The Bull of Wall Street

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1:29Check, check, check. check. I probably mentioned this before, but search engine broadcast from Manhattan. Our offices are in the financial district right by wall street, walking outside of the entrance of our building. The first thing you see is just this very tiny plaza. Like plaza is almost too grand a word for it. It's just a small triangle of concrete and there's cobblestones. It sits just on top of this tiny little piece of park. There's some fences, there's a fountain. there's not much. But in the center of the concrete triangle, there's this sculpture. It's a sculpture of a gigantic bronze bull.

2:08It's planted, snout low, like it's about to charge somebody. This public sculpture, everyone I know calls it the Wall Street Bull, although technically it's called the Charging Bull. And every day, including today where it's very cold outside, two enormous lines of tourists wait to take their photos with this bowl. There's a short line by the horns and a much, much larger line here by the balls.

2:36I thought about these balls for a few months and the bowl they belong to as well. In April, when I started working in this office regularly, I'd go outside and take a smoke break without the cigarette. I just stand there and stare at the bull while I cleared my mind. The bull is not a beautiful piece of art. It's not transcendent. I'm not sure you're even supposed to gaze at it in the middle distance way that you gaze at museum art. It's lowbrow Wall Street street art. The symbolism goes exactly as deep as bull is short for the bull market. Barely more complicated than just a big statue of a dollar sign.

3:17But because I went out there so much, I really did start to think a lot about it. I'd see a hundred people, a hundred different people every time lined up for a half hour to take a picture with a cheesy symbol of capitalism. And I'd think about how no one I've ever met would do that. I know a lot of people with a lot of different beliefs but even my friend who's the biggest capitalism cheerleader she would not come take a picture with a bull statue. But here were maybe a thousand people a day whose opinions about the world were just different from anyone I knew. And that felt really good to me.

3:51It made the world feel big instead of small. I started to suspect that maybe I was actually finally having this experience I'd always wanted, that I saw people having at art museums whenever I was dragged to one. Staring at the bull was sending me into this weird sort of contemplative fugue state that I wasn't used to. I was having my first ever experience of reacting to a piece of visual art. For some reason, it was this one. And I wanted to know, what was this weird hypnotic reaction that I and these 1 ,000 tourists a day were having? What is going on with this bronze bowl? Look, I didn't think this question was going to lead to any kind of story either, but it did.

4:34A story about neighborhoods, artists, and gamblers. And about a kind of crime on Wall Street I'd never heard of before. That story, after some ads.

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7:06A few weeks ago, I got to hear the story of this strange sculpture of a bronze bull, and the much stranger story of the man who made it. I heard it from a journalist, a longtime chronicler of New York City. I'm Christopher Bananos. I'm the city editor of New York Magazine and the author of a couple of books. What are the books about? I'm the author of A History of Polaroid Photography and a biography of the photographer Weegee. Oh, Weegee the street photographer. Got it. I like Weegee. So, yeah, I want to talk to you today about a piece of art in New York City that I feel like is not always celebrated as high art, but which I have found that I think a lot about.

7:49The Wall Street bull, which is actually called the charging bull, but it's like a bronze statue of a bull that is actually outside of the office building in which we work. I think when tourists come to New York City, they're like, I need to see the bull. But it's in a part of town where there's not a ton to see. Like Wall Street doesn't really have banks anymore. It creates this kind of tourist economy around it where there's like a guy selling statues of liberty, key chains, and there's like these tour guides that'll tell you about Hamilton's real life locations in New York City and there's a hot dog guy and there's an ice cream truck.

8:21And none of those people would be here but for the bowl. But because there's this piece of like, it's almost like they've dropped a little miniature Times Square outside of Times Square. You know what I mean? This one little hub of tourism activity. And so lately that's what I've been thinking about. But I feel like I'm gonna stare at it for three more months and I'm gonna have a different feeling. And I'm like, I'm curious, is this the experience that other people are having of art all the time? Well, I have lots of thoughts about that. One is that there is a certain kind of very broad, popular fine art that just clicks with a larger audience than most.

9:02And in the 70s and 80s, during the sort of, you know, minimalist abstract sculpture era, there's a whole class of public art that gets put in front of office buildings. And it has broad appeal. And it's often a little bland. Not always, but often a little bland. And the derisive nickname that art critics use is they call it plop art. Plop art because you just plop it somewhere. Because it clunk right down in the middle of the plaza. And it's usually brightly colored. I find the idea of plot art really helpful because it's like the love statue in Philadelphia where I'm from is definitely a plot art.

