Hitting the Wall: Upper East Side Yoga Studio's Green Wall Losing Battle With Scaffolding

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.

At The Real Deal, James Gardner discusses the sad fate of Pure Yoga's living wall, and the bigger problems of trying to keep green walls green in Manhattan. In general, living walls are a challenge in terms of irrigation, sunlight and a number of other variables, and while some green walls work better than others -- the Nzinga Townhomes in Bedford-Stuyvesant use an innovative graywater-irrigation system to keep their green walls green -- Gardner argues that Pure Yoga's wall never really had a chance. "The scaffolding went up about a year ago and, as always, it sliced sheer across the second story of the building, entombing the living wall in constant darkness, notwithstanding its precious southern exposure," Gardner writes. "For some time, the owners of Pure Yoga held tight, continuing to water the plants through a complicated and costly tangle of pipes built into the wall. But eventually it became clear that they were fighting a losing battle, and there appears to be no end in sight for the removal of the scaffolding."

While the ghost of the former green wall -- which was designed by architect James Harb and implemented by landscapers Tony Caggiano and Melissa Daniels -- is still there. Kind of. I saw it just this morning, actually, looking brave and bristly and brown and rained-on and pretty freaking sad, honestly. The good news -- at least according to my wife, who takes classes there -- is that Pure Yoga remains a pretty nice place to take yoga classes. Sadly, it just happens to be in a city that's not so nice a place to have a living wall. So let's let the picture above -- and this photo-rich 2008 post from Buildinggreentv -- remind us of the green wall's (vertical) salad days.