I researched this last year and still had the info on my computer:
From the NY Times in 2001:
Maria Terrone was crossing 75th Street at 37th Avenue recently when she came across an arctic bird on a boulder. "It seemed kind of incongruous," she said. "Why is there a penguin in Jackson Heights? "
She figured the penguin, which is three feet tall and made of bronze, might have been placed there by the city's Parks Department because it was standing on a median newly planted with trees and shrubs. But there was no sign explaining its presence in the middle of a busy street.
As it turns out, a window from City Councilman John D. Sabini's office looks out onto the penguin. He was tired of seeing drivers whip U-turns across the street's low-rise concrete divider. So he asked the Parks Department, which has jurisdiction over a three-block stretch of the median between 37th Avenue and Broadway, to install a raised bed of plantings to beautify the area and keep drivers in line.
Parks complied. The bird was Commissioner Henry J. Stern's embellishment. He wanted an animal presence on the median but a species that would complement the neighborhood. He knew that many Argentine immigrants were in the area, so he picked the penguin, which is known to waddle pompously through the southern part of that country.
Mr. Stern had planned to install a flamingo sculpture on the other end of the three-block median, at 75th Street and Broadway, but feared that a car might mangle its slender leg. So he put in another penguin.
When told of the commissioner's reasoning, Mr. Sabini belly-laughed. "What was the flamingo for?" he asked. "To satisfy the local Floridians?"
Ms. Terrone worried that the water-loving penguins might have landed in a hostile clime. "There's not a lake or a pond in Jackson Heights," she said.
