#shakespeareforeveryone

The eyes are made from thick, green-tinted glass. Green LEDs were installed behind them in a 2007 restoration. Before then, incandescent bulbs sat in the owls’ skulls and projected as green through the glass, Don Bussolini, a capital projects director for the 34th Street Partnership, said.

How these green-eyed owls first came to be is stranger than most would imagine.

The two owls were once part of a flock of 22 that roosted along the roofline of the old New York Herald newspaper building, for which the square was named. The owls lit up on the hour with the ringing of a clock bell that was part of the building.” –Alex Vadkul, The New York Times, 2013 [1]

“The building was designed by Stanford White (of the leading firm McKim, Mead & White, architects of this Museum) on commission from the newspaper’s flamboyant publisher, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

Bennett also conceived the array of bronze roof sculptures, installed in 1895. The central figure group, commissioned in Paris from the French sculptor Antonin Jean Paul Carles (1851–1919), featured the Roman war goddess Minerva presiding over two hammer-wielding blacksmiths, who flank a large bell. The stately owls that edged the rest of the roofline were electrified so that their glass eyes glowed and blinked in time with the hammered toning of the hours. Bennett had a penchant for owls—the official emblem of the Herald—and collected both live and sculpted ones. Neither the designer nor the foundry responsible for these owls has yet been identified.

In 1939 (by which time the demolition of the Herald Building was nearly complete) Minerva, the bell-ringer group, and two of the four winged owls were installed in Herald Square as the James Gordon Bennett Memorial.” [2]

References