14. Bowling Green Fence and Park

Location: Broadway and Beaver Streets
Built: 1733 (Park) and 1771 (Fence)
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 80002673
Listed: March 9, 1980
Visited: August 19, 2007



It's New York City's oldest park but the fence gets top billing. It's an actual honest-to-goodness relic from colonial New York City, erected a few years before the Revolutionary War to protect a statue of King George III against vandalism. Once news of the Declaration of Independence hit the city, New Yorkers ripped that fucker right down, hacked off the fence's crown-shaped tips, and in a fine bit of Patriot irony, fashioned the lead into ammunition for use against British soldiers. (Parts of the statue were somehow spirited away by local Tories, eventually making their way to the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society.)

In another fine, fine irony: according to legend, the park is the site of Peter Minuit's purchase of Manhattan for $24; today, it faces the New York City branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. Oh and yeah people used to bowl here, just like the ghosts of Irving's "Rip Van Winkle."

Save for a homeless man sleeping on a bunch, the park is empty on the Sunday I visit. It's well-kept, full of geraniums in bloom and liatris (I think) leaning over the fence, and has a kind of wildness that it lacked only a few years ago, but still, such a tiny spot of green especially compared to the nearby Battery Park. And yet there's enough of a habitat to warrant a Parks Department sign on the fence noting the presence of peregrine falcons in the area. The tourists avoid it, preferring instead to take pictures of Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull: they want to see what they've already seen on the tee-vee.