Photo by Scott Enman
Bushwick’s “Bird Man” Barely Rustled After an Unbelievably Shitty Week
Within mere days, he was shot in the leg and lost one of his coops. And yet, the neighborhood icon, known to some locals as "The Mayor of Maria Hernandez," claims he's at "100 percent"
The residents of the few blocks surrounding Maria Hernandez Park wake up most mornings to the siren of aughts-rock anthems, like “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence or occasionally songs by Linkin Park or Thirty Seconds to Mars, blaring from a club-sized speaker. It is Bushwick’s de facto alarm clock, and it is powered by Juan Rodriguez, a neighborhood fixture who can be found chopping it up with locals and playing dominoes in the park late into the night on any given evening.
After crowing the park back to life, Rodriguez heads up to a residential building on Starr Street, where he’s spent years tending to pigeons on its roof with his partner Alberto, earning him, amongst myriad titles and designations, a reputation as Bushwick’s “bird man.” In exchange for free use of the rooftops, they served as implied superintendents for the buildings. Their duties included fixing broken appliances, taking out the trash, and delivering packages to tenants’ doors. Arrangements like this aren’t rare in Bushwick. “All the tenants know me, and they know I make sure their package gets to them,” Rodriguez told Brooklyn Magazine when we caught up with him in the park last Tuesday. “When they come out of work, they walk in the hallway, and they’re like, ‘Oh, Tree was here. The hallway’s clean.’ I used to clean, sweep, and mop every day.”
From the dog days of summer through the dead of winter, Rodriguez is usually found with his rooftop flock. He feeds them, releases them, and, like a choreographer, directs their movements with whistles and flags, sending them soaring into the sky to circle overhead before returning to roost. It’s a simple enough life that’s embedded him in the community and calendars of the neighborhood, where he’s alternately known to locals as “The Mayor of Maria Hernandez” or just “Tree.”
“He’s one of those Bushwick faces that you just see all the time,” said Hunter Boone, a 36-year-old tenants’ rights activist and video producer who has lived in the area for 11 years. “He’s a very nice guy, a colorful local, but I’ve heard he lives a pretty hard life.”
That week was an especially difficult one for Rodriguez. At 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, he was shot in the left leg outside of 202 Starr Street. Officers investigating an unrelated incident in the park rushed to help him, as emergency vehicles filled the area and helicopters circled overhead. “I had my headphones in and assumed it was fireworks,” said Boone, who was steps away from the incident. “There were five loud bangs, and I turned around, and all of these high school kids were running toward the park. I look around, and two cops are helping Tree on the ground. One officer was tapping his face, being like, ‘Stay with us. You’re going to be OK.’ It felt like he was just an innocent bystander.” The investigation is ongoing, with no arrests made yet, but just four days later, Rodriguez, still using a cane to walk around, said his leg was “100 percent,” and by Thursday the cane was gone.
Photo by Scott Enman
However, just days after being shot a block over from his terrestrial stomping grounds, Rodriguez returned to the roof only to find yet another tragedy to endure: a coop was in the middle of being dismantled by a waste collection crew.
Moshe Samouha, the building’s landlord, said the coop regrettably had to be removed so he could repair a leak that was damaging two apartments. Samouha told us he had given Rodriguez an opportunity to fix the problem, yet the leak persisted. But Rodriguez offered a different account: that he was being pushed out despite years of operating at the building, questioning whether Samouha would actually permit them to rebuild the coop. “I’ve been there for six years, taking care of their building, shoveling, fixing sinks, fixing toilets,” Rodriguez said, noting that some of his belongings had also gone missing from a rooftop shed. “They had a bad guy come and harass all the tenants. Who spooks him away? I did. Now they come after me.”
“Tree’s a nice guy,” Samouha said. “When I bought the building more than 20 years ago, the birds were already there. I loved them, and I used to go up and play with them. My tenants love the birds, too. But the building is deteriorating. I had no choice but to remove the coop so I could fix the roof. It cost me a lot of money, and I gave them time to move the birds. Once I fix the roof, I have no problem with them putting their coop back.”
On Wednesday, police were called to the building as tensions boiled over, with Rodriguez screaming from the rooftop as he rifled through his personal items and the waste removal workers claiming they felt threatened. Cops told the crew to leave for the day, saying work could not continue until the dispute between Rodriguez and Samouha was resolved. By Thursday, the crew had returned.
Eydie Saleh, a tenant at 92 Starr since 2012, said tenants love the birds but acknowledged that allowing people who don’t live in the building to maintain rooftop coops comes with some risks, particularly when it comes to roof access and building maintenance. “We like Tree,” Saleh said. “We just want the leak to stop. That’s it. There’s no agenda or motive other than that. I’ve been an advocate for Tree for many years. I’ve protected him many times. I’m a lawyer; I really care about him. He takes care of the place. It’s his peace. It keeps him out of trouble, but he has to properly take care of the property. There were piles of trash, tons of rats, and now the leak.”
Photo by Scott Enman
While his other coop next door remains intact, the dispute over Rodriguez’s pigeons offers a glimpse at the contrast between old and new Bushwick, where longtime residents and traditions coexist with a neighborhood increasingly reshaped by gentrification. Along the L line, particularly around the Jefferson Street station, new developments and boutique businesses have sprung up in recent years, yet Rodriguez’s rooftop pigeon enclave remains a reminder of earlier days, when these types of unconventional negotiations between New York tenants, landlords, and integral members of the community were commonplace.
Carl Nowak, a 31-year-old who lived in the neighborhood for 10 years before moving to Los Angeles, said she was saddened to hear that Rodriguez’s coop had been torn down. Her great-grandfather raced pigeons, giving the coops a personal significance. Like the squirrels in Maria Hernandez Park, Bushwick’s pigeons, she said, have become part of the neighborhood’s character.
“When I was in lockdown, I was living in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window,” she said. “In Bushwick, the pigeons are really well taken care of because they’re people’s pets. They are loved so much. I would go to Maria Hernandez and feed them, and I’ve had them in my hands like I was fucking Snow White.” It was also during lockdown that Nowak first became aware of Rodriguez’s raucous morning rituals in the park, likely heard clearer than ever as an eerie quiet captured the city. Naturally, she sent dispatches to friends who were shipping out, sharing videos of Rodriguez carrying his speaker or pulling it in a red Radio Flyer wagon with his daughter by his side. “It was a cute way to keep them a part of the neighborhood, for them to have a piece of home,” she said.
We returned to the park on Monday afternoon to check up on Rodriguez, relieved to find a man of many names and trades back at it, roaming with his speaker, and locals calling out to him as he passed by. He pounded his chest and flashed a peace sign when we made eye contact, not even a limp in sight.
