Because I am not 15 years old and this is not a Livejournal called "b e i n g  g r e e n" or something, I am not going to go into why posts have been so hard to come by of late around here. But obviously I apologize for that -- tough professional times for your blogger of late, although things are looking up somewhat there. If you want more info, you can check out my (imaginary) MySpace page, where I've upgraded my mood to "mischievous." Or something. Look, I'm here to write about green buildings and green real estate in New York City, you know? And I wasn't doing that, and now I'm doing that and while I know this sentence is hurtling towards the bloggily agrammatical already, I don't want to let it end without thanking Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times for making my job easier today with his lively, super-smart review of 100 Eleventh Avenue, Jean Nouvel's new LEED-certified condo building in Chelsea. Whew. That was a long sentence, and I am out of blogging shape. Let me... okay, just meet me in the next paragraph.

For awhile, Slate was satisfied just to be one of the more consistently engaging/occasionally enraging sites on the Internet -- well, satisfied to be that and to run dazzling features from one of the finest young writers of his generation. But in recent years, they've done a lot of innovating. Yes, there's still a lot of "what you think is bad is actually good" feature-ing, but there are also a ton of new spin-off blogs and aggregations and videos and such. Apps, presumably. (The young people are always talking about the apps) One such new addition to Slate is The Hive, in which Slate's readership's collective intelligence is brought to bear on a particular problem. This is made all the more interesting, and gbNYC-relevant, by the fact that the first subject The Hive is tackling is the greening of Slate writer Daniel Gross' Connecticut home.

There are hardcore real estate heads out there, probably, who are very aware of German commercial real estate company Jamestown Properties. All I can do is salute those people. For me, the Jamestown Properties of the world -- which the New York Times identifies as "an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta, has invested $12 billion in commercial properties in the United States since 1983 through private equity funds for German investors" -- are shadowy entities. (I can never quite tell what Britt Daniel is writing about, but the Spoon song "Who Makes Your Money" came to mind during my reading about Jamestown) In one of their rare turns in the gbNYC spotlight, though, Jamestown is acquitting itself well. Jamestown recently announced a commitment to do up to $10 million worth of green retrofits on its entire U.S. building portfolio. Given the size of Jamestown's $4 billion portfolio, that's a lot of buildings, with such major New York City properties as LEED Gold-hopeful 1250 Broadway and Chelsea Market among them.

To say that Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal "rolls through Red Hook, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope" is inaccurate. It doesn't even loll, really. The Gowanus Canal just sort of sprawls, slack and flat and brown and grease-slicked and awash in pesticides, PCBs and metals, across 1.8 miles in South Brooklyn. It is one of the most polluted waterways in the United States, which is a fact that essentially no one disputes. So in one sense, it's not a surprise to read that the Gowanus Canal was tagged a Superfund site by the EPA on Tuesday. If there has ever been a more deserving Superfund site it... well, it would've had to have been pretty freaking nightmarish. But while the Gowanus is certainly apocalyptic enough in its noxiousness to deserve the Superfund label, there were some in New York City -- including Mayor Bloomberg and several big real estate developers -- who fought against that designation.