9:37Oh, there you go. Exactly. What it's useful for is defining a plaza. You know, the plaza in front of an office building is an architectural problem because it gets a little windswept and bare. If you put something in the middle of it, it does two things. It marks the spot. It defines the plaza much more effectively visually. and it provides a talking point and a meeting place. I'll meet you by the big red whatever it is. I'll meet you by the bull. There you go. But a lot of it is sort of used to signal the presence of art rather than really to function as art. It's easy to understand. It's a charging bull on Wall Street.

10:19Right. The bull is made out of bronze. It is much larger than life size, maybe 20 feet long. It doesn't need a lot of decoding. It says what it does on the tin, as the expression goes. Secondarily, obviously, it has become an Instagram object. That's the source of the line outside. Everybody's taking the same picture that they've seen on Instagram under the balls. Oh. So, like, ten years ago, there would not necessarily have been the same line. Less. Much less. This is a more recent format. I mean, it became a tourist attraction. It is a well-loved object. And people did find it funny to pose under the testicles.

11:01But not like now. The line running down the block is a comparatively recent phenomenon. And every city has a number of these sites now where people go to take the same picture that everybody else does. You know the spot in Brooklyn by the Manhattan Bridge? Yeah. Where everybody takes the same picture down the, I think it's, is it, I can't remember the name of the street, forgive me. Is it Water Street in Brooklyn? I'm not sure, but I know the street you're talking about. It just perfectly frames the bridge. That's right. And there are two brick warehouses on either side. And there's a picture of the bridge going up in 1909 that is precisely the same buildings on both sides.

11:38And everyone replicates it on Instagram. But now it's, you know, a tourist from Omaha or Shanghai posing in the same spot. I'll tell you. So the first several months of standing in front of the bull, what I would think about is there's always a huge line of people who are really excited about it. And there's one really big line to touch. The bull has testicles. Very large testicles. Huge testicles. Huge testicles. And the balls are more shiny where they've been rubbed off from people touching them. People love the bull's balls. What do you make of that? I think it's just the dirty joke of it. Right.

12:14Or the naughty Djokovic. It's not actually dirty. No, it doesn't. It feels like it's... It's a teehee. Yeah. I will also say that the statue, I think, is shaped to display them a little. The rear legs are splayed a little bit and the balls are sort of, you know, set back slightly. I don't think you weren't not supposed to notice them. Let's put it that way. But so I guess what I was going to ask you is, is it just like a funny accident that the things people were looking for in public art, before the internet, which is like, you know, you want something that is simple and obvious. You want it to be in a place that people will either visit or want to visit because of the art.

12:57And also that the art should be, should have a way to interact with it. Are those also the things that a piece of art that Instagram is going to like? Do those things shake hands? You know what I mean? I think they do. The interaction thing is interesting because most art, obviously, you can't touch. There are plenty of old public statues elsewhere in the world that have similar sort of touch points. You know, the statue of Winston Churchill outside the House of Commons in Britain, which has been there since, I don't know, the end of World War II, something like that. It was put up, you know, after he was prime minister, so maybe in the 60s.

13:33The toe is bright because members of parliament rub it on their way in the door. Oh, for luck. Good luck. And do the people who make this kind of art, is it like, I'm assuming the answer is it depends, but does everyone try to figure out what is Winston Churchill's toe, what is the bull's balls, or does it just happen? I think some people think about it and others don't. I would guess it is more often a happy accident. And I'm guessing, I mean, I'm not trying to be like a space alien to the world of fine art. Like, I know some things. I'm guessing that in the world of fine art, generally speaking, the people who are making mass appeal public art stuff are like, it's not the top of the prestige hierarchy.

14:12Well, that is somewhat true. It's a continuum, you know. But it's true, for example, that the guy behind the Wall Street Bowl, Arturo De Modica, was kind of poo-pooed by the art establishment. And can you tell me more about him, like sort of his career in New York City prior to making this bull? He was an immigrant from southern Italy who came here to make a splash in the early 70s. And he had that sort of make it in America huckster quality of a pop culture artist, if you like. He certainly thought of himself as a maker of fine art. But clearly he wanted to get famous and he wanted to make stuff with broad appeal.

