Beloved Birdhouses Cut Down Overnight On Upper East Side Street

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — An Upper East Side block is reeling from the theft of 19 colorful birdhouses which had decorated trees along East 81st Street for months this summer — until a person, armed with wirecutters, inexplicably cut them down and threw them in the garbage early Thursday morning.

"The whole block is in shock," said Jerry Howe, a resident of the Yorkville block between 1st and York avenues who began building the birdhouses this spring as a way of keeping himself busy after he lost work as an art director during the pandemic.

The project helped unify the block, serving as a form of "art therapy" during difficult times, said Howe, who would construct the birdhouses and then pass them on to neighbors to paint and hang. Passersby would stop to take photos, and parents would bring their children to look at the display.

One birdhouse, painted white with a red cross, paid tribute to first responders working during the pandemic. Another, styled as food truck, sat outside the Gracie Mews Diner, where owners said it helped bring in customers each day.

It was there, while walking his dog outside the diner Thursday morning, that Howe made the discovery: the birdhouse was gone. So was all but one of the others.

Members of the Yorkville 81 Block Association sprung into action, sending "hundreds of emails" trying to figure out what happened, Howe said. Their search yielded video surveillance footage, appearing to show a woman wearing flip-flops cutting the birdhouses down shortly after midnight Thursday and dropping them into a curbside garbage can, where they were collected by the city the following morning.

Justin Shea, a resident and cofounder of the block association, planned to file a police report Friday morning at the NYPD's 19th Precinct, but was told the situation was a civil matter. His only recourse would be to sue the culprit, if the association manages to identify her — and Shea suspects she is a neighborhood resident, given the swiftness of the act.

Shea said he and other neighbors have struggled to imagine a possible motive.

"There was nothing remotely biased or skewed about them in any way," he said of the birdhouses. "The most political theme was that we thanked the first responders."

Howe said he's uncertain how to move forward — it seems risky to rebuild and rehang the birdhouses, given that the same culprit could cut them down again.

In any case, he deemed the project a success, noting he'd spoken to more neighbors in the past few months than in the previous 28 years he's lived on the block.

"If she was trying to separate us, if anything, it brought us together," Howe said.