On the night of December 15, 1989, sculptor Arturo Di Modica and friends drove a flatbed to the 60-foot tall Christmas tree in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and unloaded a 7,000-pound gift. Workers arriving in the Financial District the next day were confronted by a sleek, 16-foot-long bronze bull, head down, nostrils flaring, poised to charge up Broad Street. In a flyer distributed that day, Di Modica stated that he created the sculpture after the stock market crash of 1987 as a symbol of the "strength, power and hope of the American people for the future." Symbol or not, the New York Police Department reprimanded the Bull for obstructing traffic without a permit. New York Stock Exchange officials hired a truck to have it hauled away that very afternoon. But so great was the outcry that within a few days, Parks Department Commissioner Henry J. Stern arranged for the Bull to be given a temporary stomping ground at the north end of Bowling Green. And there it remains, despite that fact that "temporary" installations of art in the City are not supposed to be on view for over a year. In 1993 Di Modica, hoping to recover some of the $300,000 cost of the sculpture (did you think that much bronze and that much design work came for free?), offered the sculpture for sale. The City refused to purchase it. Several large corporations and private donors failed to come up with funds. The only interested party was a Las Vegas hotel, but by then the sculpture was so popular that the campaign to keep it in New York was led by none other than Henry Stern, by that time no longer Parks Dept. Commissioner. As of late 2003, the Bull was still a temporary installation. Where do the terms “bull market” and “bear market” come from? No one knows. The most popular theory is that the bear market originally referred to middlemen in the fur trade, who would buy and sell bearskins before the bears had been caught a practice even more financially hazardous than counting your chickens before they're hatched. A proverb about bear-jobbers was current as early as the seventeenth century. The term "bear" for stock buyers who expected prices to fall became common during the 1720s South Sea Bubble scandal in England. A bull buys with the expectation of selling later at a higher price. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary gives no earlier usage of "bull" in this sense than in the combination "bears and bulls," cited in a 1714 publication. Bulls may have been associated with bears because, from the sixteenth well into the nineteenth century, a popular entertainment in England was the baiting of bulls and bears, which involved putting one or the other in a pit and letting dogs loose on them, to see which animals survived. Thomas Nast, famed nineteenth-century cartoonist, popularized the image of bulls and bears in the American stock market. (Note: Most of the material on the Internet regarding the origins of bulls and bears is simply a rehash of the Oxford English Dictionary entries on those two words.) Copyright © 2004 Dianne L. Durante, all rights reserved. This essay is excerpted from a forthcoming volume in the Forgotten Delights series on outdoor representational sculpture in Manhattan. Visit www.ForgottenDelights.com for more information.
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