The bull will be on parade Friday in downtown Wyandotte as Merrill Lynch celebrates the grand opening of its new offices.
The financial services firm restored a 127-year-old building at the corner of Biddle Avenue and Oak Street for its new office space. To celebrate the move, the firm will move the large bull statue from its old office at 3217 Biddle to its new one as part of a parade that includes local officials and the high school band.
"We're bringing it home," says Leo Stevenson, a vice president with Merrill Lynch. "We're going to have a lot of fun with it."
A tractor will pull the 650-pound statue down Biddle to what is long been known as the Armstrong Men's Clothing Building. The building, originally built at the Arlington Hotel and once a speakeasy, had fallen into disrepair and become abandoned since the 1990s.
Merrill Lynch took control of two-story structure late last year and invested $2 million in restoring it into 6,400 square feet of Class A office space with 16-foot ceilings. About a dozen Merrill Lynch employees moved into the building this summer after outgrowing its old location four blocks away.
Three years ago the local Merrill Lynch branch bought the bull statue from local artist Keith Coleman at the Biddle Art Gallery because the bull is one of the company's symbols. The 5-foot tall and 8-foot long sculpture was made with metal from five water heaters.
It has been a fixture of public art in downtown since its purchase, standing guard on the sidewalk in front of Merrill Lynch's old offices. Stevenson says it will continue that role in front of the company's new offices after the parade.
"It's kind of a celebration of taking a really run down building and restoring it instead of tearing it down," Stevenson says. "This is sort of a culmination of all that work."
Source: Leo Stevenson, vice president with Merrill Lynch
Writer: Jon Zemke
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