Through the Children's Gate (16 page)

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 what 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 seven-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.”

The interior of a switch hotel on a Friday night in 2001 looks exactly like the interior of a Soho gallery on a Saturday afternoon circa 1985: the same tiny, cryptic lettering, the same inexplicable arrangements of racks and liquids and bolts and electric cells, the same pervasive air of sterility and airless ominousness. The battery boxes for the emergency generators, which are kept in bright side chapels near the dark switch rooms, are translucent tubs half filled with liquid, with copper buses above as shiny as pennies, and as deadly as power lines. (They are alive with electricity and hold no insulation.)

Most people who develop and rent out switch hotels are aware of the paradox they suggest, which is that the more virtual the world gets, the heavier the machines are to get it that way, and the more space they take up in Manhattan. “That was the one thing no one really thought about the New Economy,” James Somoza said. “How much power you would need to run it. A telecom hotel demands a hundred watts per square foot.” A normal office needs, at most, around six watts per square foot. “I mean, this is the Internet,” he said, standing among the chattering switches. “You're looking at it. It smells like an old Lionel train set. It weighs a ton. It sits on the floor on Hudson Street. Virtual reality depends on the strength of this floor.”

Late that night, the watchman was talking excitedly about the ID equipment, the New Economy, life among the switches. The night watchman in a switch hotel is actually more of a concierge and knows something about his guests. He continued his rounds.

“It's the only place in 2001 that looks like 2001,” the real estate man said, looking over the rows and rows of red blinking lights that fill the busy, empty building, and shaking his head.

* * *

N
ew York itself can sometimes seem to be a giant switch, taking in improbable immigrants and routing them out as ideal tenants. If the parrots recall our ethnic origins, the telecom machines are, from a real estate agent's point of view, the perfect renters of the future. They have everything: They are clean, intelligent, and reliable, don't own pets, and spend a lot of their own money on improvements. Each tenant spends as much as half a million dollars for generators and batteries, in case of a blackout, which, until recently, no one thought could ever happen. Now the men who own the switches wake up in their beds to contemplate all those things which were surely never meant to happen: the bankruptcy of a state power corporation; an earthquake on the Upper East Side; a fire in Flatbush; and a sudden flurry of green feathers.

T
hings in New York begin either six flights up or one flight down and then just vanish. All the wonders that Henry James wondered at a century ago—the Waldorf-Astoria, the Metropolitan Opera—are gone, and the wonders that he didn't wonder at but that we know enough to wonder at now—say, Albert Ryder's room in the Village—are gone, too. The past, even the immediate past, in New York is organized more or less like the cemetery in Venice: The skeletons are buried and then, after a dozen years, dug up and evicted and thrown onto a second island in a mixed-up heap of remembrance. New Yorkers live on that second island and sort through crazy heaps of memory to find a past. There are compensations for our indifference, though. Freed from its connection to its origins, the past has more carry. Nothing calls it home, and the picture or the poem or the piano part often just keeps on traveling, past the original audience and into the world, the way that, though the Polo Grounds are gone, Bobby Thomson's home run is still traveling over that fence.