Lower Manhattan Icons Walk

Welcome to Lower Manhattan! We're starting with a crowd favorite: Charging Bull, the bronze bull on Broadway just north of Bowling Green. It weighs about 7,100 pounds and is 16 feet long, head down, ready to charge. The bull is a symbol of financial optimism, a bull market.

Its origin story is pure New York. The Italian artist Arturo Di Modica made it after the stock market crash of 1987, known as Black Monday. Late on the night of December 14, 1989, he drove it downtown on a truck and dropped it outside the New York Stock Exchange without permission. Police removed it that same day.

But within a week, on December 20, it was installed here at Bowling Green, on what was supposed to be a temporary permit. It never left. Expect a crowd around it for photos. Be patient, take your turn, and keep an eye on your belongings in busy spots like this.

This magnificent building is the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, designed by Cass Gilbert and built between 1902 and 1907. It was built as the headquarters for collecting import duties at the Port of New York. The outside is loaded with nautical details and sculpture by a dozen artists.

Look at the four large seated figures flanking the entrance steps. They're called the Four Continents, by the sculptor Daniel Chester French. Above them, a colonnade of Corinthian columns wraps the upper floors. Today the building houses the George Gustav Heye Center, a branch of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, along with a federal bankruptcy court and National Archives offices.

If you go inside, look up in the rotunda for the skylight and ceiling murals by Reginald Marsh.