Archive for the ‘Birds and Pigeons’ Category

  “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco This ain’t no fooling around This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB I ain’t got time for that now”–Life During Wartime, Talking Heads In its heyday during the 1970s, the famous grungy dive bar at 315 Bowery called CBGB was like a second home to bikers, junkies, prostitutes, and inebriates (the bar […]

Help! Murder! Murder! The loud cries for help pierced the early morning stillness in Madison Square Park, nearly startling Policeman Betts out of his shoes as he walked his beat near the Hoffman House Hotel on Broadway and 25th Street.

Having heard that the house sparrows of European cities were helping to control insect infestations, a group of prominent New Yorkers, including dry goods merchant Alfred Edwards, imported eight pairs of sparrows from England in 1850.

Today, we have ticker-tape parades to honor our favorite sports teams when they win the World Series or the Super Bowl. In 1915, New Yorkers had a welcoming parade to honor a chicken. A white single-comb leghorn hen named Lady Eglantine, to be exact. Mind you, this was not an ordinary hen. This was Addison […]

Sir Oliver was a handsome twentieth-century matinée idol who had a habit of going off script and speaking out of line. Perhaps this was because Sir Oliver was not a man of royalty, but a female cockatoo that had the gift of gab. Or maybe it was because Sir Oliver spent many of her down-time […]