greenbuildingsNYC

New Domino: Worst Mega-Development in NYC, Or Just One of the Worst?

David Roth — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:25:12 +0000

For a (very) non-green development, Williamsburg’s New Domino has gotten a lot of attention at this green building website. And not just in this epically pitched bitch of mine from last month — no, the parking lot-intensive, Tampa-style mega-development on the East River waterfront haunts any post even remotely related to it, and has served as a stand-in for the worst sort of one-size-fits-all identikit developments for which the (otherwise impressively green) Bloomberg Administration has shown an unfortunate soft spot. There are two reasons for this. One is that I am one perseverating dude, and this is how I roll, baby. The other is that New Domino is, in more or less every way, the lousiest, lamest and most reprehensible mega-project underway in New York City at the moment. I suppose that Extell’s Riverside Center could’ve been nearly as bad, but a heroic community board’s insistence on LEED Platinum efficiency for the development — I write “heroic” seriously, embarrassingly enough, because the story makes me want to high-five someone — may yet save it. (Thanks to Nick of BetterBuildingsNY for the update in comments, and keep an eye out for super-intern Christine Mule’s story on that in the next few days) New Domino, on the other hand, seems determined to cement its claim as the all-around worst big new real estate development in the city. Their new angle? Backing away from a promise to the City Council to include 30 percent affordable housing in the final plans… by simply submitting plans that instead include 20 percent, without explanation. /Slow clap

In the New York Post, New York’s finest news source that also runs pictures of Shakira and That Fake Nun down the right-hand column, Rich Calder details New Domino’s latest anti-achievement. “For years, [New Domino's development team] has vowed that 30 percent – or 660 – of the project’s 2,200 apartments would be affordable units,” Calder writes. “However, city officials confirmed that when the City Council votes Thursday on the controversial project’s needed zoning change, the zoning amendment’s text will include standard language of the city’s Inclusionary Zoning policy – thus guaranteeing that only 20 percent of the units will be set aside for low- and moderate-income residents. In Domino’s case, that translates into just 440 affordable units. The 30-percent affordable-housing promise, however, has been memorialized in a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that both the city and the development team of CPC Resources and Isaac Katan recently signed off on. However, as even the document notes, it is a non-binding agreement. City officials yesterday declined to explain why the zoning text wouldn’t include language guaranteeing 30-percent affordability.” I totally bet!

Of course, this particular bit of high-handedness is roughly what New Domino fans expect from the development, but the way in which they’ve gone about depriving the city of 220 affordable units deserves its share of boos, as well. It has long been the city’s (frankly inexplicable) policy to force developers to sign only non-binding MOU’s in cases like this. There is presumably some sort of business-positive explanation for this — allows flexibility, fosters creativity, doesn’t force mega-developers to do things they don’t like to do — but the scandal is bigger than simply New Domino being New Domino. In short, as offensive as New Domino is, they’re hardly the only offenders in this case.

“Alas, this resembles the groundwork of many a development project in New York,” the Observer’s Real Estate Desk notes. “While a good number of developers do end up delivering on promises, other projects are sold to the public on the promise of certain public benefits (in exchange, the public’s representatives grant approvals), only to see those benefits eroded over time as they prove difficult or impossible to fulfill.” Among other offenders named by the Observer are Battery Park City (once intended as affordable housing) and another New Domino contender, the Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project. When private buildings do this sort of thing — say, promise LEED Platinum condos but allegedly deliver something less — residents can sue, as we’ve seen at The Riverhouse. When it happens on the macro scale… well, it’s unclear just yet what kind of consequences, if any, there will be. If anything good comes out of the New Domino project, which seems to be happening no matter what, perhaps it will be that totally necessary riverfront esplanade more attention to and hopefully a cessation of the Memorandum of Understanding thing. New Yorkers of any borough deserve as much, and while the achievement of Community Board 7 with Riverside Center is impressive and admirable, it would surely help a lot if city government was nearly as serious about its responsibilities.

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New in New Haven: LEED Platinum Luxury Rental 360 State Street

David Roth — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:07:05 +0000

There’s no reason why Connecticut’s cities shouldn’t have numerous green buildings — as with some of New Jersey’s faded cities, Connecticut’s urban housing stock both reflects those cities’ lost grandeur and suggests all kind of encouraging adaptive reuse projects. Of course, like New Jersey’s cities, Connecticut’s cities are in many cases pretty far gone — there are people who remember a time when Bridgeport was less like Bartertown from Mad Max and more like a nice place to live, but it’s doubtful that they still live in Bridgeport. It takes consumer demand to get those green construction projects going, though, and that’s an area where your Bridgeports (and Hartfords and so on) are currently somewhat lacking. There are green successes to build upon — Hartford has a bunch and a green-minded mayor in Eddie Perez — and the state has a moderately progressive government and even an indispensable green blog of its own in BuildingCTGreen. But green residential projects are tricky, risky and not coincidentally scarce, in the Nutmeg State.

All the more reason, then, to applaud the arrival on the scene of 360 State Street, a LEED Platinum luxury rental building in New Haven that is the state’s first LEED Platinum residential building. It helps that there’s a pretty reliable demand for high-end green rentals in New Haven — the presence of a major academic institution helps with that — but everyone behind 360 State Street deserves a round of applause for getting this far ((that is, open and 20 percent rented). Fairfield-based Becker + Becker deserves credit for designing and developing an impressively green building and the Multi-Employer Property Trust deserves credit for backing a green residential project while its competitors cling to outdated/plain-wrong investment criteria in their real estate developments and stiff cities with projects like New Domino as a result. Whether 360 State Street will succeed on the terms that matter to Becker + Becker and MEPT — that is, by generating a solid return on investment — remains to be seen. But as a green showpiece building, the $190 million, 32-story mixed-use tower is already a pretty smashing success.

I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink mocking point-obsessed LEED Brain-style green buildings — ones that would stick a solar panel or a wind turbine on something just to give residents a chance to show it off at a cocktail party. But your author is as susceptible to temporary LEED Brain fugue states as the next guy, and 360 State Street’s lengthy list of green building features begs for that open-mouthed salute — from the half-acre green roof (I know, I know, but I think they’re great) to the high-efficiency lighting (with occupancy sensors, naturally) to the sophisticated multifaceted submetering system to the on-site 400-kilowatt fuel cell, the biggest in any residential building in the world, it’s a daunting collection. The usual goofy LEED point-getters are in effect, too — bike racks and the all-important electric car charging station (you know, for your electric car) — but there’s more going on here than LEED point-hoarding. Starting with its dead-center location, 360 State Street is green in ways that go beyond low-VOC finishes. “Directly across from the State Street Metro North train station, a half-mile from the Union Station Metro North station — and with a Zipcar sharing program in the parking garage — [360 State] is a transit-oriented residential development designed for those eager to have cars handy but minimize their use,” BuildingCTGreen blogs. “New Haven Green is one block to the west, and Yale University, Yale New Haven Hospital and other downtown employers are within easy walking distance — as are hundreds of restaurants, shops, galleries, museums and clubs.”

