The 7,100-pound bronze bull at Bowling Green looks like a monument commissioned by the financial establishment, but it began as illegal midnight guerrilla art dropped off as a Christmas present. This episode tells the story of Arturo Di Modica, who arrived in New York from Sicily in 1970 with nothing, bypassed the gatekept gallery world by selling directly from a Soho studio, and after the Black Monday crash of 1987 decided to spend roughly $360,000 of his own savings on an 11-foot symbol of American resilience.

We cover the two years of lost-wax casting at a Brooklyn foundry, the scouting of NYPD patrol gaps to find a four-to-five-minute window, the surprise Christmas tree on Broad Street on December 14, 1989, the impounding of the sculpture, and the public outcry that had the Parks Department relocate it to Bowling Green within days. Then ...