After 27 years of operating Webster Hall, the Ballinger family is selling the 131-year-old Manhattan concert hall to AEG Presents and Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment. The two firms will assume operating rights, assets and the long-term lease from building owner Unity Gallega while Bowery Presents will take over booking and talent buying.
Brett Yormark, chief executive of Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment, told The Post: “We’re going to preserve what Webster Hall means to the consumers and artists, but we will contemporize it.” Expect food and beverage upgrades, with possible bathroom enhancements.
Webster Hall has hosted a wide range of parties and meeting over its 129-year-old history. In its early years it “acquired a reputation as a center of leftist, socialist, anarchist, and union political activity”, according to a January 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article.
The hawk population in Manhattan has grown from only three known pairs in 2006 to 14 or 15 today, said Rob Mastrianni, a New York City Urban Park Ranger.
It is unclear why raptors are becoming more common in Manhattan, said Debra Kriensky, a conservation biologist at New York City Audubon. Possible explanations include the abundance of food—rats, squirrels and pigeons—and city efforts to limit the use of rat poison, which can kill hawks.
Whatever the reason, the presence of more hawks heralds changes in the relationship between New Yorkers and nature. Combined with sightings of coyotes, deer, and even eagles prowling city neighborhoods, hawk spottings are a reminder that urban areas can include a surprising amount of wildlife.
Research shows hawks need about two square miles of exclusive territory, but New York City’s hawks are living as close as five blocks from each other, said Bobby Horvath, a city firefighter who rehabilitates injured hawks from New York City in his home in South Massapequa on Long Island. “I guess the red-tailed hawks haven’t read that part of the textbook.”
With hawks already defying density predictions, it is unclear how long the urban population boom will continue.
The main danger hawks face in New York is eating rats that have been poisoned by rodenticide. But since the city has curtailed rat poison use in parks near known hawk nests, New Yorkers may continue to be startled by urban wildlife sightings.