And that is more or less exactly the way you do it. The fine-grained submetering — through a web-based dashboard designed by The Lucid Group — empowers residents, which is cool. But the NYC-style passive efficiency embodied by the building being an easy walk from just about everything is arguably an even greener (and notably low-tech) aspect. Even if the apartments for rent didn’t look pretty sweet (they do), 360 State Street would qualify for Green Building Rock Star status. That the apartments actually do look pretty nice — and come with all the usual luxury rental amenities — should help 360 State Street qualify for a label that doubtless means more to the developers than all the gbNYC bouquets and LEED certifications combined: successful investment. We’re pulling for it.

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Slow Train Coming: Phase 1 of Moynihan Station Project Might Actually Happen

David Roth — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:32:18 +0000

Among those who care about this sort of thing, the destruction of the old, grand Penn Station is considered one of the greatest crimes of Robert Moses’s reign as New York City’s building-knocker-over-in-chief, even though Moses himself had less to do with it than did the station’s owner, the Pennsylvania Railroad. To look at pictures of the old building, which came down in 1963, it’s easy to see why people like Jane Jacobs — the loudest voice, as per usual, in the upswell of public sentiment against the destruction — hated the demolition so much. And of course anyone who has been in the new Penn Station, which went up in 1968 and boasts a freaking Houlihan’s as its defining stylistic grace note, knows well how poorly that decision worked out. But while the current Penn Station stands out as one of Manhattan’s most easily improvable spaces — dial back the smell of old fried things 20%, swap out the depressing-industrial-basement lighting, and you’re there! — the process of actually improving upon it has been a decades-long study in frustration, indecision, mega-developer grandiosity and general failure. For nearly a decade, now, New Yorkers have known what the new Penn Station would look like — the design, by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, has changed somewhat since 2001, but not all that much — as well as where it would be and even what it would it would be called. The biggest question, though, and the only one that truly matters, was when the planned Moynihan Station in the old John A. Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue from the present-day Penn Station, would actually happen. And no one has ever really had a good answer for that one.

The last few years have been interesting ones for the station, as a hilariously grandiose boom-market plan to surround Moynihan Station with a totally reasonable six new-construction high-rise office towers was first held up by State Assembly capo Sheldon Silver and later obliterated by reality in the form of waning interest and, more practically, the real estate and credit crash. In 2009, Sen. Charles Schumer began angling to get $100 million in federal transportation stimulus funds for the project, and planning on a new, scaled-back, multi-phase development — in contrast to the boom-era one, in which those six high-rise office towers would spring from the earth around the station like glassy toadstools, to be instantly be filled with financial types — began to come together.

In the first phase, Amtrak would move to the Farley building, while the LIRR and New Jersey Transit would remain in the old, smells-like-sad-pretzels Penn Station. It was not exactly the revolution in urban planning initially discussed, but certainly a start. The Friends of Moynihan Station (band name?) website describes it thusly: “[Phase 1] is to build new entrances to the platforms through the northeast and southest corners of the Post Office, to double the width of the West End Concourse and 33rd Street Connector, provide 13 new ‘vertical access elements’ (escalators, elevators, stairs) to the platforms, and other infrastructure upgrades. Phase 1 will begin construction by the end of 2010 and should be completed by 2015.” Again, this is a $267 million project to expand some platforms and underground concourses and build some escalators — not necessarily the most exciting news on its own, and not necessarily the sort of thing you’d ordinarily read about in gbNYC, especially considering that even the most grandiose plans for Moynihan Station (puzzlingly) never included any green design elements. But, as the FoMS website concisely puts it, “It is a prerequisite to Phase 2.” That would be when things really get interesting — Phase 2 is the billion-plus dollar part of the project, in which a new, “intermodal” mixed-use station is constructed, featuring new retail, the grand hall depicted above, and all the other stylistic flourishes one expects from a grand big city train station designed by a big-ticket architecture firm.

And while the funding for Phase 2 is nowhere to be found at present, the fact that both funding and approval for Phase 1 appears set is newsworthy enough in itself. The state’s Public Authority Control Board approved Phase 1 of the Moynihan Station project on Wednesday, which finally lent a bit of momentum to a project that had been fully stalled for nearly a decade. “With each additional approval (of which there are many), it’s actually looking like the project, which would eventually move Amtrak into the Corinthian column-lined Farley Post Office across Eighth Avenue, will see the start of construction,” Eliot Brown writes in the New York Observer. “The approval was for $267 million in infrastructure construction that would expand a concourse and complete ventilation work–most certainly not the sexiest or visually appealing part of the project.”

One could argue that all this doesn’t mean all that much, given that Phase 2 is still something of a longshot unless and until the flat-broke state government — or a Congress hobbled by appallingly cynical and risibly shameless faux-deficit hawks on one side and weenies of only the vaguest principle on the other — can turn up $1-to-$1.5 billion for an eminently worthy transportation project of the kind that people used to believe it was the state’s job to fund. Brown aruges as much in the Observer, writing that, “on its own, this probably isn’t worth $267 million in value for riders, as the spending rests on the assumption that the state will eventually find money for the rest of the project.” Phase 1 will certainly relieve the hellish congestion at Penn Station, though — no word on the sad pretzel smell, alas — and that’s not nothing. And while we don’t like to deal in sports section cliches here at gbNYC (I save that for my actual sportswriting), there is one other benefit that Phase 1 would confer — a fundamental and important momentum that makes Phase 2 seem possible.

Even without any green design elements, Moynihan Station and improved commuter and AMTRAK rail service would obviously confer a huge environmental benefit not just to New York City but to all surrounding areas. And from a more Manhattan-centric perspective, Moynihan Station would do much to improve the already surging fortunes of the previously sagging Hudson Yards area. Factor in expanded 7 train service on the west side (one, and possibly two, new stations coming in 2013) and a crop of planned and extant new rental and condominium construction — including the Related Companies’ blockbuster LEED rental building, Emerald Green — and greater Hudson Yards could become a very interesting neighborhood indeed. Anyone who remembers that neighborhood from even a few years ago might find that hard to imagine, and anyone who has followed Moynihan Station’s glacial progress over the past two decades surely finds it difficult to imagine the prospect of a Farley/Moynihan building as a neighborhood jewel. But both those former long shots have become a bit easier to imagine of late, and that’s something worth celebrating — and not entirely because it would mean retiring both the current Penn Station and its panoply of depressing odors.

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(City) Point Break: Remember Brooklyn’s LEED Silver-Hopeful City Point Development?

David Roth — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:18:40 +0000

In the beginning, there was The Albee Square Mall. And, Biz Markie songs to the contrary, it was not very good. Dull, downmarket, frankly bummerific in about a dozen different ways, Albee Square was one of those things that most people don’t even bother to miss until it has been plowed under. But while it wasn’t a great place to shop, per se, That Albee Square and the nearby Fulton Street Mall were important to the street life of downtown Brooklyn, and home to numerous locally owned small businesses along the now shutter-intensive blocks around Boro Hall. Back in 2008, the Brooklyn Eagle reported on the demise of those local businesses, which is always a sad story. But back in 2007 and ‘08, when the City Point development that would rise from the tacky rubble of the Albee Square Mall was still being heralded as Brooklyn’s answer to the Time Warner Center, it was easy to bury that story.

