In Each Other’s Way: The Upper West Side’s Wild Side and Us

By Yvonne Vávra

If I had a run-in with a snake on an Upper West Side street, that might very well be the last thing I’d see, because chances are I’d drop dead from fear on the spot. It’s some consolation that even Pier Bueno, the construction superintendent who found the snake at his workplace at 95th and West End Avenue last week—and whom I imagine to be an indestructible New York man who can lift anything, fix anything, and has probably seen everything—found the encounter “pretty scary.”

The snake didn’t seem to be a fan of Bueno either, as it quickly escaped into a scaffolding pipe. Excellent snake real estate. It probably wasn’t too happy about being forced out when police officers started banging on the pipe, flushing it with water, and poking inside with a brush. Now it’s living in a shelter, waiting for its new forever family, and having to answer to the name the shelter gave it: Pillow. The indignity.

Pillow is not the first snake of the Upper West Side. Just two summers ago, residents spotted a 5-foot-long boa constrictor making its way into a basement apartment at 140 West 87th Street. The tenant later found it in the kitchen sink, from which it escaped onto a fence outside, where police eventually caught it. Animal Control soon found a new upstate home for Severus. Now that’s a name! I can’t help feeling sorry for our construction-site snake, who was apparently judged to be more of a Pillow.

We have a rather narrow definition of who counts as an Upper West Sider. Humans? Obviously. Rats? Unfortunately. Roaches, raccoons, pigeons? Yes, yes, yes, they all belong. Turtles, hawks, and Romeo and Juliet, our resident coyote couple in Central Park? Definitely. But a snake?

Actually, Pillow is very much one of us. In fact, its family was here long before we built our little concrete jungle. The Northern water snake, as the shelter identified it, can be found in or near water all over New York State and is said to be quite an aggressive and defensive creature. New Yorker to a fault. It usually enjoys a diet of frogs and fish, so maybe it was on its way east to The Shell Seafood Kitchen on 91st and Amsterdam. Their raw bar might be able to hold a candle to the Hudson.

We might see more of Pillow’s friends as we keep changing the places they call home, sometimes disturbing them enough to send them wandering into places where we don’t expect to find them. But I, for one—sorry, Severus—draw the line at boa constrictors.

And at jungle cats.

In the summer of 2013, an Upper West Sider on West 72nd Street filed a 311 report about a neighbor who was supposedly living with two jungle cats in a studio apartment. We don’t know whether the report was justified. The building’s landlord, at least, said he had never received any complaints about jungle animals. Was this a false accusation? Even if it was, there was still one wild character in the story.

Another wild cat who was definitely living the sweet Upper West Side life was opera star Lily Pons’s pet jaguar, Ita (which some later accounts identified as an ocelot). In the 1930s, they lived at 55 Central Park West, on the corner of 66th Street, and were inseparable. But apartment living with a growing jaguar? Not so easy. Eventually, the opera singer decided to donate Ita to the New York Zoological Gardens (now the Bronx Zoo), taking her there herself, with Ita riding in the passenger seat next to the chauffeur.

“Lily Pons, unfeignedly sad, said farewell yesterday to yellow-eyed Ita, the pet Brazilian jaguar that had been her constant companion, on tour and at home, for nineteen months,” reported The New York Times on March 16, 1934. When the jaguar scratched the diva after leaping from her hands at the zoo, Pons said, “It is nothing. Poor Ita is nervous. She is sweet.”

Most of the wildlife around us is much easier to miss than a jaguar in the front seat of a car or a snake on a sidewalk. But the creatures that live among us without us even noticing them or knowing anything about them might be the most fascinating of all.

Right now, scientists are trying to find out just how many undiscovered species might be living in New York City. They’ve set up traps in Central Park to collect insects and are sending their DNA to a lab for analysis. Last week, they shared an update: In just one month, they collected 12,000 specimens. And already, many of them are turning up something extraordinary: their genetic IDs don’t match any of the millions of IDs researchers have already catalogued from animals around the world. That could mean we have some new species on our hands—or at least species that are unknown to science.

Just as unknown, still, is what Pillow was doing on 95th Street. Maybe it left the Hudson to visit its fellow reptiles at the Dinosaur Playground on 96th and Riverside, got lured by the tuna melt at SoHa Gourmet Marketplace on 96th and West End, and then decided to see what Pier Bueno and his construction site were all about. With all the torrential rain we’ve had this summer, who can blame Pillow for getting confused about where the water is? And we can hardly blame it for getting in our way, either. We’re in each other’s way. That’s just what it’s like to be New York neighbors.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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