Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about an exhibition about Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that captivated the city until his death last year. We’ll also get details on traffic in Manhattan during the first week of congestion pricing.
In life, Flaco got the celebrity treatment. In death, he is getting the museum treatment.
The New York Historical (as the New-York Historical Society has called itself since last fall) will open an exhibition titled “The Year of Flaco” on Feb. 7. It will celebrate the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl that winged it in Manhattan, hunting and holing up in a favorite tree. His fans worried about the dangers of the city, including a diet that was apparently heavy on tainted prey. When he died after crashing into an apartment building last year, he had enough rat poison and pigeon virus in his system to kill him.
Rebecca Klassen, the curator of material culture at New York Historical, said it was unusual to assemble an exhibition so soon after the central subject had died. And New York Historical does not have Flaco’s remains, only memorabilia. His wings and tissue samples went to the American Museum of Natural History.
The idea for New York Historical’s exhibit came up after Valerie Hartman, a runner who had kept tabs on Flaco, filled out an online form for the museum’s “History Responds” initiative. That program was started after the Sept. 11 attacks to collect material related to major events. Klassen read the form and offered to go to Hartman’s apartment to inspect Flaco memorabilia that she and another Flaco fan had collected after a memorial gathering in Central Park last year.
Without telling Klassen, Hartman invited three other Flaco fans.
“They were basically pitching me on the idea of doing an exhibition timed to the anniversary of his escape and his death,” Klassen said.
Hartman said she had not meant to “ambush” Klassen at the gathering last June, not quite two months after Flaco’s death.
“My first priority was the material should survive and be archived and accessible,” Hartman said. “I didn’t have an agenda to do an exhibit, but in talking about why these materials should be saved, it lit a spark of wow, this is an ongoing story. People were still grieving. What would it be like to have an exhibit where people could see the photography, combine that with the poems and letters and stuffed animals and trinkets?”
Klassen remembers her response: “I said, ‘Well, OK, this is a very short timeline for a museum.”
But she felt that capitalizing on Flaco’s enduring popularity made sense. “He’s such a flexible symbol,” she said. “People see all these things in him — a New Yorker who had grit, an immigrant — and he was liberated, he was free. That idea was very potent for people. And he was a raptor. Raptors have a hold on people. You can imagine how people felt when this large raptor appeared on your window sill. You’re going about your day, and this large, beautiful bird appeared.”
Flaco won’t be the only bird in an exhibition at New York Historical. Watercolor models for the engravings used in publishing John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” are on display. New York Historical is also showing “Pets and the City,” which “surveys the evolution of pets” in New York, from the days of Indigenous tribes to the Sept. 11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic. Flaco is in that exhibition, too, in a portrait commissioned by Agnes Hsu-Tang, the board chairwoman of the New York Historical, even though he was not a pet.
“I miss him dearly,” she said.
She said she had been trained as an archaeologist and had seen the Eurasian eagle-owl in its native habitat, hunting.
She compared Flaco to Patrick Henry, the colonial-era patriot remembered for his “give me liberty or give me death” speech. Flaco “really chose liberty” when he broke out of the zoo, she said. “He repeatedly dodged capture” when the zookeepers tried lure him back.
But no, she said: “He wanted to remain free.”
Weather
Prepare for wind, increasing clouds and a chance of snow showers, with a high near 33. Winds and clouds will persist through the evening, with a low around 24.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Monday (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).
The latest Metro news
-
School closings: An elementary schoolteacher in Montclair, N.J., was arrested after making a threat against a principal that prompted officials to close the schools. The teacher was apprehended in Philadelphia. He had been put on administrative leave last week when he started showing signs of “erratic behavior,” the police said.
-
Shot after calling 911: A man who called 911 to report a burglary was shot by a police officer in an apartment building in the South Bronx. The police said the man had a knife in one hand. The shooting, and whether a language barrier played a role, is under investigation.
-
A push for cellphone restrictions: Gov. Kathy Hochul signaled that she wants to limit students’ access to cellphones in schools. It’s her latest move to address children’s reliance on the devices.
-
Stagehands go on strike: Workers walked off the job at the Atlantic Theater Company, forcing cancellations of several performances. The union representing them accused the nonprofit theater of stalling talks.
Less traffic in congestion pricing’s first week
Early data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suggests that the new congestion pricing program has reduced traffic in some parts of Manhattan that it covers.
The agency said traffic entering the congestion pricing zone — Manhattan south of 60th Street — and on nearby highways had dropped 7.5 percent compared with an estimate of an average workday in January before congestion pricing began last week. The M.T.A. calculated the estimate because it has no actual data from past years on vehicles entering the zone, where most passenger cars are charged $9 a day at peak hours.
The M.T.A. said the drop in traffic was steeper on Sunday: It estimated that the number of vehicles that drove into the zone was down by about 18.5 percent, compared with the same base line. The drop in traffic works out to 219,000 fewer vehicles entering the zone per week, the agency said.
Opponents of congestion pricing have called it a money grab by the M.T.A., which will spend the revenue generated by congestion pricing on improvements to the transit system.
The data seemed to confirm what some New Yorkers said they had noticed: fewer traffic jams, and more curbside parking on some blocks in and around the congestion pricing zone. The M.T.A.’s express buses reported a significant increase in ridership last week — up 6 percent from January 2024. But New Jersey Transit officials said that they had not seen a notable increase in ridership last week.
With only one week of data, it is too early to say how much of a difference congestion pricing is making. Congestion pricing was not the only factor that might have kept some drivers off the roads last week: Subfreezing temperatures might have figured into drivers’ decisions about whether to head into Manhattan.
Still, Samuel Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner who supports congestion pricing, said that the first week had been a crucial test. “New York’s a tough town,” he said. “Any show that opens and gets panned the first week usually closes. We have survived the first week.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Food Cart
Dear Diary:
I was near Central Park South for a doctor’s appointment, so I decided to stop at a food cart I used to frequent when I worked in the area.
The cart was owned by an Egyptian couple. The woman who worked there gave me a free banana and said “love you” without fail every day.
She didn’t know that I was going through a rough time, and that she was often the only bright spot in my otherwise grim days.
As I got in line on this occasion, I worried that she wouldn’t be there anymore and that if she was, she wouldn’t remember me. After all, it had been six years.
But there she was, at the rear of the cart. We made eye contact, and she kept looking back at me.
“Did I see you at Costco the other day?” she asked.
I smiled and shook my head.
She stepped in front of the cart. Her shirt said, “I love you.”
“No, no,” she said. “I remember you.”
She gave me a free bagel and told me proudly that her daughter was a big shot at Chase now. She told me to come back soon.
As I walked away, I began to tear up. I wished she knew what her kindness had meant to me all those years ago.
— Kelly Krause
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
The post ‘The Year of Flaco’ Will Celebrate a Beloved Owl appeared first on New York Times.
