Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll look at a name change that has put a well-known birding organization on the right side of history. We’ll also see why the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority says “we’re behind the eight ball” now that Gov. Kathy Hochul has shelved congestion pricing.
Last week a well-known New York birding organization, NYC Audubon, rebranded itself to be on the right side of history.
It changed its name to NYC Bird Alliance, dropping the reference to John James Audubon, the self-trained ornithologist and illustrator who was once a patron saint of birders.
He also enslaved people.
NYC Bird Alliance is not the only group that has abandoned the Audubon name. In the past few years, Nature Forward (formerly the Audubon Naturalist Society) has done so, as have some local chapters of the National Audubon Society, including those in Seattle and Chicago.
But Audubon’s name remains in other places in northern Manhattan, where he lived for about nine years before his death in 1851.
Two historic districts carry the Audubon name, the Audubon Park Historic District and the Audubon Terrace Historic District. The Audubon Playground is on Audubon Avenue. A public school — P.S. 128, the Audubon School — looks out on the avenue.
NYC Bird Alliance announced its new name 15 months after it said it would change it because of its concerns about Audubon’s legacy. “We wouldn’t be where we are without John James Audubon,” said Jessica Wilson, who was the executive director of NYC Audubon and has the same title with NYC Bird Alliance. But after calling him “overtly, vocally racist,” she added that “his actions and his views were harmful at the time and continue to be harmful today.”
Her group was, and is, the New York chapter of the National Audubon Society, whose board voted last year to keep that name. Its chief executive, Elizabeth Gray, said then that “the organization transcends one person’s name.”
Wilson’s organization took the opposite tack, collecting “hundreds of suggestions” of possible new names, consulting experts in marketing and branding and eventually running an online poll of five possibilities. NYC Bird Alliance was the clear choice, “but it wasn’t the only choice that people liked, Wilson said, adding that “Birds NYC was quite popular, as was NYC Bird Conservancy.”
‘A community conversation to be had’
Councilwoman Carmen De La Rosa, who represents Washington Heights, said that she was “proud” of NYC Bird Alliance for making the name change. She also said that “there is definitely a community conversation to be had” about renaming streets and buildings with Audubon’s name.
“I have been having some conversations with the community — not anything in an official, public-facing way,” she said, mentioning William Dyckman, the 18th-century Dutch farmer for whom Dyckman Street was named. The street is a block from where she grew up.
“Dyckman had the same thing, slavery and slave ownership,” she said. “I was one of those girls who had always been proud of saying ‘I’m from Dyckman.’ When I learned that Dyckman was a slave owner, I learned about it as an adult.”
As for Audubon, the city’s Department of Transportation said it could not rename a street without action by the City Council. The parks department said there had been no discussions about renaming Audubon Playground.
But Vivian Ducat, co-chairwoman of the Riverside Oval Association, said that the group stopped holding its annual Audubon celebration a couple of years ago after she got “pushback from the neighborhood.” The gathering, with speakers and a small raffle, took place on the Saturday closest to April 26, Audubon’s birthday.
Matthew Spady, the author of “The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It,” was a speaker at the last Audubon birthday event. He said “one of the reasons we know” about Audubon’s time enslaving people “was that he had to sell his slaves when he went bankrupt.” The national Audubon group says the bankruptcy sent Audubon to jail in 1819, more than 20 years before he moved to Washington Heights.
Spady also said the fallout about Audubon raised another question.
“If you were to rename Audubon Park because he was a slave owner for only a few years,” Spady said, “what do we do about Washington Heights, because George Washington was a slaveholder his entire life, with many more slaves?”
Weather
Today will be sunny with temperatures in the high 70s. In the evening it will cool off, with lows in the mid-60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Shavuot).
The latest New York news
Menendez corruption trial: Jose Uribe, who has said he bribed Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, in return for help in quashing criminal matters involving two friends, testified that he had asked Menendez for help directly. Menendez said he would “look into it,” Uribe said.
A congressman makes amends with a socialist group: Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, told the Democratic Socialists of America that his views on Israel aligned with theirs and insisted that he had never quit the group, despite earlier claims.
Leadership trouble at an elite private school: The leader of Collegiate School in Manhattan stepped down after an internal report found “problems of religious and cultural bias.”
An artist and activist dies at 64: Debby Lee Cohen’s successful campaign against foam lunch trays in New York City led to similar bans elsewhere.
Without congestion pricing, ‘a tall order’
“We got a tall order, and we’re behind the eight ball right now,” the chief executive of the state agency that runs New York City’s subway and bus system said as he outlined priorities now that Gov. Kathy Hochul has shelved a congestion pricing plan, leaving the agency to wrestle with a $15 billion shortfall.
The chief executive, Janno Lieber, said that the agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, would emphasize “basic stuff to make sure the system doesn’t fall apart” and operates safely. He also told a news conference that “we’re going to fight like hell throughout to make sure we don’t have to reduce service.”
Lieber said the agency would take “serious steps to carve up the capital program” so that the transit system “did not fall into disrepair” and revert to conditions of the 1970s and ’80s, when “you got on and you didn’t know if the train was going to break down before you got there.”
Lieber said Hochul’s decision would force the agency to shrink its current capital budget and could affect the next one. Lieber said the future projects now at risk included the next phase of the Second Avenue subway line. He said the agency would work to retain a $3.2 billion federal grant that was to help pay for extending the line.
Lieber, in his first public remarks since Hochul’s surprise announcement, did not refer to the governor by name or comment directly on her motivation for deciding to, as she put it, “indefinitely pause” congestion pricing. The program was to go into effect on June 30 and would have charged E-ZPass drivers as much as $15 when they headed into Manhattan south of 60th Street. Hochul said she was worried that the program would have hurt the city’s economy.
On Monday, Lieber said that “our job at the M.T.A. is not to be political analysts.” When he was asked whether he considered resigning after Hochul decided to halt the long-planned congestion pricing program, he said: “I’m the patron saint of challenging projects and challenging causes. It’s not my nature to walk or quit.”
He also said that he had been “incredibly moved” by support from passengers and transit advocates in the days since Hochul’s announcement.
“Loving the M.T.A. is not a 365 job for New Yorkers,” he said, “but in the last week we have felt it.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Foraging with John Cage
Dear Diary:
In 1959, I signed up for a mushroom identification course at the New School taught by the composer John Cage.
In those days, I often accompanied my uncles when they gathered mushrooms in the woods near Greenwood Lake in New Jersey. I thought it would be a good idea to really know something about what we were picking.
The class met on Sundays, in a park off the Palisades Parkway. About 15 of us walked around with baskets and picked mushrooms.
It was all very casual. We just walked in the park, saw different mushrooms and learned about them, including which ones were harmful. I still remember that the amanita is poisonous.
Cage was instrumental in starting the New York Mycological Society, and he also got me started on collecting mushroom-related things: prints, ceramics and so on.
Nowadays, I get my mushrooms at the local Acme or ShopRite, saute them in butter, or pickle them with vinegar, and dress them with garlic and olive oil.
— Adriana O’Toole
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.
Kellina Moore and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Why NYC Audubon Changed Its Name appeared first on New York Times.