After all, the economy was so good — although as we now know it wasn’t, really. Predictably, the developers behind City Point — a Traveling Wilburys-grade supergroup of mega-developers comprised of Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners, P/A Associates, Washington Square Partners, Rose Associates, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison — were also throwing around huge job-creation numbers. Which were dubious, as usual, but who can ever really disprove that particular bit of hyperbole when it’s still in the being-thrown-around stage? And anyway, the economy was so good, and why doesn’t Brooklyn deserve its own 1.5 million square foot answer to the Time Warner Center? Do you have something against progress? Against Brooklyn? Against Biz Markie? And so on. Those were the days.

And then Lehman Brothers happened and credit for incredibly ambitious re-imaginings of vast swathes of Brooklyn became cruelly hard to come by. And so City Point was subsequently scaled way back — first to a smaller development that would include a LEED Gold-hopeful 17-story office tower, and then to a smaller-still, two-stage LEED Silver-hopeful vertical mall that was funded, in part, by $20 million of stimulus funds. We wrote about the new City Point back in February, and weren’t terribly enthused. “[Project architects] Cook+Fox’s green bona fides are beyond reproach, with the Bank of America Tower being just one example of their work, but it’s as frustrating as it is unsurprising to see the first deliverable facet of this very-2007 development — you remember, the ones that would provide hundreds of jobs and affordable apartments and free ponies for all — turn out to be what appears to be a tasteful neo-classical vertical mall,” I wrote back then. “Whatever its unspecified sustainabilities and bearing in mind that Cook+Fox would never design anything undistinguished enough to fit in with Forest City Ratner’s Brooklyn projects, City Point looks vaguely Ratner-ian in its unimaginative, ham-fisted re-imagining of a neighborhood that was, for all its downmarket dimensions, at least something unique and organic.” For reference, you should know that “Ratner-ian” is a word I would never say in front of a child or my parents. It’s about as nasty a cussword as we have in our arsenal here at gbNYC. So yeah: not the most positive.

But life goes on, and so does the whole reductio-ad-absurdum object lesson in real estate cynicism and overreach that is City Point. The phase of the development that broke ground earlier this week bears little resemblance to the mega-development that was to have provided all that LEED-certified retail space, affordable housing and jobs. Luckily, as the Wall Street Journal’s Craig Karmin writes, the big box retail and uninspiring aesthetics are still in place. “The $20 million bond offering will provide most of the $24 million in financing for the first phase of development, consisting of 50,000 square feet of retail shops to be completed by early 2012. An additional 450,000 square feet of retail, and a million feet of affordable and market-rate housing, are to follow,” Karmin writes. “As with other projects that stalled during the recession, the developers have scaled back their ambitions to get work started. They are ditching plans for 125,000 square feet of office space, and splitting the retail and housing components into two separate towers to cut costs further.”

Given that Cook + Fox has designed some beautiful and peerlessly sustainable buildings, and given that Jonathan Rose is officially filed under the “Gets It” heading here at gbNYC HQ, it would probably be foolish to give up hope on City Point. But what we have, at the moment, is the replacement of small, locally owned businesses with a federally-funded mall anchored by national big box retail establishments TBD; the jobs created, it seems reasonable to assume, will all involve wearing polo shirts with nameplates pinned to them. As we wrote back in February, it’s tough to miss The Albee Square Mall — but circumstances at City Point have conspired to make it all but impossible not to. LEED-certified mall-style retail is clearly hot right now in NYC, but just because that’s true doesn’t mean that we have to applaud it.

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Gowanus Update: Green Condos, Brown Canal, Fleeing Developers, Superfund Adventures, Et Cetera

Christine Mulé — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:05:32 +0000

(Note: Please welcome gbNYC super-intern and default Gowanus Bureau Chief Christine D. Mule to the website. Today, she reports on the green goings on in Brooklyn’s most fluorescently toxic ‘hoodlet, and the most promising Superfund site in the five boroughs)

The potential for a little community to develop along the Gowanus Canal exists, but it will take years before cleaned up properly. This body of — should I even call it water? — liquid with its very own distinct smell would take a superhero and his band of brothers to clean up; for the moment, and likely for the next ten years or so, we’ll have the EPA on the job instead. But while we wait for Clark Kent to rip off that button-down shirt, put on some contacts, and get on speed dial, it’s worth remembering that life has continued in the Gowanus.

Back in March, David reported that the Environmental Protection Agency added the Gowanus Canal to its National Priorities Superfund List as one of the most polluted areas in the nation. As the New York Times announced, this push to clean up the muck of Brooklyn ran into some serious, human-sized obstacles: namely, Mayor Bloomberg and some big-wig real estate developers who had designs on opening up the Gowanus as a venue for luxury rentals and condos. Their hope was to avoid Superfund designation and handle the cleanup themselves with assistance from city tax dollars and “voluntary” aid from such polluters as Con Edison. It didn’t work, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s website now lists the Gowanus Canal as final as of March 4th, a good step forward considering de-polluting the Gowanus will take over 10 years to complete. Maybe one day, because of the Superfund, living along the Gowanus will actually seem more enjoyable and less like a punchline, and we will not need to hold our noses as we walk by the canal. We shall keep our fingers crossed.

Bloomberg and the developers argued that Superfund seems to go hand-in-hand with halting development in neighborhoods where the Environmental Protection Agency sets up camp, but let’s face it: the Gowanus Canal itself poses somewhat of a deal-breaker when it comes to new developments in the area, anyway. And so it’s probably not surprising that the biggest residential deal in the Gowanus just recently got broken. The ides of July took down their first big real estate development project near the Gowanus, the Toll Brothers’ planned 500-unit housing development (and not-at-all comical waterfront esplanade! — ed), earlier this month. Back when the Superfund emerged, Toll Brothers said that they felt that their project would not make sense if the government pursued their Superfund plans. They stuck to their word, deciding it was unworthy of their time and money to wait 15 or 20 years before they can actually develop their project.

On the other hand, there is some good news on one impressively green residential building in the area. Third and Bond, a LEED Gold condominium building at, yes, Third Street and Bond that was developed by Hudson Companies and designed by Rodgers Marvel Architects, is officially open for business just blocks from the canal. If this mid-rise residential building indicates any of the potential of the neighborhood, then I cannot wait to see what the area surrounding the Gowanus Canal could look like 10 or 15 years from now, when this clean-up project comes to an end. As the building’s website states, Third and Bond is “the first mid-rise luxury residential building in Brooklyn to reach…commitment to [an] environmentally sustainable design,” with LEED-GOLD and Energy Star designations. The developers of this project were very honest about their development experience; they created a weekly blog on Brownstoner.com in which they exposed the ups and downs of their development project to readers. After 138 weeks of blogging, Third and Bond is selling homes and boasts an impressive green resume. Among other things, their Energy Star homes save up to 30% more energy than a regular home.

With Third and Bond completed and apartments for sale, the area near the Gowanus Canal has received a very tiny face-lift — or at least some minor Botox treatment. The good comes with the bad, though and the fact of the matter remains that the state of the Gowanus Canal is not the best. That has been true for roughly a century, though, and with the Superfund plans underway, hopefully we will see some slow improvement over the next few years. Superman and his friends seem too busy saving the human race, but it would be nice to get some help on hand for the EPA in their attempts at de-gunkifying the Gowanus Canal. Life goes on in the Gowanus, and the arrival of Third and Bond is reason for hope, but on a job this big, we can use all the help we can get.

