That gigantic curved building with the four seated women out front is the Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House. And the small oval of grass beside it is Bowling Green — the oldest public park in New York City.
The park first. The city set it aside in seventeen thirty-three and rented it out to three local men for one peppercorn a year. That was a real legal trick — a rent small enough to be a joke, but real enough to make the lease stick.
Now the fence around it. It's the original ironwork from seventeen seventy-one. Walk along it and check the top of each post, because every one of them has been cut flat. There used to be a small iron crown on every single post.
They were sawn off in one night.
In the middle of that little park stood a gilded lead statue of King George the Third on horseback. Four thousand pounds of it. On the ninth of July, seventeen seventy-six, a crowd came down Broadway, threw ropes over the King, and pulled him off his pedestal. The crowns came off t
he fence on the way past. They were already out, and the tools were already in their hands.
The lead was carted up to Litchfield, Connecticut, where the women and children of the town melted the King of England down into musket balls. Someone kept count. Forty-two thousand and eighty-eight of them.
An entire monarch, converted into ammunition, with a receipt.
Which is a fine way to start a revo
