Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  That these two hopes are irreconcilable—that, having flown, they won't fly home, save as we fly home now to our parents, preoccupied with our own lives and pitying theirs—does not alter the pathos of the hope. There's a lovely instance of it in Macbeth, of all places. “How will you live?” the mother asks a small boy with gentle mockery, and the boy answers, “As birds do, Mother.” It is the exchange of the generations, the exchange of the, well, the ages: The parents say, “How will you live?,” and the child says that it's really no problem. Birds eat, and so will I. (Jesus, whom Shakespeare was sampling, was on the side of the kids; the lilies of the field get by, sparrows get by, you'll get by.)

  We want our children to fly, and we want them to be tethered. We believe in freedom for them, but freedom within narrow channels of liberty, parent-tested and precut. We want them to fly, but we want them to fly as kites do, as Macy's balloons do, safely on the ends of strings, not freely, as birds do, Mother.

  Peter Pan opened at last. It was wonderful! The force of the story, the children longing to be free, the songs, the sword fights … a great show! Everyone was delighted. And the children flew! How they flew! Or, rather, how did they fly? Someone had had an inspiration: As the first act ended and the children approached the window with Peter, our Peter, leading, the lights dimmed and then flickered, and then there appeared a small-scale model of the London skyline, the steeple of Big Ben and the cupola of St. Paul's—and the flying children in their nightclothes around it. Above it, around it, leaning over it, they were … not flying, exactly, but flying enough, certainly running and dancing above the skyline of London. That surely counted, fulfilled the mission: It was dark, they were in clouds, and they were above the city. If it was not flying, it was indubitably flight.

  We all gathered around afterward for congratulations and pizza and photographs. It was only later on that one of the parents, in an e-mail we chose to ignore or delete, touched gently on another point: “We didn't really raise the children,” she wrote equably. “We simply lowered the heavens and told them they were flying, as we always do.”

  Our downstairs neighbors put their apartment on the market and fled to a loft downtown, the place where I, funnily enough, had wanted to be in the first place.

  Coming home from work on the same day that Peter Pan premiered and the children flew, at a time while they were still looking for a buyer, I actually found myself in the elevator with the man of the house: a decent, serious, sensitive-seeming man. I could not say anything; he could not say anything. We pressed our buttons, too-touchy five and too-noisy six, and then faced front, still as rocks, unmoving, unbreathing, unconnected, eyes fixed tight on the blinking lights of passing floors, as still as cat burglars holding their breath in the presence of a motion sensor alarm in a caper movie. He got off and I watched his herringbone tweed coat recede into the infinitude of apartments. I realized that together we had accomplished the hardest of all New York things. We had at last achieved a moment of perfect silence.

  Power and the Parrot

  The city of New York sits on a power grid. This is not the power grid one reads about in magazines, where rich men reassure one another of their existence by eating the same food in the same place at the same time. It is an honest-to-God grid, consisting of thousands of miles of cables and wires and pipes, all carrying electrons—organized into do-with-me-what-you-will currents and let-me-tell-you-what-I'm-thinking pulses—and it runs on just about every street in the city, below the ground in Manhattan and mostly aboveground outside it. Strange animals and objects erupt on the grid, and two of the strangest of these are the feral parakeets of Flatbush and the switch hotels of lower Manhattan. Feral parakeets are (probably) pet birds that have escaped and gone to live in the wild or, anyway, on the power poles of Flatbush. They are flourishing, and their presence has raised interesting ornithological, and even legal, issues, not to mention a hell of a racket in Flatbush. A switch hotel—often called a carrier or telecom hotel—is a great big building that eighteen months ago might have been filled with people and is now inhabited exclusively by switches, both servers and routers, who rent small locked rooms in which they exchange electrons, making dreamy machine love to other machines all night long, and sucking more power from the grid below than any tenants ever have before. Both the birds and the buildings resonate to the deepest, alligator-in-the-sewers myth of New York—to the notion that we have introduced strangers among us who not only have made themselves at home but have actually moved out on their own. The parakeets can be found in a couple of different places and approached in a couple of different ways. There is a large colony of them in Green-Wood Cemetery, but the densest concentration, according to Jen Uscher, a Columbia graduate student and bird lover who is working on a thesis about New York birds, is right on and around the campus of Brooklyn College, at the end of the number 2 line. The neighborhood there, apart from the parakeets, is an outer-borough mixture of long-established African-Americans, new East Indian immigrants (whose stores dominate the shopping streets), and Orthodox Jews (whose small shuls are set along the residential avenues).

