I’ll start with an apology. I’m about to tell you a story about pigeons and buildings—particularly New York City buildings—and once you’re done, you may not see those buildings in the same light ever again.
This won’t be news to anyone, but New York City has a pigeon problem. And what pigeons like to do best is roost on building facades. This results in a constellation of guano (a more elegant word for poop), which can stain and, due to its acidity, eat away at stone facades. But since 1989, one company has single-handedly pigeon-proofed almost every important building in the city.
It’s often said that good design goes unnoticed: It serves its function quietly, without drawing much attention to itself. This is particularly true when it comes to pigeon-proofing. To this day, spikes remain the most common form of bird deterrence, but Birdmaster’s main tool (yes, the company is called Birdmaster) is much more subtle. The company uses special, tightly woven netting stretched so tight you can’t really see it—unless you know to look. Birdmaster identifies where pigeons roost the most (or where they’re likely to), then wraps those potential “bird seats” in netting that matches the color of the building.
Whose turf?
Historical buildings are particularly prone to pigeon roosting. Compared to their modern counterparts, these buildings boast a panoply of three-dimensional curlicues, pilasters, arches, and ledges that give them charm, character, and plenty of landing spots for pigeons.
The problem is that pigeons are extremely territorial: Once they build a nest somewhere on a building, they consider that building home for generations to come. “These birds protect their site, their mission in life is to create poop and babies,” says John Pace, who emigrated from the U.K. in 1989 and founded Birdmaster that year. Pigeons evolved from the rock dove, which, as the name suggests, lived on rocky coastal cliffs. “We just happen to build these beautiful edifices that look like cliffs,” he says.
Take the Morgan Library. The building was commissioned by J.P. Morgan himself and built by McKim, Mead & White (who also designed the Brooklyn Museum and the Boston Public Library). It opened in 1906, on the corner of Madison Avenue and 36th Street—and because pigeons are so territorial, Pace says those that live there today are likely direct descendants of those who lived there in the 1900s.
Breaking the habit
But the pigeons haven’t lived there for about two years, when Pace first put up his netting as part of the restoration. “They’ll have places where they like to stay warm and dry and out of the wind and the rain,” says Pace. “Part of our skill is recognizing those areas and birdproofing them.” (He calls this process “breaking the habit.”)
Unlike me, my friend didn’t know what to look for, so it took her much longer to spot the net. This, of course, is by design. “The whole essence of bird-proofing is that we make it so the average person doesn’t see,” says Pace. “If you go to St Patrick’s Cathedral [in Midtown Manhattan], there’s a big bronze transom arch with a statuary on it and that entire thing is covered with netting, but because your brain isn’t expecting to see it, you don’t see it.”
‘Once you see it, you can’t unsee it’
Right about now seems like a good time to bring up the fact that there’s a bit of a netting controversy in the architecture sphere. Pace is the first to acknowledge that this form of bird deterrence has never been a favorite among architects. He recalls a recent Zoom meeting with an architect restoring the Treasury Building in D.C, who declared, “There’s going to be no netting on this building.” (Eventually, there was.)
“I was one of the people that needed to be convinced,” says Frank J. Prial Jr., a principal at Beyer Blinder Belle. “[McKim, Mead & White] were very careful in the way they modeled the stone, so if you cover it up with netting, it’ll look like a Christo project,” he says, only partially in jest. Encouraged by a colleague who’d worked with Pace before, Prial was quickly convinced that Birdmaster’s netting was the way to go. “[Pace] has learned to think like an architect,” he says. “The netting needs to speak to the building, follow the lines of the building.”
Broadly speaking, of course, netting is far from perfect. As Prial puts it: “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” This might explain why the Met, according to Pace, “doesn’t want everybody to know the building has a net on it.” But as far as I’m concerned, these nets, and the skill with which they’re applied, may be one of the stealthiest pieces of design ever created. Why shouldn’t that be celebrated?
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