My Portfolio
Jul 5, 2013
We pensioners in the Alabama Retirement System, we own us some serious real estate: hotels, golf courses, the tallest skyscraper on the Gulf of Mexico (outside of Houston), and believe it or not, the biggest office building in New York City.
55 Water Street in lower Manhattan, the big, boxy building in the picture above, the one with black and white vertical stripes–that's my building, all 52 stories of it. I rent out its 3.6 million square feet of office space, but I let the peregrine falcons nest for free on a ledge above the 14th story, near the bottom of those vertical black stripes.
A falcon couple named Jack and Diane built a nest there in 1993 and over the years raised 19 chicks up there on the 14th floor. Jack was a local boy, born and raised on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge; Diane moved to New York as an adult, from Connecticut. Sadly, in 2001, she was found trying to live on the street in Manhattan, suffering from severe arthritis in one of her wings.
Peregrine falcons mate for life, but after Diane was placed in a raptor center, Jack found himself a spring chicken, so to speak, a much younger falconess from upstate named Jill. Annual nesting continued at 55 Water Street through July 2011, when that spring's four hatchlings–Jordan, Shattuck, Hope, and Austin–successfully fledged and the family took off for ?? They have not yet returned.
But as long as I have anything to do with this building, I say falcons can come and nest here whenever they want, stay as long as they want, and if any of the paying tenants complain, they can just take their business elsewhere.