Feral Monument

New York City’s pigeons have long nested in the space between love and hate. We chase them away, complain about where they shit, fret about the diseases they carry. We mock how they puff their iridescent chests and the emptiness of their amber gazes. We’re disarmed by the doltish quirk of their heads, their persistent pecking at the sidewalk, and the rumble of their coos. We also scatter crumbs of food for them to scavenge, band together to rescue wounded hatchlings, and watch their flocks pass over the skyline on their own urban commutes. We’ve labeled them as pests, trespassers, and vandals. When we don’t love or hate them, we simply ignore them.

Staring down the northbound traffic of Tenth Avenue, however, is one pigeon no one can ignore. As you approach Iván Argote’s Dinosaur (2024) from the street below, or from the elevated arteries of the High Line’s Spur, the colossal pigeon seems like a trick of the eye. Perched on a stone pedestal, curiously noble, it appears enframed rather than devoured by the surrounding urban vista of Hudson Yards’ glass towers and Chelsea’s industrial warehouses. The pigeon’s monumental, hyperrealistic body — a steel skeleton encased in durable cast and painted aluminum — magnifies details we rarely notice: gentle gradations of gray and silver feathers, the raptor-like hook of its talons, the soft curve of its puffed chest and sloping head. Loitering tourists and hurried locals alike acknowledge Dinosaur’s peculiar totality with confused double takes, amused chuckles, gasps of awe, and, of course, many selfies.

The work’s title alludes both to the sculpture’s 16-foot stature (similar in height, Argote notes, to a Tyrannosaurus rex) and to the bird’s million-year-old reptilian ancestry. Humanity’s earliest entanglements with pigeons can be traced back to the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean Basin 10,000 years ago. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts that document the pigeon’s evolution from feral to domesticated companion and food source. In North America, the native passenger pigeon once dominated the skies with populations in the billions. People of the Seneca Nation dubbed them jah’gowa, or “big bread” for the sustenance they provided. European colonists introduced new domestic breeds and destroyed traditional habitats. Eventually, the overconsumption of squab drove the local pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) to extinction. Eurasian pigeons (Columba livia) escaped captivity and began to settle alongside us, roosting on building ledges and windowsills that mimicked the steep cliffside shelters of their ancestors.

In the middle of the 20th century, the rooftops of Lower East Side tenements were sites for pigeon racing and breeding coops. The birds’ reputation took a nosedive in the 1960s when local leaders condemned them as unsanitary vectors of disease and christened them with the epithet “rats with wings.” Today, however, ornithologists increasingly recognize the pigeon’s importance in urban ecosystems: they feed predatory birds, clean waste, consume harmful insects, and facilitate pollination and seed dispersal among plant and tree populations otherwise isolated by city blocks. The saga of the pigeon is such: we captured them, brought them into our communities, utilized them as food, pets, and messengers, abandoned them when they were no longer useful to us, and then antagonized their attempts at mutualistic companionship. Dinosaur marks an overdue reckoning with the pigeon’s unjust plight, raising up these mundane fixtures of our streets and skylines as worthy of our protection and attention.

The fourth commission in the High Line’s Plinth series, Dinosaur succeeds works by Simone Leigh, Sam Durant, and Pamela Rosenkranz that grappled with themes of visibility and invisibility across bodies, beings, and built environments. Argote’s subversive acts of memorialization — dressing Spanish conquistador statues with Indigenous ponchos, an ‘anti-monument’ to Christopher Columbus, toppled, decaying, and consumed by overgrown invasive and native plants — unsettle our expectations for commemoration in our public spaces. Dinosaur’s upended human-animal power dynamics are a catalyst for excavating histories of migration, adaptation, abandonment, and resilience from the socioecological margins.

Dinosaur also serves as a fitting metaphor for the High Line’s complicated legacy of preservation. Once an eyesore, the elevated railway was rescued from demolition by those who found beauty in its neglected state. Since its restoration and reopening as a park, the High Line has endured criticism as an artwashing engine paving the way for the luxury real estate development that surrounds it. Like Argote’s efforts to rehabilitate the New York City pigeon’s social standing, the Plinth feels like an attempt to re-establish the High Line’s reputation as a hub for people to stop, gather, and consider the landscape around them.

Perhaps I need to decenter my own anthropocentric gripes with Dinosaur’s location. After all, the High Line is one of the few places in this section of Manhattan that isn’t lined with architectures hostile to the pigeon’s existence: anti-roosting spikes, wire netting, shock systems, sonic deterrents. Even if signs around the sculpture urge visitors, “DON’T FEED THE PIGEON / DO FEED THE PARK!, ” Dinosaur can’t be scared away. It looms over the street with an unruly ferocity, confronting the traffic that usually sends its skittish kin scattering. Argote’s bold act of heroicization seems effective. I don’t see anyone daring to shoo away the few pigeons that have come to peck at the plaza’s melting snow.

In late January, I observe the statue against a backdrop of national announcements of mass deportation and a fresh wave of migrant shelter closures — including the Stewart Hotel on nearby 31st Street and Seventh Avenue — that bring sudden evictions and forced relocations to the city’s outskirts. As I try to take in all of Dinosaur’s feral glory, my phone won’t stop vibrating in my coat pocket. Friends send me guides for reporting detentions and raids, multilingual “Know Your Rights” resources to distribute in my networks, mutual aid groups crowdsourcing for legal assistance and warm winter clothes for New York City’s newest and most vulnerable residents. Standing there, I am reminded that Columba livia was once an immigrant too. Transplanted, forced to endure and adapt to social marginalization, stereotyping, and exploitation, the pigeon has still made the city home.

Even if its satirical monumentality risks reducing eco-cultural nuance to meme-worthy photo op, Dinosaur manages to stand its critical ground. Pigeons are vital bellwethers for our urban futures. Some estimate that nearly nine million of them now live in the five boroughs — approximately one pigeon for every New Yorker. Taking pigeons up once more as messengers and witnesses, Argote’s Dinosaur stands as a proud homage to some of New York City’s oldest immigrants. Beyond humorous celebration of our overlooked neighbors, we can also understand Dinosaur as a homing device that can guide us towards an urgent multispecies and multicultural solidarity. Resisting the urge to shoo away a feathered friend that lands too close to the base of the monument, my phone still buzzing incessantly, I recall a musing from Rosemary Mosco’s A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: “It’s a hard world. Sometimes you just need to look at a soft bird.”