New York, New York - Wall Street Bull - Good Luck Burnishing

This is the charging bull located on Wall Street, just north of Bowling Green Park in Manhattan. [Erik Lander, 03/09/2007]

I was reading your essay on statues that get rubbed for luck in various places. You speak of animal statues -- there is one animal statue that has been rubbed in a decidedly different place, however.

Down in the NYC's Financial District, there has long stood a statue of a bull (as in "the bull market", I presume). It's near the Stock Exchange, and as such, stockbrokers pass by it every day. I read a while back that if you look closely, you will notice that the testicles on the statue are brilliantly burnished -- from the hands of myriad stockbrokers rubbing the statue there every day for luck on their way to work. [Kimberly Wadsworth, 01/14/2003]

[RA: The 3 1/2 ton bronze statue of a "Charging Bull" was sculptor Arturo Di Modica's artistic statement about the stock market's Black Monday in Oct 1987. Without permission, Di Modica placed the bull on Wall Street in 1989. It was moved a few blocks southwest to Bowling Green Park at the end of Broadway.]