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Friday Reading: Ambitious New Art Space in Hudson Yards, Richard Meier’s Outtakes and The Ground Zero Ghost Ship

David Roth — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:30:08 +0000

The thermometer says it’s 92 degrees; the heat index bumps that up a few degrees more. And while we here at gbNYC are usually pretty skeptical of climate science — remember that time it was really warm back during the winter? — it’s hard to argue that what’s going on outside is anything more than an explicit invitation to stay indoors and read some stuff on the internets. To that end, and because some of our longer-gestating posts are still gestating, we bring the triumphant(-ish) return of Friday Reading, the gbNYC feature that helps you help yourself stay indoors. You are so, so welcome.

The building rendering you see above is that of what is currently perhaps the coolest-looking mystery in New York City. Its name is the Culture Shed, and it’s a 22,000-square-foot combination art gallery and event space that’s being developed by the Hudson Yards Development Corporation on 30th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. It just received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and may wind up functioning as a sort of floating adjunct gallery for a host of foreign and domestic art institutions. The design comes courtesy of Diller Scofidio & Renfro and The Rockwell Group, and while little is known about any green building elements in the plan, it’s worth noting that 1) basically no one knows anything about this building or project at this point and 2) Hudson Yards Development Corporation is a city entity, and therefore likely to insist on some sort of third-party green certification. “The idea for the building, which has been little noted in the New York cultural world until now, envisions a new breed of cultural site — a kind of combination museum and rental exhibition space, which would be self-supporting,” Kate Taylor reports in The New York Times. “The design calls for a five-story building with two translucent sheds that fit over it like trestle tables and can roll out into the plaza to temporarily create an exhibition hall of more than 55,000 square feet.” More on this one as it develops, obviously. For starters, though, here’s a skeptical look at the merits of the NEA grant from Arts Journal’s Lee Rosenbaum. “NEA should serve the needs of the existing cultural community (not speculative and ambigious new ventures) and should leave the creation of new facilities, with still uncertain uses, to private funders or other government agencies whose mission involves supporting redevelopment construction projects,” Rosenbaum writes. I am sort of inclined to agree myself, but mostly I’m just interested in hearing more about those translucent sheds. Translucent sheds!
Architecture dorks have a new destination this summer in the just-opened Richard Meier Model Museum in Long Island City. The smallish private museum, housed in a 3,600-square-foot warehouse, is open on Fridays by appointment only, but sounds pretty fascinating even if you’re not into Richard Meier’s designs. (We at gbNYC are indeed into his work, and can attest to the fact that it sounds pretty fascinating from our perspective as well) Meier envisions the museum as a window into his creative process, but for fans of the Jersey-born Pritzker Prize winner, the model museum offers a unique opportunity to check out some of the Meier designs that never actually cracked a skyline. In an interview with Wallpaper’s Mimi Ziegler, Meier talks about his hopes for the Model Museum and, briefly, about his fascinating new Teachers Village development project in Newark. (Which is the subject of one of those long-gestating gbNYC posts mentioned earlier)
And finally, this one is just kind of cool. The excavation of the World Trade Center site turned up an 18th-century sea wall recently, which was the sort of frankly literary crypto-metaphor for time and perseverance and New York City as New York City that would’ve worked very well in a short story, but was even more resonant in a news story. A more recent turn-up is perhaps a bit less symbolically rich, but arguably just as cool for those inclined to find things like this cool — ladies and gentlemen, we give you a 30-foot, 18th-century ship that was recently discovered at the bottom of the WTC pit.

And that’s that for now. Obviously this has been a slow week, as was last week. I won’t make any excuses for that, although I feel obligated to mention that I totally could, and also to mention — because it’s about time someone gave me a round of applause for this — that I recently handed my novel over to my agent. The book is all about insulation. It’s a love story. I expect big things. But thanks for your patience while my mind was elsewhere. See you Monday.

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Green and Orange: Meet Barnard College’s LEED Silver Diana Center

David Roth — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:31:55 +0000

We know you, reader. Not personally, with some exceptions. But we know what you know about green buildings, and we’re aware that when we bring up, for instance, the vanishing cost differential between building green and building brown and the shrinking payback time for return-on-investment in green building, we are generally telling you something you already know. But perhaps we’re repeating this stuff in the hopes that these manifest truths will reach some kind of critical mass in the discourse and start making itself more felt in NYC’s built environment. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have plenty of fine green buildings in New York City, but… well, my personal goal is for green building to become the new normal, and many of our most interesting new green buildings seem to fit better under the heading of “very special.” Sowhile it’s pretty silly to look at the LEED-CS Silver Diana Center at Barnard College as anything but a green building project worth celebrating, there’s also a sense in which the fact that it’s on a college campus makes its sustainability and edgy look somewhat less surprising. But while the Diana Center isn’t in the rarefied class of the Cooper Union’s LEED Platinum 41 Cooper Square, either in terms of sustainability or (to my wholly untrained eye) architectural awesomeness — and while it is, through no fault of its own, located on a college campus — the new glass prism at 117th and Broadway is a building worth celebrating. So, yeah: put your party hats on.

Built over and around the unloved McIntosh Center — a student center and bunker rolled cleverly into one — The Diana Center’s design, by the architecture firm of Weiss/Manfredi, both literally reuses much of the old McIntosh building and entirely re-imagines it. The Diana Center will be home to Barnard’s art, art history and architecture departments besides doing its other student center-y duties — cafes and event spaces and such — and if the images from inside and out on offer at Open House New York’s website are any indication, it strikes an impressive balance between the practical and the pretty in so doing. The Diana Center’s green building elements are everything they should be, as well, from such show-offy aspects as a green roof and fritted glass curtain wall to your more practical low-flow plumbing fixtures, daylighting, advanced HVAC and so on. It’s an impressive building, all told, and about as responsible and well-planned a showcase structure as a college could ask for. It’s also, and there’s no easy way around this, kind of orange. Glass panels of varying colors and frit make up the building’s public face — a streak of transparent glass runs across the face, too — and the overall chromatic appearance of the building falls somewhere between terra cotta, a tangerine and Jersey Shore’s Snooki. In short: orange.

Which is honestly all that Real Deal architecture critic James Gardner needed to see before delivering a comparatively withering dismissal of The Diana Center today. “As for its ruddy, brownish color, I do not believe I have ever seen that specific hue adorning the facade of a building before, and to see it in Morningside Heights is to understand why: it is too glaring to accommodate any pre-existing context, and yet too subdued to achieve the sort of Gehryesque goofiness that might serve as its own justification,” Gardner writes. “Furthermore, the color is applied to the windows in a strange allusion to fritted glass whose contextual implications have no conceivable relevance to the rest of the project and serve no ostensible purpose. But properly understood, the orangey skin of the building is so subtly bizarre that perhaps it almost carries conviction.” So no: not a rave.