14:54Yeah. He was explicit about, I make my art for the people, that kind of thing. And he was a big, gruff character. I met him only once, but I've talked to people who knew him better. And they described the person I met that one time. You know, that he was like sort of volcanic in the sort of stereotypical Italian artist kind of way, you know. He'd come here looking like a sculptor of the late 60s or early 70s, you know. Sort of like a hairy chested denim shirt kind of guy. And what was the Soho art scene that he was operating at the time, what was that scene like? Well, it's sort of hard to imagine now, but the Soho art scene in the 70s was really something special.

15:41Especially in the early 70s when he first got here. The Soho of the 1960s had been a factory district for 100 years. Those big loft buildings with the big arched windows and the cast iron facades had all been factories, light industry to medium industry factories. And they made everything, underwear, gears, paper boxes for the country and the world. And that business had started to decline in the 50s and 60s. A bunch of things happened. Suburbanization happened. And the Lower East Side stopped being the most packed residential district in America. And that's where all the workers came from. It was the poor people at the Lower East Side would walk over to what is now Soho and work in the paper box and underwear factories.

16:27So those buildings started to empty out. And certain changes were taking place, too. People were moving to the suburbs, but also the interstate highway system was up so you could move goods around the country more easily. You didn't have to have the concentration in cities that you had. It was a lot easier to make a factory in, let's say, South Carolina next to a highway instead of in lower Manhattan where you couldn't get the trucks in and everything had to go into a freight elevator. It's much easier to just throw it out the loading dock somewhere a lot simpler. And, well, you have a different labor force there, but you can get people to work there.

17:03So the jobs started to flow away from New York dramatically. That's why New York got so rough in the 1970s. I never knew that. We lost almost a million people in the 1970s. City went from approximately, I mean, I'm approximating, but roughly 8 million to roughly 7 million. And some of it was just to the south and the west, right? Got it. Just because the space was better and, you know, easier. And also you got away from the New York unions, which were very strong. Right. To labor costs are lower. That's right. So all of that meant that this district downtown of sooty old buildings that were aging was empty.

17:40And I mean empty. If you walked around Soho at night in 1960, you would not see a single light on in those buildings. They were mostly either unrented by the mid-60s or, in many cases, abandoned because there were so few tenants that they couldn't pay the taxes. And the fire department in New York stopped answering calls in that neighborhood. They would just let them burn, you know? It was called Hell's Hundred Acres by the fire department. So we had this completely empty neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. And around 1965 or so, a few artists discovered, realized, decided that a big empty factory floor that was a foot of concrete thick and had 20-foot ceilings and industrial-grade plumbing was probably a good place to make big metal sculptures or 20-foot paintings or other kinds of art that also kind of needed a factory, you know?

18:45And a few of these folks came. A number of them had been at Yale. A guy named Alan Capra was one of the early ones. Chuck Close was one of the earliest ones. And they all started taking these floors. And it was illegal. They were not zoned residential. So they would rent it as studio space, but they would sleep there. And they would build it out as an apartment illegally and secretly. You weren't allowed to have a kitchen, so you'd put it behind a partition or something. You weren't supposed to sleep there. So everybody had a fake sculpture. It was a model stand. It was a plinth on which the model would pose to be sculpted and a bed slid out from it.

19:27They would, you know, wire it up for lighting if the electricity was off or whatever. They would steal power from the street lamp outside. it. Chuck Close, I interviewed him once, and he said he figured out how to turn on the gas meter and then turn it off before the monthly inspection and replace the dust on top of the wheel so it did not appear that he had touched it. He would steal gas.

19:58He hired a guy to plumb out his apartment, who was Philip Glass, who was working as a plumber during the day. And he's a better composer than a plumber. Wow. Yes. Other guys, because some of these guys were painters, art painters, became the other kind of painters. They would paint lofts. It's so funny. It's like, it's this weird thing. It's like you imagine like a revolving door where like the spaces for factory workers are being filled with artists, but the artists are doing trades. But then like, it's such a, it's so funny. Like a city reinventing itself. The relationship between fine art, especially this sort of more robust fine arts like sculpture, you know, and industrial craft, they're not always so far apart, you know?

