James Harb NYC

What's not to like about a living wall? Where regular walls are (perhaps inevitably) drab and wall-like, a living wall is leafy and generally green-colored and alive. I barely remember what it was like to walk past The Colorado -- a condo building on the Upper East Side a couple blocks from my apartment -- before Pure Yoga moved into the space formerly known as The Space Behind The Gap back in 2008. But I remember vividly the experience of walking past the leafy, verdant facade provided by the living wall Pure Yoga installed. It was like a big vertical salad at first, and then was wild and blowy and lush during the summer months, and things like that stick in the memory. Sadly, though, that memory is about all that's left of the living wall at this point. Thanks to the inevitable Manhattan intrusion of a scaffolding bridge, Pure Yoga's living wall is looking kind of... well, dead.