In a somewhat fussier but notably more favorable write-up in Architect Magazine, Joseph Giovannini seems notably more attuned to what Weiss/Manfredi were going for. “The building’s character is both urban and urbane. The scale is generous, and the sequence of spaces both civilized in its processional quality, and experiential in the way it unfolds,” he writes. “The architects looked forward rather than back, and so set the best possible example for students exploring their own creativity.”

Giovannini makes passing note of The Diana Center’s green attributes, which he praises as being part and parcel to its broader architectural goal of increased openness; Gardner, typically for him, makes no mention of the green stuff. In a certain sense, this is justifiable — while The Diana Center’s green building elements will (once again) deliver a rapid return on investment for Barnard and save the school a good deal of money in operating costs over the building’s lifetime, none of that is necessarily an architecture critic’s concern. At the same time, though — and here we are telling you something you already know, again — the idea that form can exist independent of function in this or any building seems awfully dated, and viewing or reviewing a building only in its aesthetic context seems like missing the point to a certain extent. Buildings have responsibilities beyond being beautiful, after all, and it would be nice to see those responsibilities — and successes in fulfilling them — more fully acknowledged in the discussion of new green buildings like The Diana Center. It might not help hasten green building’s necessary migration from the rarefied realms of campuses and public space and into the urban landscape, but it certainly seems like it couldn’t hurt.

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WWJJD: What Would Jane Jacobs Think Of Green Building In New York City Circa Now?

David Roth — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:42:39 +0000

If you dabble in urbanism even a little bit, you know who Jane Jacobs is. I write this with conviction, because I only dabble in urbanism a little bit, and I know who Jane Jacobs is. But for most of us — or at least for me — the actual outlines of who Jane Jacobs is and what her legacy means are fairly vague. I know her as the opposite number to Robert Moses, which is to say that she’s The Good Guy opposite his mustache-twirling central planning baddie in the battle for the soul of New York City’s built environment. (Incidentally, I’m getting ready to start reading Roberta Brandes Gratz’s Battle For Gotham, which is about that conflict and might deepen that understanding somewhat) It helps, from the perspective of my own biases, that Jacobs’ ideal city looks a lot like mine and includes the very same built-in, human-scale efficiencies that David Owen argues ensure NYC’s unexpected and near-unprecedented greenness. (Peter Dreier of the National Housing Institute provides a neat overview of Jacobs’ beliefs and extraordinary life here) I’m not sure what kind of personal relationship I would’ve had with the relentlessly feisty, contrary and contentious Jacobs — since she passed in 2006, I’ll just assume we would’ve gotten drinks every Tuesday and gone to Mets games together, or something — but I do know what kind of relationship I have with her ideas. It’s a cordial one. A more complicated question, though, would be how Jacobs feels about the state of green building in New York City circa now.

Jacobs wasn’t much for mega-projects, which made itself felt most famously in her (successful) opposition to Robert Moses’ attempts to turn Fifth Avenue into a major arterial and open a highway that would’ve sped drivers through lower Manhattan, but also manifested in her resistance to better-conceived developments such as Lincoln Center. Jacobs was, on the other hand, generally all for community-driven initiatives. While this enables us to divide recent gbNYC stories up into things Jacobs would or would not have liked — she would’ve loathed Brooklyn’s loathsome New Domino development; she presumably would’ve loved Long Island City’s privately conceived, funded and executed quasi-homesteady Brooklyn Grange farm (which just recently had its ribbon-cutting ceremony) — it doesn’t really do us much good in terms of helping us to understand contemporary Manhattan as Jacobs might have. And that understanding becomes doubly difficult when we consider just how much of what’s happening in New York’s green scene is the result of incentives designed by one of Jacobs’ other bugaboos: the state.

As easy as it is to cheer community board-centered people power when it makes itself felt — through Brooklyn’s Community Board 1 exacting concessions from New Domino that make it marginally less loathsome to the Upper West Siders demanding that Extell green up and scale down its sprawling Riverside Center mega-development — it’s an uncomfortable truth that most of what’s interesting in green building in NYC is coming from the state. Thus CUNY’s new green building management program, brought to you by the ultimate central planner, the U.S. Department of Energy. Thus the promising New York Solar Industry Development and Jobs Act, brought to you by what is surely the single most ineffective locus of central planning in the entire freaking world, your New York State government. And thus, too, such recent NYC mega-projects as the South Bronx Greenway and The Brook, Bronx’s LEED-certified and (partially) city-funded affordable housing development. These aren’t the sort of Oppressive Concrete Mega-Projects that Jacobs raised hell about back in the day, but they’re very much a product of top-down incentives and planning, albeit of a much more sophisticated and progressive sort than that embodied by Moses or Le Corbusier. Even the booming, bustling, expanding High Line, which is surely one of Manhattan’s biggest urban planning success stories in recent years and a prime example of productive interaction between state actors and community interests like Friends of the High Line, was advanced by some of the most well-heeled community activists ever seen (as well as the deep-pocketed developers who have built and profited from the High Line-adjacent bumper crop of luxury condominium and retail development, and essentially remade Chelsea as a high-end neighborhood in the process)

Does it matter what Jane Jacobs would think about all this? Whether she’d recognize anything of the city she describes and celebrates and excoriates in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in this New York City? In terms of your commute, or the price of your apartment, or your property taxes, the answer is probably no. In terms of understanding the city in which we live, though, it might. Jacobs’ manichean view of the struggle between Communities and Power may be dated in the sense that the conflict doesn’t take the shape that it once did — they don’t necessarily get to write the laws, but it’s not tough to argue that NYC’s mega-developers currently wield nearly as much power than city government, and occasionally wield said power through the city government — but the conflict between big and small interests and big and small development are enduring, and endure still. As long as the city charter retains New York’s byzantine building bureaucracy and vests so much power in the community boards, too, the dynamic tension between the developers and (for lack of a better term) the developed will remain much the same — just as dynamic, just as tense. It’s telling that, all these years later, Jacobs’ ideas still have the power to elicit snarky, peevish editorials from real estate developers in the Wall Street Journal. And it’s telling, too, that the organic, community-driven urbanism that Jacobs so prized in 1961 is still so close to the sustainable NYC ideal nearly 50 years later. Whether a given project or development is on Jacobs’ side, or whether Jacobs would be on its side, seems less significant than the fact that, all these years after The Death and Life of Great American Cities, we are still having essentially the same life-and-death argument about the relative sustainability, livability and viability of New York City.

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Hear Ye: Verizon Wireless Store at One Bryant Park Seeking LEED Gold

David Roth — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:19:46 +0000

It’s hard to know what to make of Verizon, brand-wise. Yeah, they’ve got the “Can you hear me now” dude and the FiOS guy who keeps owning that Galifinakisian cable guy in the commercials, and everyone knows what services they provide and all that, but they’re not the first to come to mind when the subject is green corporations. Which is strange, since whatever one might think of their cell phone service, Verizon actually is fairly green for a mega-corp. From the super-green renovation of the stubbornly un-certified Verizon Building on down, though, Verizon is comparatively reticent about its greenness. Not to say that they don’t put out press releases when they open a LEED-CI Gold store in Chandler, Arizona — believe me, they do — but Verizon is not nearly as intent on letting you know how green they are as, say, Whole Foods. Which makes sense, given that Whole Foods is selling organic kohlrabi and Verizon is selling the nation’s largest 3G network or whatever. But of all the instances of Verizon soft-pedaling its sustainability, perhaps none is more amusing than the recent opening of their LEED-CI Gold-hopeful Verizon Wireless store at the LEED Platinum One Bryant Park. That is, in the Bank of America Tower… and across the freaking street from The Verizon Building.

