My Darling B posed for her picture with the charging bull of Wall Street, except that it’s not on Wall Street, it’s on Bowling Green at the bottom of Broadway, just north of Battery Park. In fact, it was never on Wall Street. But it is a bull. The artist who made it, Arturo Di Modica, placed it on Broad Street outside the Stock Exchange, apparently without asking anybody. It was so hugely popular that, when the city removed it, the public made such a stink that it was relocated it to Bowling Green.
There was a teeming throng of about a hundred people clustered all around it that barely fit inside the enclosure fence set up along the boundaries of the island it stood on in the middle of the street. I had wait patiently to snap a few shots of My Darling B beside it without somebody else in the frame, and then the best photo I got still had a guy’s butt just inside the edge of the frame that I had to crop out. Thank goodness for photoshop.
Just as we got there, an older man was gathering up a busload of kids who looked like maybe fourth graders and explaining the significance of the bull as a lucky rub. The bull is cast in bronze, so the parts of it that people rub for luck are quite shiny, while the rest of it wears an earthy patina. “Many people like to rub the bull’s nose,” the old man explained to the children, “and some people like to rub the bull’s backside. Some people like to reach underneath and rub the bull.” Titters from the crowd of children, who really didn’t need their minder to explain this, as one person after another posed to get their pictures taken grabbing the bull by the, ah, jewels.
This Is Drivel 