  In the early morning, Jen often takes the number 2 out from Park Slope, where she lives, to look at the parakeets, and she is often with her boyfriend, Jason. Jen is a birder but a democratic one. As a girl in Fairfax, Virginia, she kept pigeons—real city pigeons. She is a small, intently pretty young woman who has the eager eyes, quick mind, and you'd-be-amazed-how-much-fun-the-subway-can-be avidity of the new New Yorker.

  As she and Jason turned down Avenue I toward Twenty-eighth Street one recent Friday morning, she said, “The parakeets were supposed to be eradicated in the early seventies, but here they are. Can't you hear them already?” First there was nothing, then a distant static-electricity crackle, and finally, an intense chattering, like a chorus line shaking maracas in a forties South American musical. The sound filled the quiet street of one-family houses with napkin front yards. “You hear them first, but they're not hard to see,” Jen went on. “These birds are so bold. They're real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude. I'm amazed they don't drive more people crazy. They're tough, social birds who live in colonies. Look right there!” She pointed to a flock of about ten feral parakeets sitting on the wires running between power poles.

  The term “feral parakeet” calls to mind a furtive escaped songbird, perky but vulnerable, its small heart fluttering, a hunted look in its eye. This image does not apply to the feral parakeets of Flatbush. What they got in Flatbush are not feral parakeets. What they got in Flatbush are wild parrots. (Technically, a parrot is just a big parakeet; there is no sharp line between the species.) Filling the trees and power lines along Avenue I are great big bright green pirate-ready parrots, with sharp, hooked beaks and blue wing feathers and raucous, jeering voices, tens and tens of tens of them, chattering like Mike and the Mad Dog after a Giants game. Their nests, of twigs and sticks, are immense hanging trulli, with multiple entrances—only slightly smaller than the spaces that are usually rented in the city to people like Jen and Jason for nine hundred dollars a month.

  “They usually build their nests on high-voltage power poles—there's something about power entrances—and if their nests catch on fire, they can cause outages,” Jason said. “There's even a website that offers solutions for infestations. The power companies regard them as a major pest.”

  Jen watched the birds fly back and forth, calling to one another from tree to tree, going in and out of the many entrances and exits to their communal nest. “They don't even look that cold, you know?” she added. “I used to keep parrots, and when they got loose, they were all fluffed up. I like to see pet birds that have gone wild. It's like they're getting the last laugh.”

  A Hasidic woman walked by. She was wearing sneakers and a shawl. She did not even look up at twelve big parrots that were cawing in her front yard. She stopped to read a poster, though, that someone had pasted on the power pole: JEWISH WOMEN, it read in part. FIND OUT the kabalist secrets of wha
t makes women tic. only at hillel this wed. 12–2 pm. free chinese food lunch!

  One parrot gave a shot to another with his beak—playfully, but he did it. “They're very aggressive,” Jen said solemnly. “There's one report that they killed a house sparrow in Pittsburgh.”

  The feral parakeets of Flatbush have given rise to a certain amount of affection (there's a playground in Flatbush decorated with a frieze of metal parrots), a certain amount of resentment (Con Ed, in particular, sees them as rats with wings in drag), and a lot of theorizing. The theorizing turns on the question of how big green parrots got loose in Brooklyn in the first place, why they don't mind the cold, and why every attempt to get rid of them has failed. Here is pretty much all that is known about the feral parakeets of Flatbush: They come from South America. They are a subtropical bird, native mostly to Argentina, genus and species Myiopsitta monachus. In the wild, they're usually called Monk parrots; pet owners refer to them as Quaker parrots. They are highly intelligent. They are good talkers—they have at least eleven different vocalizations—and excellent imitators. They are unique among the 330 or so species of parrots because they live in co-ops. Their nests can contain from one to six pairs, each with a separate chamber and entrance hole.

