Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll meet the summer landscaping squad on Governors Island. We’ll also get details on the mixed verdict in the retrial of the former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
On Governors Island, the 172-acre former fort in New York Harbor, the return of the summer landscaping squad was as predictable as the return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano in California.
The landscaping squad is five sheep. They will spend their days eating plants that sound unappetizing — mugworts, phragmites and bromes. The sheep like them, and gobble them up faster than people working the same acreage could clear them, according to Melissa Perrin, who as the gardener on Governors Island is the de facto sheep herder. The plants in question are invasive species that can cause irreversible problems.
This is the fifth year that the sheep — Bowie, Chad, Evening, Jupiter and Philip Aries — have spent the summer on Governors Island, and it will be their last. Their services will no longer be needed after September. They may even be sent home, to the farm near Albany where they spend the rest of the year, sooner.
They will leave with gold stars as well as pink slips. They have done what they were brought in to do and have done it well, said Nicole Fogarty, the director of marketing for Governors Island.
“Sheep eating weeds is better than humans spending their time pulling the weeds,” she said, explaining that the mission of the sheep was to prevent the species from flowering and spreading seeds. And the sheep are a more eco-friendly option than using power tools to whack through the unwanted vegetation.
The area the sheep have foraged is adjacent to where construction will begin next year on a “living laboratory” for climate solutions. In 2023 the city chose a consortium led by Stony Brook University for a 400,000-square-foot hub called the New York Climate Exchange, which describes itself as “part think tank, part do-tank.” The new campus is expected to open in 2029.
The sheep on the island are hardly the first to nibble their way through acreage in New York City. Sheep once roamed in Sheep Meadow in Central Park, and for several years, sheep grazed outside the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a Roman Catholic Church in NoLIta.
Some urban parks have imported goats, but Governors Island decided against them. Goats are omnivorous. They would eat almost anything in their path, invasive or not, including the bark on the trees in Hammock Grove, as the area the sheep have helped clear is known. Governors Island says the sheep’s tastes are more refined, and they eat around the trees.
Like Sheep Meadow, Hammock Grove may look natural, but it was planned and planted. The trees went in 10 years ago, and the plan envisioned pathways for people to stroll on. But first the ground had to be readied. “The areas they’re grazing are so densely populated by the mugwort, phragmites and Bromus that it would be a lot of human work,” Perrin said.
The sheep’s diet includes more than invasive plants. They are given hay every night — “an armful of hay for all five of them,” Perrin said, as well as molasses-covered pellets.
She has come to know their personalities. The one ewe, Evening, is the leader. Bowie is “literally the black sheep of the group,” Perrin said. He stepped on a rock the other day, slightly injuring a hoof.
“An ouch-y,” Perrin called it.
When a veterinarian checked on him, “the other four would stand outside of the area that we had him in,” she said. “His twin, Jupiter, would walk over and stare deep into Bowie’s eyes and they would stare at each other. They were looking out for each other.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day with the temperature potentially reaching 90. If that happens, it will be the city’s first 90-degree day of the year. In the evening, there will be a small chance of rain. The temperature will dip into the high 60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth).
The latest New York news
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Trump resumes fight to overturn criminal conviction: The president’s legal team argued on Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity justified moving an appeal of his conviction — on 34 felony charges related to a hush-money payment — in Manhattan to federal jurisdiction.
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Charged with fraud: A founder of the Queens Defenders, a public defender office, has been charged with diverting thousands of dollars from the organization and using the money for personal expenses, including a vacation in Bali and teeth-whitening procedures.
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Parsing “hotel night” texts: Lawyers for the music mogul Sean Combs walked his former girlfriend, who is now a government witness, through a voluminous history of text and audio messages. The ex-girlfriend, testifying under the pseudonym Jane, has said that Combs pressured her into a pattern of degrading sex marathons with male escorts.
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A mixed verdict for Harvey Weinstein
The former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was convicted of a sex crime in Manhattan for the second time in five years. But the jury acquitted him on a second charge and has not come to agreement on a third.
The foreman said that the deliberations involving the last charge had turned heated and that the other jurors “keep attacking me.” The jurors are expected to return today to continue deliberating, their sixth day in the jury room.
Two of Weinstein’s accusers, Miriam Haley and Jessica Mann, testified against Weinstein in his first Manhattan trial in 2020. The third woman, Kaja Sokola, did not testify at the first trial; the charge involving her was added last year. The jury found him guilty on the charge involving Haley and not guilty on the charge involving Sokola. The third-degree rape charge involving Mann was the one that the jurors did not reach a verdict on.
Haley called the verdict “a relief all around” and said she was “happy” that she had testified “despite some intimidation tactics by the defense.” Sokola said the mixed verdict was “a big win for everyone,” even if Weinstein had been cleared of assaulting her. She said she hoped the ultimate result of the trial would be to “give courage to others to speak up.”
Weinstein’s first trial came at a significant moment for the #MeToo movement, with its demand for accountability for workplace sexual harassment and assault by powerful men. The jury then convicted him of two felony sex crimes, including rape, but found him not guilty on three other charges, including the most serious one he had faced: being a sexual predator.
That verdict was overturned last year by the state’s highest court, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office decided to try Weinstein again. The testimony this time around largely mirrored the testimony in 2020.
The jury’s decision on the first two counts was announced after the judge had told the jurors to “cool down” after their discussions seemingly broke down amid shouting and threats. The unusual development came during a private meeting between the jury foreman and the judge, Justice Curtis Farber, and led Weinstein to ask for a mistrial, a request Farber did not grant.
The foreman said that he had made up his mind on one of the charges against Weinstein and would not change his position, leading other jurors to yell at him, according to a transcript of the conversation with Farber. The deliberations became so heated that one juror told him, “‘Oh, we will see you outside,’” the foreman told Farber.
METROPOLITAN diary
On the M31
Dear Diary:
I was on the M31 bus on the way home. I had a cane, and seemingly half of the other passengers had canes or walkers or were otherwise sitting appropriately in seats marked for the elderly or infirm.
An older woman got on and saw that there were no empty seats. She politely asked a teenage girl to give up her seat, which the girl did.
As she was getting off a few stops later, the older woman stopped to thank the girl.
“Someday you’ll be a senior,” she said. “And then you’ll understand.”
“That won’t be for a while,” the girl said. “I’m just a freshman.”
— Paula Gray Hunker
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.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post For the Sheep of Governors Island, a Final New York Summer appeared first on New York Times.