But while Verizon might be selling themselves short somewhat on this one, their super-green store at One Bryant Park deserves plenty of praise. While it’s not notably more impressive in its sustainability than, say, the Chandler, AZ branch, the Verizon Wireless store has plenty to offer. I know this because of, yes, a Verizon press release. A press release that includes one paragraph on the store’s forward-thinking recycling policies and superior air quality, and five other grafs and four bullet points detailing things that have nothing to do with the store’s LEED certification. For a communications company, Verizon is surprisingly not-that-good at communicating information about its apparent dedication to sustainability. But they deserve some praise for it all the same.

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Frank Talk: Gehry Explains Dropping The (Shiny, Maybe A Little Over The Top) Bomb On LEED

David Roth — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:12:47 +0000

The Pritzker Prize is not awarded for humility or moderation or being a chill dude. The Pritzker Prize, at least in theory, is awarded to architects who design impressive buildings, and by that standard Frank Gehry eminently deserved the Pritzker Prize he won way back in 1989. Since then, Gehry has continued to do what he does best, which is design fascinating structures like the beloved Guggenheim Bilbao — which architects recently chose as the greatest building of the past 30 years in a Vanity Fair poll — and the Novartis Building, which is seen above. While its (jargon alert) unconventional shape and super-shiny aesthetics unmistakably mark the Novartis Building as a Gehry project, something about it is different than many of Gehry’s others. No, it’s not less shiny — not that we can see, at least. It’s just a lot more energy efficient, which is more the result of Switzerland’s forward-thinking national green building laws — it’s different in Europe, people — than any change of heart on Gehry’s part. But while Gehry has never really evinced much interest in green design, it wasn’t until recently that he weighed in on the US Green Building Council’s LEED program, which — for better and worse, as we’ve discussed numerous times at gbNYC — is effectively the brand name for green building in the United States. He is, to put it gently, a skeptic.

Back in April, Gehry busted some harsh but reasonable battle raps about LEED at the Yale School of Architecture, which BusinessWeek’s Michael Arndt reported here. It’s hard to pick just one quote from this salty array, but this works okay: “A lot of LEEDs are given for bogus stuff. A lot of the things they do really don’t save energy.” Say what you will about the Old Guy Pluralization — it’s not quite “The Google,” but yeah — but the dude is right. When Gehry — whose Stata Center at MIT won LEED Silver, although it wasn’t designed with that in mind — tried to walk back his comments to Arndt a week later, he still couldn’t resist lodging some critiques of LEED. “[LEED has] become ‘fetishized’ in my profession. It’s like if you wear the American flag on your lapel, you’re an American,” Gehry told Arndt. “That’s what I was trying to say. You get people who are holier than thou. I think architects can do a lot, but some of what gets done is marketing and doesn’t really serve to the extent that the PR says it does.” That’s like the Guggenheim Bilbao of extremely qualified praise, right there, but again: the (Pritzker Prize-winning) guy is not wrong.

Again, Gehry’s not a green building maven, and he’s not making any points that semi-mavens like myself — for starters — haven’t been making for some time. While LEED has plenty of potential, it’s really most reliable at this point as an indicator of a developer’s marketing approach — l’affaire Riverhouse may yet bear this out — and green good intentions in the planning stage than it is as an indicator of a building’s performance. But while Gehry’s interest in green building as a pursuit is roughly analogous to David Chang’s interest in serving seitan at Momofuku, the guy is not a troll and he’s not — thankfully — some sort of stealth global warming skeptic or anything like that. In a long and interesting interview on green building with Abigail Leonard of PBS, Gehry gets into greater detail on his feelings about green building’s potential, pitfalls and imperfect certification process:

Leonard: To use the Novartis building as an example, what is the Swiss government doing that ours isn’t? What do you think the government’s role should be in this?

Gehry: They set very particular standards: The Swiss government said the Novartis building couldn’t be air-conditioned. So we had to come up with another way to regulate the temperature. We built it entirely out of glass and cooled it with a geothermal system. The roof panels were made with photovoltaic glass that generates energy. And there is an opening at the top that lets hot air out — like a teepee. In the end, there’s no one way to do it, you have to be creative.

Leonard: So pressure should come from government at the top and builders will respond?

Gehry: In an ideal world, pressure should come from below and from the top.

Leonard: Some critics have taken issue with LEED’s point system, which they say doesn’t always produce the most environmentally friendly buildings. The most commonly sited example is that developers get the same number of points for installing a bike rack as they do for a complex, and expensive, water recycling system. Do you think the point system is useful?

Gehry: Maybe you need the point system to energize this type of building, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. The best way would be a political initiative that requires people to address these issues in order to get a building permit. Then the government can incentivize sustainable building through subsidies and various other things. But this is a global issue, so you need programs that not only we agree on but also that the Russians and the Chinese agree on.

Again, it’s not necessarily groundbreaking commentary, but Gehry’s a smart guy, and his initial skepticism of LEED — warranted skepticism, we should once again point out — might’ve unfairly gotten him tagged as a troll by green building watchers. It’s worth reading, and a nice reminder that the man many consider to be our greatest living architect is actually engaged with building issues not having to do with making things shinier.

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Green(e) Buildings (W)NYC: New York’s Public Radio Scores LEED Gold Honors

David Roth — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:39:06 +0000

A gbNYC post without links? On a Friday afternoon? It’s almost as if your blogger was getting ready to blow town — during rush hour, naturally — for a friend’s wedding in New York State. It is really almost exactly like that. But while I don’t usually do the rip-and-run thing from press releases, these are kind of extraordinary circumstances (um) and also, there really hasn’t been much coverage yet of the LEED-CI Gold honors recently bestowed on WNYC’s Greene Performance Space at 44 Charlton Street in Soho. Does that mean gbNYC is breaking this story? It might, but it might also be more accurate to say that gbNYC is basically acting off a tip from gbNYC reader/WNYC employee Jonathan Korzen. Mentioning that is what we blogging professionals call disclosure. Running Korzen’s list of the Green Space’s green aspects is what we blogging professionals call “frankly kind of lazy.” But that’ll probably happen.

The Greene Space was originally targeting LEED Silver for Commercial Interiors, but managed to overshoot and wind up golden thanks to such measures as:

Installed lighting power that is over 30% more efficient than code requirements.
A Climate Control System designed to surpass energy code requirements by 53%.
Composite wood and laminate products that are free of urea formaldehyde resins.
Drywall consisting of 95% recycled content.
A Bike Room with Shower and Locker Room to promote alternative commuting practices and reduce the energy intensity of standard commuting.
Daylight exposure has been maximized with an open office environment.
All paints, coatings, adhesives and sealants used contain no or low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Over 50% of all wood products installed have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, ensuring that wood was grown and harvested using sustainable forestry practices.

