Near Flaco’s Hunting Grounds, a regreening of Central Park

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we look at a construction site in Central Park, next to a favorite hunting ground of Flaco, the famous Eurasian eagle owl that died last week.

Before we look at the construction project, here’s what else you need to know about Flaco.

• The Central Park Zoo said an autopsy showed injuries “consistent with death due to acute traumatic injury.” Flaco was found on the ground Friday after apparently hitting a building on West 89th Street in Manhattan, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement.

• Did he fly well? Some bird watchers speculated that he may have eaten a pigeon or a rat that had ingested poison, which could have entered his system. Toxicology tests on Flaco are underway. The association said results would not be available until weeks later. In 2021, testing on Barry the barred owl, another well-known bird that died unexpectedly, high concentrations of rat poison found in her blood, according to news channel The City.

• Can bird strikes be reduced? The city now needs new buildings and major window replacement projects that use glass that birds will recognize and avoid. As for existing windows, New York City-based Audubon is proposing small dot-shaped stickers, which it says can reduce collisions by as much as 90 percent.

A $160 million construction project

The construction in Central Park involves redesigning a portion of the park that serves as a backyard for nearby blocks in East Harlem that don’t have much green space.

A monolithic above-ground structure from the 1960s has already been demolished. It was topped by the Lasker Pool, which doubled as an ice skating rink in cold weather.

“This right’s a wrong,” Elizabeth Smith, president of the Central Park Conservancy, said one recent morning. “What was here divided the park and kept the residents of East Harlem from enjoying the rest of the park. It feels like you’re in the park now.”

The demolition of the Lasker Pool was one of several perspective-changing changes in the project that will open the way to the park south of 110th Street. The project will cost $160 million; the city is investing $60 million, and the conservancy has raised the rest. The new complex, which will include a swimming pool that can also be used as an ice skating rink, is expected to open next winter, a few months later than originally planned. “Covid has set us back a bit,” Smith said.

The differences between the old Lasker layout and what will replace it are already clear. The new building – with toilets, changing rooms and a snack area – is hidden in a hill and the path from the north side of the park runs over the green roof on top.

Hidden inside is the equipment to pump water for swimming and cool it for skating. Outside, the new swimming pool and ice rink will have an artificial grass covering, creating an open green space for park visitors to walk across. Or just laze around, if they feel like lying down and stretching out during the “shoulder seasons,” as the conservation community calls the times when the weather is too cold for swimming and too hot for skating.

‘Olmstedian’

Christopher Nolan, a landscape architect who helped conceive the project, said it was all very “Olmstedian” – as in Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park with Calvert Vaux. Nolan said the new structure was carefully “integrated into the landscape” in a way that Olmsted would have liked, unlike the old design, “where the idea in the 20th century was to put buildings on top of the landscape.”

Another Olmstedian touch was the diversion of a stream that flows through the area. Since the 1960s it has been diverted underground via a culvert. Now it will be visible again. And it will once again flow into the Harlem Meer, the small lake created by Olmsted and Vaux.

Smith, the conservation leader, said the new building would be open year-round. The Lasker location, which was operated by the Trump Organization until 2021, was closed for almost six months, between the swimming and skating seasons. Additionally, conservation officials said anyone who entered during skating season had to pay, even if they were just spectators who had no plans to lace up and hit the ice. Admission to the new building will be free, although there are still fees associated with renting skates and getting on the ice.

Following the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to terminate contracts with the Trump Organization for four concession operations in the city, including those at Lasker Rink and Wollman Rink on the city’s South Side. the park.

The Trump contract for the Lasker concession expired in March of that year, and because the construction project was already planned, the contract was not renewed. The conservancy will take over year-round concessions when the new center opens, with pool operations handled by the parks department.

Weather

Expect a partly sunny day with temperatures in the low 50s. At night it will be partly cloudy and temperatures will drop below 40 degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until March 24 (Purim).

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METROPOLITAN diary

The verdict

Dear Diary:

In 1953, at the age of twenty, I fulfilled an old dream and moved to New York City from Ohio.

Eager to participate in life in my new city, I applied to be included as a future jury member.

A few years later I was called to serve on a civil court jury. I was the only woman.

The case was a lawsuit seeking damages against Horn & Hardart, which operated the Automat cafeterias. It was brought by a woman who claimed to have found a worm in her salad. As proof, she had kept the worm in her freezer for over a year and brought it to court.

The judge, a tall, dark-haired, middle-aged man with a booming voice, had a real New York accent that was impressive for this former Ohio resident bent on erasing her own Midwestern accent.

After the prosecutor testified to her extreme distress at discovering the worm, the judge ordered that “Exhibit A, to wit da woim,” be distributed to the jurors.

Then he paused and said with a smile and a nod to me, “Except the lady.”

I tried to protest by shaking my head, but the clerk carrying the worm passed me by.

Back in the jury room, no one doubted that the prosecutor had indeed found a worm in her salad, but we were unimpressed by the suffering she claimed it had caused her.

Hadn’t she willingly, perhaps eagerly, extracted the noxious worm, wrapped it in napkins, transported it home and stored it in her freezer?