DEPEYSTER STATUE, BOWLING GREEN
Bowling Green, Foot of Broadway
JULY 23, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 154

Bowling Green, 1930-1931 (CGLI)

George Edwin Bissell's bronze statue of Abraham DePeyster (1657-1728), mayor of New Amsterdam from 1695 to 1699, was commissioned in 1890 by his great-great-great grandson John Watts DePeyster. The statue was erected at the base of Broadway in Bowling Green, New York's oldest public park, best remembered as a site of Revolutionary War protest, where a lead statue of King George III was toppled and melted down for bullets. The Dutch burgomaster DePeyster, stolid and bewigged, was a fitting corrective to the royal image.

Surrounding the half-acre park was the "oil and steamship" district, with the British Cunard Line's offices on the west side of Broadway (left) and the curved facade of the Standard Oil Building on the east (right). Abbott first photographed Bowling Green between 1930 and 1933 from the roof of the U.S. Custom House at the southern edge of the park. In 1936, she reconsidered the site from street level, placing the DePeyster statue in the foreground. In this version, the seventeenth-century Dutchman seems to rule over the captains of modern industry.

With the growth of the financial district and the infusion of commuters, Bowling Green became more thoroughfare than oasis. Partially renovated in 1938, the park was restored in 1972 to its late-eighteenth-century appearance. The DePeyster sculpture was removed and later installed in Hanover Square, where it remains today.

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