Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll find out why 20 trees that will be planted today matter to the Bronx Zoo. We’ll also get details about the weekend at Cornell University.
The Bronx Zoo is about to address a problem it discovered so long ago that Abdul, its Aldabra tortoise, hadn’t been born yet. At around 100, he is one of the zoo’s oldest residents. Even when Abdul was young, the American chestnut trees on the zoo’s 265-acre grounds were in trouble, the result of a blight that ultimately destroyed more than four billion trees across the country. The culprit was identified in 1904 — 20 or so years before Abdul was born — by the zoo’s chief forester at the time. Craig Piper, the current director of the zoo, told me that he did not know when the last American chestnut at the zoo died. History suggests it was probably when Abdul was a teenager. Today, in a moment that is sure to be freighted with meaning, the zoo will plant 20 new chestnut trees, the first it has brought in since the blight all but wiped out the species. “This is so much more than planting trees to us,” Piper told me last week, when we talked about why planting a mere 20 trees mattered. “Our overall mission is about conserving wildlife,” he said, “but to do that, we have to conserve the place.” These days, it’s hard to imagine why Henry David Thoreau referred to “boundless chestnut woods” in “Walden” or that the chestnuts roasting on an open fire in “The Christmas Song” were probably American chestnuts. But American chestnuts were, in fact, once a dominant species — “a defining part of our forests,” according to Lynn Bodnar Kelly, the executive director of the New York Restoration Project, a nonprofit that has worked for years to bring back American chestnuts.
Piper — who is also the interim executive vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo — said that American chestnuts had been “a primary food source for bears as they were bulking up for the wintertime, for deer, squirrels, chipmunks. The nuts were important forage for farm animals.” The wood was prized for cabinets and furniture as well as for boats, fences and telephone poles. Then the fungus arrived, probably with Asian chestnut trees that were imported, and spread with surprising speed. Hermann Merkel, the zoo’s chief forester in the early 1900s, wrote in 1905 that the disease had appeared “in a few scattered cases which occurred during the summer of 1904. Since that time, however, it has spread to such an extent that today it is no exaggeration to say that 98 percent of all the chestnut trees in the parks of this borough are infected.” The new chestnuts are hybrids that have been bred to resist the tree-killing fungus. The American Chestnut Foundation developed them using traditional breeding methods to generate trees with the blight resistance of Chinese chestnuts and the strength of the original American species. “We think it’s a good time to be planting trees in New York,” said Jason Smith, the director of northern Manhattan parks for the New York Restoration Project. The group is donating the hybrids to the zoo in partnership with the American Chestnut Foundation. His group, working with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, planted a grove in Highbridge Park in Upper Manhattan nearly 10 years ago. More recently, with the Brooklyn conservationist Bart Chezar and the American Chestnut Foundation, it has run the “1,000 Chestnut Challenge,” which makes chestnuts available to New Yorkers willing to plant them. For the zoo, the planting amounts to coming full circle. “The Bronx Zoo was a part of this whole tragic story,” Smith said. “I think they’re eager for a happy ending.” WEATHER Temperatures will rise near 69 today, as partly sunny skies make way for the sun. Expect clear skies tonight and a low near 50. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Oct. 12 (Indigenous Peoples’ Day). QUOTE OF THE DAY “All holy places. All places where I find quiet.” — Christopher Myers, on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He created a picture book that follows five young people who explore the city by bike in the dark. The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. At Cornell, a weekend of anger and confusion
At Cornell University, shaken by last week’s revelations about how the campus police and the local district attorney had handled a sophomore’s claim that she was raped at a fraternity party in 2024, the weekend was subdued. My colleague Maia Coleman writes that there was a sense of heaviness, and many students stayed away from large parties. “It felt like you had to take a break from it — the story has kind of been all-consuming,” said Hal Stokes, a senior. He and a friend went to a local hangout that serves food and coffee and operates a small bar in search of a low-key night. By the end of last week, there was a high-profile criminal investigation, with Letitia James, the state attorney general, overseeing it. Gov. Kathy Hochul assigned James to the case after denouncing the local district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, who decided not to bring charges in 2024. Documents obtained by The New York Times showed last week that a summary from the campus police forwarded to Van Houten did not contain the statement by the Cornell sophomore at the center of the case, who said she had been raped. As the week ended, many at Cornell voiced sympathy for her, or outrage. Others defended the men she accused in a civil lawsuit. They have denied the allegations. Some students wonder what’s next for Cornell — and whether a university that finds itself uncomfortably in the national spotlight will ever be the same. As Lewis Holland, a senior, put it, his voice shaking, “Cornell is now known for this.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Familiar frame
Dear Diary: About 20 years ago, I flew into New York from Houston for a conference followed by several fun days with a friend who worked in the city and lived in Mamaroneck. One night, we went to a flamenco show on St. Marks Place. The performances were amazing, and long. We had to hustle back to Grand Central to avoid missing the last train. Passing under a streetlight, I noticed a vintage 1970s bicycle chained to the fence outside a brownstone. The back of the big, padded seat looked familiar, as did the silhouette of the handlebars and, upon a close look, the distinctive double-down tubes. I called ahead to my friend to wait, and examined the blue-green paint, built-in headlamp and chrome fenders over the big wheels. I gripped the handlebars, straddled the heavy bike and placed my seat and feet into position. Long-dormant muscle memory flooded back. Finally, I peered at the seat post and confirmed my suspicion: a remnant of a City of Houston bicycle registration decal. It was the Skyrider Deluxe my parents had given me for Hanukkah in 1970. It had moved from California to Houston and had then most likely been bought by a collector when my mother sold the house. All those years later, my old queen of a bicycle made sure I saw it in Manhattan. I left a scrap of paper with my scribbled name, a quick story and a plea for the owner to contact me before ever selling. We did catch the train, and I called my father in Houston. “I’ll be damned,” is all he said. “I’ll be damned.” — Rachel Dvoretzky Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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