Nikola Tesla, Trusted Friend of the Pigeons

Apropos eating places, there is one dining room in the open on Fifth avenue which attracts much attention at the daily noon hour when it doesn’t rain. It is in front of the Public Library, which flanks the Avenue from Fortieth to Forty-second street. Here during the noon hour many visitors come to the Library, and on fine days the benches are filled in the little parks on either side of the sardonic and supercilious lions.

And here come, too, each day, hundreds of pigeons for their lunch. Each day there are spread along the rails by the sides of the grinning stone lions quantities of grain: and kind-hearted men and kind-hearted women come too with little bags of grain or bread and cake crumbs, which they feed to the birds on the walks.

Pigeons there are in as many colors as there are costumes among the shoppers along the avenue — pink and blue and black with green trimmings, white and black and brown — a gorgeous rainbow cloud they make as they swoop down from the high eaves of the Library and alight daintily on their lunch. Nor are they a whit disturbed by the shop girls who occupy the benches and munch their lunch or chocolate and devour their romances or thrill to the descriptions of the lives of their favorite movie heroes.

Nikola Tesla, the inventor, is a frequent visitor to the grounds and is a true and trusted friend of the pigeons. They see him from afar and aloft and sail down to him. They gather on his head, his arms and shoulders and pick from his fingers the lunch he proffers them, and all are happy.