Good morning. It's Wednesday. Today we'll find out about a giant featherless bird that will land on the High Line in Manhattan before long. We'll also get details on a pretrial hearing in the criminal fraud case against former Representative George Santos.
Its name is Dinosaur. It looks like an omnipresent New Yorker, a pigeon. But Dinosaur the pigeon is closer in size to the Tyrannosaurus rex in "Jurassic Park" than to the usual feathered city dwellers. Dinosaur the pigeon has no feathers and will not peck at birdseed on the ground — or at anything else. It is an aluminum art installation that will tower over the High Line Plinth, at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue. Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art, said that Dinosaur "will add great wit to the skyline of New York." Dinosaur is not the only animal installation that is headed to Manhattan. Next month a herd of full-size Indian elephants will take up residence in the Meatpacking district at the invitation of the area's business improvement district. The elephants were made by Indigenous artisans in India from Lantana camara, a flowering shrub plant that is considered an invasive species there. It took Dinosaur awhile to be chosen for its perch. Iván Argote, the artist who created it, first submitted a proposal in 2020 — among 80 that arrived for the third High Line Plinth commission. The High Line opened the proposals to public comments and said that Argote's "proved polarizing," prompting "strong feelings" of affection or disgust. In announcing that Dinosaur had been selected for the fourth High Line Plinth and would spend 18 months there, the High Line said that "Dinosaur reverses the typical power dynamic between bird and human." Dinosaur will arrive in October, a few months behind a new edition of the book "The New York Pigeon: Behind the Feathers," by Andrew Garn, a photographer and writer. For more than 15 years, he has been capturing the oft-loathed birds with studio-style images — dark backgrounds, dramatic lighting and seemingly meaningful expressions. He wrote in the introduction to the book that it is as hard to imagine New York City without pigeons as it is to think of the Everglades without alligators or Antarctica without penguins. "Pigeons are our nature," he wrote. Argote said that Dinosaur's size was a tribute to pigeon ancestors "who millions of years ago dominated the globe, as we do today." Naming a statue of a pigeon Dinosaur "serves as a reference to the dinosaur's extinction," he said. "Like them, one day we won't be around anymore, but perhaps a remnant of humanity will live on — as pigeons do." For real pigeons, the hazards of the citySkyscrapers in New York can cut short the lives of real pigeons that slam into them. And a new study suggests that far more birds die in building collisions than had been thought — more than a billion a year nationwide, or about triple one previous estimate. One of the researchers who worked on the study, Dustin Partridge, the director of conservation and science for NYC Bird Alliance, said that the previous estimate for New York City — between 90,000 and 250,000 bird deaths a year from collisions — was also low, in part because of reliance on data from a decade ago. Buildings that have gone up since then have added more glass to the skyline, and migrating birds can be fooled by reflections of open sky or green space that they see in glass. "They don't perceive the reflection," said Partridge, who worked on the study with researchers from Fordham University. "The sun comes up, they need a place to find food — insects or seed — or just to rest before they take off the next day. When they're trying to do that, they encounter what we know is a reflection." "What's hard about this personally is when you see a bird hit glass, you often see it fly off, and you always hope it does OK," he said. The data used in the study, from the records of rehabilitation centers to which injured birds are taken, indicated that "not only does a significant percentage die, it takes at least a day for them to die. That underscores the lethality of these collisions." WEATHER Expect sunshine with temperatures in the high 80s. For tonight, partly cloudy with temperatures in the high 60s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect today. Suspended Thursday (Feast of the Assumption). The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Santos argues that publicity could taint his trial.
George Santos's trial is scheduled for next month. He was expelled from Congress in disgrace after his résumé turned out to be largely a fantasy, and he became a punchline for late-night hosts. Now George Santos's criminal fraud trial is weeks away, and on Tuesday he argued that all the publicity before he was expelled from the House could taint the proceeding. "Unlike typical high-profile cases, Santos's situation intertwines political controversy, complex financial crimes and unprecedented media scrutiny in a manner that creates extraordinary challenges for seating an impartial jury," his lawyers wrote in a pretrial filing. They included a tally of 1,500 articles about Santos from New York newspapers. How to select a jury was one of several pretrial disputes that Santos's lawyers and federal prosecutors wrestled with on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., where jury selection is scheduled to begin Sept. 9. The judge, Joanna Seybert, has kept the proceeding on a schedule that could lead to a verdict before Election Day. On Tuesday Santos's lawyers asked the judge to screen potential jurors with a 137-question written survey and to obscure their identities from the public, to ensure that the proceeding was fair. Seybert agreed to seat a jury whose identities will be known only to the judge and lawyers but said that she saw no reason to abandon the usual oral questioning. "One thing I've come across in my 35 years as a judge is: a written questionnaire, it offends people," she said. "And it's very inefficient." Santos could still avoid a trial by pleading guilty to the 23 charges he faces, which include money laundering and aggravated identity theft. The prosecutors are prepared to present evidence that he swindled donors, filed false campaign documents and faked unemployment to secure government checks. Prosecutors are seeking to introduce evidence that Mr. Santos lied about his education and employment history and made up the existence of a large family firm. They wrote that his fabricated political biography, first reported by The New York Times shortly after his election in 2022, was "inextricably intertwined" with the charges against him and was important to understanding "Santos's state of mind and intent." Buried in their filings, prosecutors disclosed for the first time that they had evidence that Mr. Santos "failed to file federal or state tax returns for the tax years 2020, 2021 and 2022." The indications are that the trial will get underway as scheduled. The court has called about 800 potential jurors, and the prosecutors have said they have as many as 30 possible witnesses. For his part, Santos pleaded not guilty again on Tuesday and remained uncharacteristically quiet as he shuffled in and out of the courthouse. METROPOLITAN DIARY His wife's hat
Dear Diary: I stepped into the elevator at my Upper East Side building. A friendly older neighbor was there carrying a hat and some tchotchkes. He was going to the basement, and I was going to the lobby. We exchanged small talk, and I asked him about the hat. His mood shifted from happy to looking like he was on the verge of tears. The hat had belonged to his wife, he said. She died some time ago, and he was finally throwing it away. I could feel his pain. It was a perfectly beautiful hat. I asked if I could have it. He handed it to me, and I put it on. "You have the perfect head for it," he said. I thanked him, and he smiled again. — Carmela Marasigan 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. Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: A pigeon for the High Line
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