  The folk explanation of how they got here is that a crate carrying Monks broke open at Kennedy Airport in 1968, and the birds got free and started a local settlement. (They were first seen that year, and were first observed breeding in Valley Stream, Long Island, in 1971.) Among serious bird theorists, though, the crate-broke-open-at-Kennedy theory of the origins of the feral parakeets is about as well regarded as the vegetables-just-fell-in-the-pan theory of the origin of pasta primavera around the same time. One strong argument against the theory is that a colony of Monks exists in Hyde Park, in Chicago, near the campus of the University of Chicago—an even colder climate—and the Chicago parrots were also seen for the first time in the late sixties. This would seem to demand a crate-broke-open-at-O’Hare-right-around-then-too theory. The best guess seems to be that both colonies are the consequence of Monk escapees. (“I've never known a pet bird who didn't get away sooner or later, and they don't always come home,” Jen points out.)

  The Monk parrots, like so much that comes north to us, manage to be both illegal and expensive. At least ten states won't let you own them as pets, partly out of fear that they will go feral and drive the local birds crazy. The parrots are also said to carry psittacosis. At first New York State tried to kill them off, and by 1975 they were all thought to be dead. They were not. Although they may live outside the law, Monk parrots have a street value in the pet trade of around two hundred dollars a bird. It is said that one local pet-store owner tried to climb the poles of Flatbush to capture them and cash in but came away empty-handed and pecked.

  No one has a very good explanation of how the birds survive the harsh winters here. One theory, popular among people who have actually lived in Argentina, is that the climate in Argentina is not all that temperate. Another is that the parrots are adaptable. This theory is circular, of course—they survive because they're good at surviving—but then so are most theories about how immigrant groups thrive in New York. (Nobody thought that Koreans had a particular affinity for fruit, or, for that matter, the Irish for police work, before they came here.)

  A theory popular among pigeons is that the parrots survive because they're pushy. Jen and Jason like to watch the parrots around the playing field of Brooklyn College. They have nested high up in the light stanchions that circle the field; beneath the lights, on little platforms made for upkeep, are nests, and the parrots swoop down to the field to wander around and dis the sparrows. On this cold morning, some parrots had flown down to the ground and were out walking on the tired gray snow, searching for birdseed near a chain-link fence.

  “I've never seen that, parrots walking on snow,” Jen said.

  Three or four sparrows were feeding greedily with the parrots. Nearby, though, a couple of pigeons were giving them a sour, disconsolate, Archie Bunker, who-let-the-element-in? look.

  “Well, they're strangers, too,” Jen said. “All the common birds of New York are exotics. Pigeons, house sparrows, starlings … They all came from outside North America and got introduced to the continent.”

  “Maybe parrots are the next pigeons,” Jason said.

  “I've read lots of good scientific reasons why they can't be,” Jen said carefully. “For one thing, unlike pigeons, the Monk parakeets don't breed all year round. But people said they couldn't survive here, and they did, and people said they were eradicated in the seventies, and they weren't, and here they are in winter.”

  The bright green parrots were walking in the snow. They were chattering wildly, telling one another about the last thing that sparrow said in Pittsburgh. The two pigeons stood on the sidewalk and watched them, furious.

