by an asphalt traffic island, with the bronze of Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull standing at the north edge. Most people who stop here stop for the bull. They take the photograph and walk on. They are standing on three of the most consequential pieces of ground in the city.

The oval is Manhattan's first leased park, granted by the colonial Common Council in 1733. It is the mythologised site of the 1626 transaction between Peter Minuit and the Lenape that gave Dutch hands the island. It is enclosed by the oldest surviving fence in New York, set in place in 1771. None of these three histories is what brings the tourist here, which is itself the joke at the centre of the place. The most photographed thing on the green is the most recent thing on the green. The history is underneath.

The 1733 lease

The Common Council of New York granted the lease for Bowling Green on 12 March 1733. The grantees were three local residents, John Chambers, Peter Bayard, and Peter Jay. The rent was one peppercorn a year. The use restriction was specific: the leased ground was to be enclosed and improved as a public bowling green for the recreation of the inhabitants of the city. The lawn-bowling green stood here for about thirty years.

What made it Manhattan's first park was not the bowling, which was a common municipal amenity in eighteenth-century English colonial cities. It was the dedication of public ground to a non-commercial use. The site had earlier been a parade ground, a cattle market, and a Dutch paerde markt. The 1733 lease was the first time the city set aside a piece of ground specifically as recreational green space, with a fence around it to keep the cattle out.

The lawn-bowling itself faded by the 1760s. The park stayed. The 1733 lease is the document that makes Bowling Green the oldest park in the city by a margin of more than a century.

The 1626 transaction

This is also the place where, by tradition, the Lenape transferred Manhattan to the Dutch West India Company. The tradition is a tradition, not a record. What survives is one piece of paper.

On 5 November 1626, the Dutch official Pieter Schagen wrote a short letter to the States General in The Hague. The letter reported that the ship Arms of Amsterdam had arrived from New Netherland with news that the colonists "have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders." That is the entire documentary basis for the founding transaction of New York. The deed itself, if there ever was one, does not survive. The names of the Lenape who signed it, if anyone signed it, are not recorded. The location of the transaction is not specified. The "$24" figure that has circulated since the nineteenth century is a Victorian-era conversion of sixty guilders at a particular exchange rate; modern reconstructions of the goods exchanged put the value much higher, though still, by any measure, a small fraction of the island's market value within a generation.

The transaction sat at Bowling Green by tradition, not by record. Burrows and Wallace in Gotham describe it as a mutual misunderstanding. The Dutch operated within a legal framework where land was alienable property; the title could be transferred from one owner to another permanently. The Lenape operated within a legal framework where territory was a shared resource with overlapping seasonal usage rights; one party could grant another the right to use ground but could not transfer it absolutely. The Dutch wrote down a sale. The Lenape, in all likelihood, were signing onto a use-right of the kind they granted to neighbouring Algonquian peoples.

The Lenape did not all immediately leave Manhattan. They continued to use parts of the island for fishing, hunting, and seasonal camps for decades. The eventual displacement was the work of two generations of Dutch and then English colonial governance, of disease that reduced the Algonquian population catastrophically through the seventeenth century, and of the slow imposition of European property law on land that had been administered under a fundamentally different legal system.

The founding transaction of the European city was undocumented. It is the only thing that gives Bowling Green a foundational role in the story of New York, and it is preserved exclusively in a single letter from a clerk who was never on the continent.

The 1771 fence

The wrought iron fence around Bowling Green is the oldest surviving fence in New York. It was installed in 1771, at the request of the city, to protect a recently erected gilded lead equestrian statue of King George the Third. The statue had been commissioned to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act.

On 9 July 1776, five days after the Continental Congress declared independence in Philadelphia, a copy of the Declaration was read aloud to George Washington's Continental Army troops stationed in lower Manhattan. The reading happened in the late afternoon. By evening, a crowd that included soldiers and civilians marched south down Broadway to Bowling Green and pulled the statue of George the Third down off its pedestal. The gilded lead was hauled to Connecticut and melted, by report, into musket balls. The decorative iron finials on the fence, small crown-shaped ornaments at the top of each post, were sawn off in the same act. The cuts are still visible on the iron today. Each post ends in a flat saw-mark where a small crown used to sit.

The fence itself was left standing because, in 1771, it had been installed to protect a statue of the king; in 1776, it was needed to protect the empty pedestal from further damage and to keep the area enclosed during a war. After the British evacuated New York in November 1783, the pedestal was removed and the fence stayed. It has been in continuous use, with periodic restorations, for over two and a half centuries. The 1996 Bowling Green restoration documented the original 1771 ironwork and confirmed the saw-marks where the finials had been.

The fence is the oldest physical object on the green that is older than the United States.

The Charging Bull

The bull at the north edge of the green is a 1989 installation. Arturo Di Modica, a Sicilian-born sculptor working in SoHo, cast the 3,200-kilogram bronze in response to the 1987 stock market crash. On 15 December 1989, before dawn, Di Modica and a small team trucked the bull into the Financial District and left it directly in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Broad Street as a piece of unsolicited public art. The police impounded it. Public outcry forced the city to release it, and the bull was placed at Bowling Green, where it has stood since.

The bull is not part of the historical fabric of the green in any meaningful sense. It is a guerrilla art installation that became permanent because the public liked it. It is, in 2026, the most photographed object in lower Manhattan after the Statue of Liberty. The 1733 park, the 1626 transaction, the 1771 fence, and the 1776 statue-pulling are not what brings the tourist to Bowling Green. The 1989 bronze is. That mismatch is a perfect compression of how the financial district relates to its own history. The deepest layers are buried under whatever is loudest at the top.

What to look at

Stand at the south end of the park, looking north. The oval of grass is the 1733 lease in its original geometry. The fence around you is the 1771 iron with the finials sawn off in 1776. Run your hand along the top of one of the posts and feel the flat saw-mark. Look north past the bull up Broadway. The sightline runs to the Custom House of 1907 (Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Woolworth Building) on the site of Fort Amsterdam, where the original Dutch citadel stood from 1626. Three centuries of foundational fictions are arranged in a hundred-metre sightline, with a bronze bull standing in front of them.

The plaque inside the fence summarises the 1733 lease. There is no marker for the 1626 transaction, because there is no record to mark. There is no marker for the 1771 fence, because the fence is the marker.

You came for the bull. You can leave knowing that the green it stands on is older than every state in the union.