Bowling Green / Sports Museum of America

Bowling Green, surrounded by Broadway office buildings, survives as New York City’s oldest public park. Before the City’s Common Council designated it in 1733 as a bowling green for the beauty and ornament of Broadway and for the recreation and delight of the city’s inhabitants, it had served as a cattle pasture and parade ground. It remains one of the few places in Downtown that Dutch settlers of the West India Company, who founded the trading post of Nieuw Amsterdam here in the 1620s, would still recognize. In 1770, the British made Bowling Green the site of a gilded equestrian statue of King George II, and in 1771 added a fence to protect it from hostile colonists. After the Declaration of Independence was first read in New York, a revolutionary crowd pulled the statue down on July 9, 1776, while much of the fence survived as a rare colonial remnant on the site of the city’s Dutch origins. Nearby, Broadway became the route of ticker-tape parades beginning in 1886 with celebrations for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, and about 200 such processions have marched north from Bowling Green to City Hall Park honoring presidents, generals, royalty, aviators, veterans, and athletes. More than two dozen of the parades passing 26 Broadway honored athletes, including Olympic teams, tennis champions, and World Series winners, making the area a fitting home for the Sports Museum of America, a museum devoted to every American sport with interactive exhibits, the Billie Jean King International Women’s Sports Center, and the original Heisman Trophy. The history of these parades is also preserved in commemorative Broadway sidewalk plaques that record each parade’s date and honoree, reflecting the transformation of Broadway into the Canyon of Heroes.

New York, New York · United States