All original random capitalizations theirs. Because… okay, got to go. Friday afternoonery aside, kudos to WNYC for not only producing really good stuff from the Greene Space — Soundcheck! Listen to that! — but producing one of Soho’s greenest commercial spaces.

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Queens Is Not Keen On Green, Glassy Flushing Commons

David Roth — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:01:47 +0000

We’ve spent a lot of time (if maybe not more time than necessary) groaning about the very un-green, fairly un-cool New Domino mega-development in South Williamsburg, which is perhaps not surprising: it’s big and dumb and definitively not the sort of thing that gbNYC is into. But yesterday’s post on the surprisingly green, undeniably mall-tacular Bronx Terminal Market presents a more complicated aesthetic situation. If New Domino stands for everything green development isn’t — 1,500 parking spots! That is a great many parking spots! — then the Bronx Terminal Market manages to stand for both. Here is a massive, top-down project rife with chain stores and could-be-anywhere aesthetics that conceals some surprisingly sustainable aspects and went to the trouble of pursuing LEED certification. This is New York, which means that — snob alert sounds here — we don’t need to settle for the less-irresponsible identikit developments that qualify as green building in many U.S. cities. But a lot of thought went into Bronx Terminal Market, regardless of how offensive you (or I) might find its conception. The same holds true for the 5.5-acre LEED Silver-hopeful Flushing Commons, a mega-development marrying 660 green condos, a YMCA, 1600 parking spots, 275,000 square feet of retail space and a new 1.5 acre public park. In terms of LEED points, it’s a winner. In most other ways, it begs the question, “Is this the best we can hope for?” At least from gbNYC, it begs that question. For a coalition of Queens residents, activists and small business owners, it has drawn a host of more heated, more pointed questions.

The list of complaints leveled against Flushing Commons is almost comically long. It’s possibly situated on a 19th-century Methodist graveyard, which will make getting poltergeist insurance very difficult. It’s definitely situated at the third-busiest intersection in New York City — after Times Square and Herald Square comes… 39th Avenue and Union Street in Flushing, apparently — and doesn’t feature any ingenious plans to make that nightmarish honkscape any less nightmarish. And of course it’s what it looks like: an environmentally responsible, aesthetically uninspiring constellation of luxury condos — with a fig-leafy amount of affordable housing — seemingly designed to host more identikit retail. Flushing is not a beautiful neighborhood (although its dumplings are delicious), but this is not a beautiful development. And even by the usual standards of contentiousness surrounding big NYC real estate developments, this one is unpopular — two Queens Business Improvement District members quit the BID in protest earlier this month, and a broad-based coalition of Queens rabble rousers have united against the development.

“[Former BID member Jim Gerson's] coalition has, in its infancy, secured broad support from the Chinese, Korean and cross-cultural business communities, according to its founder. In his opinion, ‘it’s the only committee’ on the development of Flushing Commons ‘that uses logic,’” the Queens Chronicle’s Nicole Levy writes. “That logic surmises that the Rockefeller Group and TDC Development and Construction Corp. joint venture ‘will be the death knell for the 900 small businesses in the community because… it will eliminate all of the parking that you see behind you.’ So said coalition lobbyist Robert Lipsky, accounting for the proposed 1,600 spaces that both ‘big box retail’ employees and condo residents would monopolize once the complex was built.”

Again with the parking, you guys? At any rate, here’s another instance in which the idea of a greener New York is complicated. Is a development that’s near the subway, built sustainably, and certified with LEED green even if it changes the face of its neighborhood and betrays no evidence of forward-thinking urbanism? Is the city doing a neighborhood a service by green-lighting — as the City Planning Commission did on Wednesday — a development like this? Are rhetorical questions a cheap way to end a blog post? We all know the answer to the last one, but I think that aside from the buildings themselves in Flushing Commons — about which we can safely say, “boring-looking but fairly green” and move on — this development, and others like it, challenge us to think about what a really green future for New York City would look like. If green buildings made a green city, after all, we’d be trying to be more like Los Angeles. It’s the whole that counts, and developments like Flushing Commons — only slightly less so than developments like New Domino — make it tougher to take an a-or-b approach to the goal of a greener New York City.

I’d love to hear what you think about this, readers, either via email or in the comments.

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Found In Space: Ambitious New Plans Give Green Makeover To Manhattan’s Water Street, DUMBO’s Pearl Street

David Roth — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:52:10 +0000

This is a surprising thing to be writing, but if it weren’t for the Bronx, we wouldn’t have much good news to report here at gbNYC of late. Yes, green building technology continues to improve and impress, and new green projects have cropped up over the past few months — it’s certainly not all bad news, or even mostly bad news. But between the revelation that superstar green condo Riverhouse may be notably less green than promised — Stephen has more on Riverhouse over at Green Real Estate Law Journal — and the apparently irresistible rise of mediocre and proudly un-green mega-developments such as Williamsburg’s New Domino, this hasn’t been the most inspiring time to be a green real estate watcher in New York City. The problems that New Domino is facing — those hacked-off city council members won’t be any less so after today’s revelation that developers, who have plead poverty while resisting calls to add more affordable housing, stand to make $400 million on the New Domino deal — don’t seem to be of the deal-derailing type. Given how much Mayor Bloomberg has invested in the development, it’s tough to imagine what a deal-derailing scandal would even look like, here. Even the city’s green new developments — we’ll have more on the just-approved, LEED Silver-hopeful Flushing Commons project tomorrow — are disconcertingly macro. But despite the fact that this hasn’t been a great June for green building news, I’m here to bring you some happy news. Or at the very least some pretty architectural renderings.

The one above is of the Pearl Street Triangle in DUMBO, which has already come a long way and which got this imaginary overhaul from DUMBO’s own Coburn Architecture, which won an “ideas contest” sponsored by the DUMBO Improvement District. Because this was just an ideas contest sponsored by a community organization, there’s no guarantee that the Coburn plan — or anything like it — will ever reach fruition, but if it can happen anywhere in New York, it will happen in DUMBO, which has already put a lot of work into the Pearl Street Triangle (it currently looks like this). And the design itself is pretty great. The New York Post has a couple of renderings, and the text of Coburn’s own description of the new Pearl Street Amphitheater. “The Tracks plaza takes it’s inspiration from the myriad of rail lines that at one time weaved their way through the industrial streets of DUMBO,” the description reads. “As these tracks emerge from beneath the pavement surrounding the triangle, they become the armature for a series of tiered seats that wind through the site to create three amphitheater-like spaces: the first, facing the Manhattan Bridge, is delineated by seating for films projected onto the masonry wall that encloses the arch beneath the bridge; the second, a performance and display space enclosed by two opposing tiers; and the third, where a low tier hugs a series of in-ground fountains.”

Perhaps even more ambitious than the proposed Pearl Street Triangle is the re-imagining of the Financial District’s Water Street (as opposed to DUMBO’s Water Street — this is confusing, I know) that was rolled out earlier this week by The Alliance for Downtown New York. The new Water Street plan — full name: “Water Street: A new Approach-Transforming Lower Manhattan’s Modern Commercial Boulevard” — was the product of a collaboration with FXFOWLE, Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Sam Schwartz Engineering. While the renderings here are also pretty nice, the whole project feels a bit closer to reality than does the Pearl Street Triangle amphitheater. In part, this is because ADNY rolled out an impressively comprehensive in-depth justification for the four-pronged plan alongside those pretty pictures. “The plan calls for improving sight lines from Water Street over to the East River waterfront, reconfiguring ground floor spaces on the street to allow more uses including retail, plus adding more lighting and concerts and other entertainment in public plazas,” Amanda Fung writes in Crain’s. “The plan also suggests putting a median in the street and widening sidewalks to allow an ‘amenity strip’ for café seating, benches, bike racks, and more trees and flowers.”

