Keep girl and beast together, elsewhere
Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor of “Charging Bull,” pressed his case Wednesday against the City of New York for supposedly violating the rights of his sculpture when it allowed “Fearless Girl” to stare it down just 25 feet away.
I don’t share Di Modica’s concerns. I do, however, think that both the bull and the girl need to move — and move together — for the sake of public safety.
Since she was installed last month, “Fearless Girl” has become a worldwide celebrity. In many ways, this has been great for downtown Manhattan.
Thousands of people, tourists from around the globe and New Yorkers alike, have come to visit her on that small and crowded plaza just north of Bowling Green park in lower Manhattan. While originally placed as a temporary installation, she’s now earned a public place of honor through at least February 2018.
The bull, now the girl’s companion on the site, has been a powerful draw and destination ever since it found a home on lower Broadway in 1989.
It is an iconic piece of art that depicts strength, energy and optimism. I respect Di Modica being protective of his creation. But none of its beauty or power is diminished by the presence of “Fearless Girl,” who arrived on International Women’s Day and symbolizes the strength, bravery and promise of women in our culture.
They work both as fully independent pieces of art — they are 25 feet apart, after all — and as works of art in conversation.
Our public spaces, and indeed public discourse, is enlivened and expanded by the idea that powerful and singular expressions can stand on their own and make up a rich, interactive whole.
They can and should co-exist. It is precisely the interplay and juxtaposition of the two pieces that has seized a wide swath of the public’s imagination.
But we do face another pressing problem, which is where to put these estimable works of art.
Even before the girl began staring down the bull, the city grappled with how to keep pedestrians safe at this location, and barricades have gone up and come down over the years.
In fact, a few years ago, I lobbied former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to “free the bull” by removing barricades that were penning it in, and he agreed.
But now, with the two statues in one plaza, far too many people are concentrated in the narrowest portion of a pedestrian island that connects to lower Broadway.
This is an accident, or worse, waiting to happen.
Visitors are vulnerable and essentially unprotected as they back up into the road to snap photos. It is only a matter of time before someone steps off the curb and ends up stumbling into two lanes of oncoming traffic. Or a terrorist attempts to replicate the attacks against groups of pedestrians that have taken place in Stockholm, London, Berlin and Nice, France.
There’s a simple solution: Move both girl and the bull just a few yards south and closer to Bowling Green park. That small move would create a buffer zone that would help prevent pedestrians from overflowing into traffic and put them out of harm’s way.
At the same time, this area needs greater protection against any vehicle with bad intent — and I’m not recommending more ugly concrete barriers or barricades that start out as temporary measures and end up being permanent monstrosities.
Lower Manhattan is already crosshatched with many security zones, checkpoints and a wide variety of safety features, often quickly planned out of pressing necessities. These measures too often have contributed to pedestrian and planning woes and stand as unnecessarily ugly reminders of the modern world in which we live.
Instead, the city should put in place substantial, attractive and nonobtrusive obstructions that prevent cars and trucks from intruding on pedestrian space.
Any permanent solution needs to be effective, it needs to harness and not dampen this new interest in the neighborhood, and it must gracefully fit in with the historic surroundings of Bowling Green.
As the weather gets warmer and the tourist season comes into full swing, we can count on even more people visiting the plaza that’s home to the bull and the girl. Lower Manhattan had 14.8 million tourists visit in 2016, and we expect that number to grow in 2017. That’s why the city should take the appropriate steps immediately to protect visitors to Bowling Green plaza — and, even better, move the girl and her animal companion a little bit south.