20:41Yeah. If you're a sculptor who's a really good welder, you can also get work as a welder of, you know, truck parts or whatever, you know, in another way. And sometimes if you need a day job, that's what you end up doing, right? So anyway, I got off the track. It's so nice to see this. And I know, like, I knew that Soho, you know, one of the most expensive places and one of the most expensive cities in the world, everyone, you know, always talks about, oh, well, you know, it used to be empty. It used to be artists. But I hadn't known. I'd never seen it clearly. Well, so what happened then was by the early 70s, the art scene was really robust and the galleries had started to open on the ground floors of these buildings.

21:19There was still a rather rough neighborhood to live in. You like, very few people had children. Again, it was illegal until the early 70s. The law had to be changed and the neighborhood had to be re-zoned. But until then, you weren't supposed to live there. The law changed to allow what was called an artist-in-residence. If you are a working artist, you are allowed to live in this formerly industrial zone. And in fact, what you would do in these days when these buildings were fire traps was put a sign next to the buzzer that said AIR2, artist-in-residence, second floor. And that way, if they came, they knew somebody was living there and they couldn't, like, just let it go.

21:56Oh, wow. Wow. It's like a message to the fire department being like, there's a human life. There's a human being up there. Yes. Don't just let it take its course. Wow. Yeah. So that was the big shift that was going on. The other thing I should mention is that the artists liked these spaces for their innate qualities. Good for industry, good for big equipment. The other thing is that they were dirt cheap. You could get a floor in 1965 of a big building on Green or Worcester Street for$50 a month. and let me tell you again from that same Chuck Close interview he said when he got here a year or two after a couple of his friends from Yale he paid$150 a month and they said you're nuts you got taken and a couple of years after that he and I don't know how many friends it was they each had a floor in the same building and it came up for sale and they had the opportunity to buy it and some of them didn't want to And he said he persuaded them.

22:58He said, it's all going up. You got to get it now. And what happened, I think he said they paid$30 ,000 for the whole building, something like that. And what he told me was within two or three years, the ground floor restaurant was paying all of their rents and then some. They were making money. The rent was less than it would have cost them for the whole mortgage. It's so funny because it's like we don't, you know, I mean, not to overgeneralize, but like we're not a country that particularly loves to subsidize art or artists. This little window. Accidentally. Accidentally. And gentrification, like a thing that none of us love, but like it just happened to work at this one time in this one particular way.

23:38This was the first gentrification story for all practical people. I mean, you could argue that Greenwich Village earlier got gentrified by the influx of Bohemians in the sort of Bob Dylan years. But really and truly, this was an early example of gentrification, but it was also not the toxic, fast-moving, throw-out-the-families-that-have-been-here-for-generations kind of gentrification that we saw a lot of later on and continue to see because this was nobody. There was no one being displaced. The only things being displaced were piles of rags in these buildings. It's so crazy. So, okay, so I can understand, I guess, then why a sculptor from Italy would hear stories like this to be like, hey, there's this place where, you know, space is cheap or even like space was cheap, but it's getting a little bit more expensive.

24:25But there's like a scene here and you should come and be a part of it. But he wouldn't have totally fit in because this stuff they're doing, or maybe not, like what he's doing, that sounds like a place for people who are going to be celebrated in a high art way. it doesn't sound like a place where you come build a studio if the lane of art you're in is like the love statue in philadelphia populist well that's not quite right because a the art world back then was tiny tiny and it could all sort of fit in in a teacup compared to today second the love statue in philadelphia is by robert indiana who lived in a law firm to slip

25:06so got it it was all one thing back then got it I mean of course there was a range between like really hard to understand performance art and you know really sort of easy to love paintings by Robert Indiana but the world of art was so much tinier that they could all sort of coexist and you know I'm sure there were guys who was like Arturo that guy he's nothing or whatever and I'm sure he was contemptuous of some of the stranger stuff out there yeah Well, that's how you know you have a scene. You have a bunch of people who are going to the same parties and judging each other. Arguing over art in the cafes at night.

25:39Yeah. I mean, is there anything healthier than a scene like that? It's why cities exist. Half the reason cities exist. So people in the same profession, whether it's Wall Street or art or movies or fashion, can hang out late at night when they're young and argue with each other over drinks and cigarettes. That's the core of civilization, if you ask me. But today it feels like, I mean, not to be like, not everything has to be nostalgia for what once was, but like that doesn't exist and that hasn't really been replicated in another place in the same way, has it? The problem now is that it's very hard to exist in that mode when your rent is no longer$50 or even$150 a month.