The Governors Island season is upon us and new this year: sheep! A family of five — Flour, Sam, Evening, Chad and Philip Aries — will spend the next four to five months on the island to help control invasive plant species in the Hammock Grove by eating them. Turns out they prefer those particular plants to the ones the park wants to keep alive. (Back in the ’80s, my Italian father-in-law once brought in a few sheep to mow his lawn. Worked great.)
There’s also a new mural in the waiting room (detail above) in the Battery Maritime Building — Not for Nutten, by Duke Riley. It’s a conceptual riff on ships in a bottle, but with the sad angle on single-use plastic bottles that are clogging our oceans. And Urban Archive has assembled a group of historical photos that can be used as a self-guided walking tour starting near Pier 102. And of course there are a dozen other programs.
More TK when I can get out there with my laptop and use an adirondack chair as an office.
Tickets can be reserved now. (Tickets are $3; residents of NYCHA housing, kids, seniors, military servicemembers, IDNYC holders and Governors Island members ride for free.) The island will be open through October 31; hours are 10a to 6p on weekdays and 10a to 7p on weekends.
And as a sidebar, this may be the last time there were sheep on the island, found while toggling around: “The parade ground of Governors Island became a tranquil sheep meadow yesterday as more than, 3,000 lambs, unaware of their impending fate in the slaughter house, grazed peacefully over the field until a relief boat sent to rescue them from a forced landing arrived. The float on which they were being transported to the butcher had been disabled by a collision with the steam trawler Osprey and had put in at the army base just in time to save the flock.” —The New York Times, Oct. 6, 1928
Loving the sheep.