Overview & visitor information
Wall Street runs through the core of Lower Manhattan's Financial District, where the New York Stock Exchange faces Federal Hall. The street's name recalls the defensive wall built across the Dutch settlement in the seventeenth century, while its modern identity grew from the banks, exchanges and government institutions clustered nearby.
Charging Bull stands south of Wall Street at Bowling Green. Sculptor Arturo Di Modica financed the bronze himself and placed it outside the stock exchange without permission in December 1989, presenting the forceful animal as a response to the 1987 market crash and an emblem of resilience and financial optimism.
Police removed the sculpture, but public interest led officials to install it at its present cobblestone site. The approximately 7,100-pound bull is now one of the district's most recognizable works of public art, linking a late-twentieth-century intervention with New York's oldest public park and the monumental architecture of American finance.
