As the Holiday Train Show ramps up, we’ll be highlighting the cultural landmarks of New York City that have come to inspire our many miniatures, as well as the established organizations behind each one. It’s an opportunity for our readers to not only come away with a fresh understanding of the beautiful architecture in our city, but of the important institutions that have helped to create our rich cultural landscape.

What would become the world-renowned Jewish Museum did not begin as such. C.P.H. Gilbert, a prominent New York architect of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, designed this building as a private home for the family of Felix Warburg in 1908. Gilbert’s specialty was designing grand, chateau-style houses on Fifth Avenue for wealthy New York patrons like investment bankers Warburg and Otto Kahn, and entrepreneur Frank Woolworth.

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Debbie Becker has been The New York Botanical Garden’s resident bird expert for over 25 years, and continues to lead her popular Bird Walks on Saturday mornings throughout much of the year.

Northern Saw-whet Owl

Each year, The Audubon Society holds a Christmas Bird Count (CBC) in which bird watchers throughout the country volunteer to count birds in a specified area, setting out at dawn and closing their notebooks at dusk. This year in the Bronx, birders will bring their binoculars to The New York Botanical Garden, Van Cortlandt Park, Pelham Bay Park, City Island, Bronx Park East and other local parks and coastal areas. Based on the counts they come up with for each bird species seen, tallies will be pooled to represent each of the five boroughs.

The purpose of the final count determines the climate of the bird population, as species representation can fluctuate due to disease, weather, habitat destruction, and food supply. At the NYBG in particular, there have been some remarkable numbers observed in the last 10 years. For example, the population of American Crows at the Garden was once counted at over 500. Today, we are lucky to see just one or two. This is owed to the arrival of the West Nile Virus, which has decimated crow populations in our area.

Tufted Titmouse

Likewise, declines among the Tufted Titmouse, Chickadees, and the House Finch have struck hard. Populations of these small visitors were explosive in the 1990s, but conjunctivitis–an inflammatory eye disease–has caused them to dwindle since the late 2000s. In this case, however, the cause is more easily tackled; dirty bird feeders quickly pass the disease from bird to bird, so cleaning your feeders with soapy water each week can prevent the epidemic from spreading. Already, numbers of these bird species are slowly rebounding.

Then there are the new species which have been observed, those we hope will stick around long enough to be counted. Red- and White-winged Crossbills, rarities to the NYC area, have been observed around the NYBG and throughout many other locations in the city. Weather and food-related problems further north have driven these pine cone feeders south and into our vicinity.
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Photo by Patricia Gonzalez