Bowling Green, a tiny park located at the foot of Broadway, next to the site of the original Dutch fort of New Amsterdam, has the distinction of being the oldest public park in New York City and possibly one of the oldest in North America.
Under Dutch rule, it served as a cattle market, and later, under the British, it became a parade ground for the colonial militia. In 1733, the British Common Council leased the site to three private citizens for the game of bowling—giving the park its name. In return, they agreed to transform the grounds into a pleasant public space that would be, in the Council’s words, “the delight of the inhabitants of the city” and add to its “beauty and ornament.”
By 1770, the British decided the park’s beauty would not be complete without a grand equestrian monument to King George III. A 4,000-pound gilded lead equestrian statue of the monarch, dressed in Roman garb, was modeled after the ancient statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. To protect the royal monument, an elegant iron fence topped with gilded crowns was erected around the park.
The fence didn’t help.
On July 9, 1776, after the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to George Washington’s troops and the people of New York, an enthusiastic crowd marched down Broadway to Bowling Green. They pulled down the king’s statue and sawed the crowns from nearly every fence post. If you look closely, you can still see the saw marks left behind nearly 250 years ago.
According to local lore, the lead statue was chopped into pieces and sent to a foundry in Connecticut, where it was melted down into 42,088 musket balls for the Continental Army. Loyalists, however, managed to rescue the king’s head and shipped it back to England for safekeeping.
Over the years, additional fragments of the statue have surfaced in Connecticut and New York. Several of them—including pieces of the horse’s tail and decorative elements—can now be seen at the New-York Historical Society.
Hard to imagine that this tranquil city spot, with a fountain in the middle, was once the site of the first symbolic act of the American Revolution.
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