Bowling Green is a small historic public park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City, at the southern end of Broadway. Built in the 18th century next to the site of the original Dutch fort of New Amsterdam, it served as a public gathering place and under the British was designated as a park in 1733. It is the oldest public park in New York City and is surrounded by its original 18th-century cast iron fence. The park included an actual bowling green and a monumental equestrian statue of King George III prior to the American Revolutionary War. Pulled down in 1776, the 4000-pound statue is said to have been melted for ammunition to fight the British.
Bowling Green is adjacent to another historic park, the Battery, located to the southwest. It is surrounded by several buildings, including the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House (with the NYC office of the National Archives), the International Mercantile Marine Company Building, Bowling Green Offices Building, Cunard Building, 26 Broadway, and 2 Broadway. The Charging Bull sculpture is located on the northern end of the park. The park is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places under the name Bowling Green Fence and Park. It is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, an NRHP district created in 2007. There was also a large elm at the end of the trail, where the trail split. It is likely at Bowling Green that the Dutch Governor Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan for $24 worth of merchandise in 1626.
Colonial era
The park has long been a center of activity in the city, going back to colonial New Amsterdam, when it served as a cattle market between 1638 and 1647, and a parade ground. In 1675, the city's Common Council designated the "plaine afore the forte" for an annual market of "graine, cattle and other produce of the country". In 1677, the city's first public well was dug in front of Fort Amsterdam at Bowling Green. In 1733, the Common Council leased a portion of the parade grounds to three prominent neighboring landlords for a peppercorn a year, upon their promise to create a park that would be "the delight of the Inhabitants of the City" and add to its "Beauty and Ornament"; the improvements were to include a "bowling green" with "walks therein". The surrounding streets were not paved with cobblestones until 1744.
thumb|A 1912 drawing reconstruction of the Equestrian Statue of King George III
On August 21, 1770, the British government erected a gilded lead equestrian statue of King George III in Bowling Green; the King was dressed in Roman garb in the style of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius. The statue had been commissioned in 1766, along with a statue of William Pitt, from the prominent London sculptor Joseph Wilton, as a celebration of victory after the Seven Years' War. With the rapid deterioration of relations with the mother country after 1770, the statue became a magnet for the Bowling Green protests. In 1773, the city passed an anti-graffiti and anti-desecration law to counter vandalism against the monument, and a protective cast-iron fence was built along the perimeter of the park; the fence is still extant, making it the city's oldest fence.
thumb|Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, N.Y.C., () by William Walcutt
upright|thumb|George Washington at Verplanck's Point by John Trumbull 1790; the remains of the George III statue pedestal can be seen at the bottom between the horse's legs.
On July 9, 1776, after the Declaration of Independence was read to Washington's troops at the current site of City Hall, local Sons of Liberty rushed down Broadway to Bowling Green to topple the statue of King George III; in the process, finials on the tops of the fence depicting the royal symbol of a crown were sawed off. one is in the Museum of the City of New York, and one is in Connecticut. (estimated total of 260–270 pounds); In 1991 the left hand and forearm of the statue was found in Wilton Connecticut; likewise 9 lead musket balls from the Monmouth Battlefield had the same lead content as the statue The stone slab on which the statue rested was used as a gravestone before becoming part of the collection of the New-York Historical Society; the stone pedestal itself remained until it was torn down. The event has been depicted over the years in several works of art, including an 1854 painting by William Walcutt, and an 1859 painting by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel.
On November 25, 1783, a U.S. soldier managed to rip down the British flag at Bowling Green and replace it with the Stars and Stripes—an apparently difficult feat, since the British had greased the flagpole. As the defeated British military boarded ships back to England, then-General George Washington triumphantly led the Continental Army through Manhattan down to Bowling Green to witness the last British troops sailing away from Lower Manhattan.
Postcolonial era
The marble slab of the statue's pedestal was first used as the tombstone of a Major John Smith of the Black Watch, who died in 1783 and was buried at a burial ground across the Hudson River at Paulus Hook in what is now Jersey City, New Jersey. When Smith's grave site was leveled in 1804, the slab became a stone step at two successive mansions in Jersey City. The latter was the Van Vorst Mansion that was owned by Cornelius Van Vorst where the stone remained from 1854 to 1874. In 1880 the inscription was rediscovered, and the slab was transferred to the New-York Historical Society. The monument base can be seen in the background of the portrait of George Washington painted by John Trumbull in 1790, now sited in City Hall. The William Pitt statue is in the New-York Historical Society.
thumb|right|[[Government House (New York City)|Government House as the Custom House, 1799–1815; Bowling Green shown on the left]]
Following the Revolution, the remains of Fort Amsterdam facing Bowling Green were demolished in 1790 and part of the rubble used to extend Battery Park to the west. In its place a grand Government House was built, suitable, it was hoped, for a president's house, with a four-columned portico facing across Bowling Green and up Broadway. Governor John Jay later inhabited it. When the state capital was moved to Albany, the building served as a boarding house and then the custom house before being demolished in 1815. Elegant townhouses were built around the park which remained largely the private domain of the residents, though now some of the Tory patricians of New York were replaced by Republican ones; leading New York merchants, led by Abraham Kennedy, in a mansion at 1 Broadway that had a facade under a central pediment