  I’ve never seen a mouse here, not once, never,” the night watchman was saying that night, up on the tenth floor of what was once a ware-house, at 325 Hudson Street. The windows of 325 Hudson are not dark at night, nor do they have the soulful checkerboard pattern—this one working late, this one gone home—of most office buildings late at night. The windows all glow faintly, and the building hums. This is because 325 Hudson is a switch hotel. Switch hotels, which real estate people prefer to call carrier hotels, are the cleanest buildings in New York—security-conscious, sterile, airtight, and animal-free. They are buildings that are filled with very heavy, very expensive, very power-thirsty telecom equipment, which allows computers to talk to one another on telephone lines. Switch hotels have been in existence for only about five years, but in the commercial real estate boom, they have boomed the loudest. There are at least seven switch hotels in Manhattan: 325 Hudson, 60 Hudson, 32 Avenue of the Americas, in Eighth Avenue, 636 Eleventh Avenue, 75 Broad Street, and 85 Tenth Avenue. They exist because behind the paper ballerinas of the virtual and the light-footed electronic lurk, unseen, the steadfast tin soldiers of heavy machinery. A switch hotel is the place where the tin soldiers and the paper ballerinas sleep together, and since each pair couples a little differently, it does not want the others to see exactly what it's doing. This is why a switch hotel is called a switch “hotel”—because the space in it is rented out to different companies, and each tenant jealously guards his privacy.

  Now the night watchman shone his flashlight along the floor. It caught a little kitchen that had been set up when the tenth floor was renovated for the “collocation” room of a company called Net2ooo. It had a blue terrazzo floor, brushed-aluminum cabinets. Inside the cabinets were tiny packets of instant coffee, lined up in perfect rows, untouched by human hand. “O brave new world,” a man from Cushman & Wakefield, which manages 325 Hudson Street, said in awe. Just to the right, behind a wall of glass, in a space that not long ago was a warehouse for Century 21, seven-foot racks of switches winked rapid little red lights at one another.

  Switches come in two kinds, servers and routers. Servers hold on to things—Web pages, most often—while routers take people who are searching for things on servers and send them somewhere else. Only the eye of love can tell a router from a server. The rooms that hold the switches are noisy, and they are hot. The hum of the giant air-conditioning units that are needed to cool them, even when there is a chill in the air and snow on the ground for parrots to walk on, is as loud as the subway. Big orange pipes filled with fiber-optic cable reach down to them. At the entrance to the bedroom where Nenooo keeps its routers and servers, which it rents out to high rollers for high prices, there is a handprint ID check, the kind you see in James Bond movies. You can get in to service the switches only if they recognize the touch of your hand. (Some of the rooms in a switch hotel use retinal identification: You have to look the switches sincerely in the eye to be allowed in.)

  Switch hotels are generally owned or managed by real estate developers, who convert warehouses that have high ceilings, strong floors, and ugly fronts. They need to have high ceilings to hold the sev
en-foot vertical switch racks and the ducts that run above them; strong floors to hold the heavy machinery; and ugly fronts, because if they didn't, they would be turned into lofts where people who work with switches live. Then the developer rents out space, at about sixty dollars a square foot, to telecom companies, which specialize in trafficking data and information, and which install the racks and equipment. Then the company rents out space on the machines to AOL or Yahoo! or whoever wants it. Each tenant—it is part of telecom-hotel etiquette—makes a point of keeping separate from the other tenants. In particular, each has an emergency two-megawatt generator on the roof, entirely its own, no sharing. “They want to be completely independent,” the real estate man said. “Everybody else in the building will go down, but we'll still be running.”

  It is often said that switch hotels are in Manhattan because it is necessary to reamplify fiber-optic signals every mile or so. The real reason that big telecom companies like to keep their switches in dark rooms in Manhattan is that they think it's sexy. “It's a marketing issue as much as anything,” said James Somoza, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield who is the Alice Mason of the switch hotel. “It's a fit-and-finish issue; they want to come and be able to see their equipment. They want to show their clients a nice facility. And there are back-haul-charges issues—the closer you are to the user, the cheaper it is. Also, having the switches in Manhattan makes it easier to have a self-healing loop.” A self-healing loop is one in which, if a section of the network breaks down, the electronic traffic reverses flow and runs in the opposite direction, bypassing the break. “But there's no absolute reason why the switches couldn't be kept in Long Island City or New Jersey. That people can afford Manhattan rents to keep machines in the dark—well, I guess it's just a sign of how much money there has been in telecoms in the past decade.”