In scope, of course, these are all not notably more or less ambitious than New Domino, although it should be noted that trying to turn Water Street and its surrounding office-scape into a 24-hour neighborhood is very ambitious indeed. But their public-minded nature — and the fact that both would lead to neighborhoods with more trees, smarter streets and a more inviting and NYC-like urban landscape — was kind of exactly what I needed today. As projects like New Domino threaten to pull New York City more and more towards the rest of America’s generally bleak urban aesthetic, it’s nice to know that the project of making NYC neighborhoods both more neighborly and more NYC-ish is still ongoing.

Tomorrow: re-imagining an entire neighborhood in Queens, adding some chain stores, and putting a LEED Silver stamp on it. I think I need to look at some more renderings.

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Chains of Silver: Gateway Center At Bronx Terminal Market Earns LEED Silver Bona Fides

David Roth — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:23:55 +0000

Maybe we’ve been a little hard on Tampa here at gbNYC of late. After all, Tampa is trying to incent green building and business development, and it has its own symphony and a good baseball team and a terrible football team and honestly doesn’t deserve to be linked — as pejoratively as I possibly can — to the blunderiffic New Domino development in South Williamsburg. But with all apologies to Tampa natives — it can’t possibly be “Tampans,” can it? — your writer was making that comparison for a reason. New York — like Tampa or anywhere else — is a very specific type of environment that’s more suitable to some types of development than others. Because of how dense, compact and vertical New York is, it’s easy to build green; because of the organic way in which NYC’s neighborhoods have developed as exemplars of human-scale mixed-use commercial/residential communities, it’s easier to build a human-scale green condo than it is to build a Big Brown Residential Building marooned in a parking lot, and easier to build a small and efficient green retail space than it is to construct a giant boxy energy-suck of a mall. As New Domino proves, though, it’s still possible to build an anonymous and totally un-New York building right here in New York City. At least to look at it, the hulking Bronx Terminal Market — a macro-scale mall in the shadow of Yankee Stadium jammed with chain retail stores — would appear to be further proof that mediocrity can, in fact, happen here. But it turns out that there’s more to the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market than meets the eye.

In part, that’s because what meets the eye is… frankly, a not-that-great-looking mall that would be at home in, you know, a city like Tampa (But not actually Tampa! Go Rays). But, as The Real Deal reports, the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market has qualified for LEED Silver certification. In many ways, the new Bronx Terminal Market is something of a rhorshach test for New Yorkers — the fact that it replaced the dilapidated but 80-year-old Bronx Terminal Market, and that Related Companies evicted the vendors who had been there, isn’t especially appealing, but whether or not it’s a dealbreaker or not depends largely on your perspective. And of course many New Yorkers — your writer somewhat included — kind of dislike malls on instinct. There’s a lot of semiotic weight behind the idea of a mall jammed with national chains, and some people (rootless cosmopolitan elites like me, again) will never really get that excited to have a Toys ‘R Us nearby. But as The Architect’s Paper points out, the new Bronx Terminal Market — despite being filled with chain stores, despite looking frankly ugly from the highway — is actually a somewhat revolutionary shopping mall. If, that is, those words can ever be put together. Much of the credit for that, apparently, goes to John Clifford, the architect who designed the Gateway Center for GreenbergFarrow Architects.

“This 950,000-square-foot project for the Related Companies represents a major departure from the traditional suburban mall. Instead of being enveloped in parking lots, this mall is pedestrian friendly,” the Architect’s Newspaper’s Alex Ulam writes. “It has wide sidewalks, a small outdoor plaza with seating, and several street-level spaces for restaurants and retail. Sloped roofs and interior streets break up the massing of the enormous development. Instead of big-box stores spread out laterally, here they are stacked on top of one another in two three-story retail blocks that flank a six-story garage for 2,341 cars. The two retail blocks are staggered by about 15 feet, allowing each big-box store to connect to its own dedicated parking deck by walkways that pass over interior streets. If a mall of this size were built in the suburbs, it would typically take up 100 acres.”

Factor in a location near the subway — 37 percent of the mall’s customers are expected to arrive via mass transit, which is a stat few malls can match — and it’s easy to see how a project that seems so un-green on its face could qualify for LEED certification. New York may not ever be a mall-friendly location — which is good, since many New Yorkers will never be friendly towards malls — but if we have to have a mall, one like the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market actually looks pretty good. The question of whether we need a mall, much like the one of whether we need developments like New Domino, is of course another matter entirely.

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Nice Tapestry: LEED Gold-Hopeful Harlem Rental Building Opens… With An Art Installation?

David Roth — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:49:19 +0000

Quiet week here at gbNYC, huh? I could explain, but I know that there’s no reason why I should. Suffice to say that, while there’s still a chance you might read a fervid, massive post limning the importance of green building practices to President Obama’s kinda-sorta energy/carbon speech earlier this week, I finally thought better of it. Oh, you’re welcome. (About the speech: credit to Grist’s David Roberts for catching the green building stuff, and for my part, overall I think Robert Reich is kind of overstrong but at least funny in writing of it, “his words hung in the air with all the force of a fundraiser for your local public access TV station”) Which left me with a lot of radio silence, and a lot of other work and what do you know, all of a sudden it’s Friday afternoon. Which means that I should really be thanking my lucky stars that the LEED Gold-hopeful Tapestry rental apartments are opening in Harlem this week. You should probably thank yours, as well. It’s what saved you from experiencing me in Pundit Mode.

Stephen wrote about Tapestry back when Jonathan Rose Companies and Harlem-based partners Gerrard and Nicholas Lettire finalized financing for it back in November of 2008, and the building got a notable amount of press elsewhere back then, as well. Well-deserved press, as it turns out: an aggressively green building with an unusual location — there’s not yet a Tribeca-style diminutive for “At the Foot of the Triborough Bridge” — brought about by local developers with an innovative mix of private and public funding should be enough to earn any building a nice feature in the New York Observer. (Of course, you don’t need to do much of anything to earn snarky quasi-scorn from Curbed, but Tapestry got that, too) As interesting as its backstory is, though — any building that gets funding from NYSERDA and Enterprise Green Communities deserves a tip of the cap, at least — what’s striking about Tapestry on the week of its opening is how well it seems to have delivered on its promise. As numerous less-ambitious projects fall behind schedule or off the map entirely, Tapestry just kind of happened as it was supposed to: financed in late 2008, reading for leasing in spring of 2010, and on track to be finished more or less on time. While Tapestry isn’t finished with construction yet, Rose put his money where his rental building is (what?) this week by allowing arts nonprofit No Longer Empty to stage a free art exhibition in the still-rising Tapestry.

We bang on about this a lot here, but real sustainability is about more than passive solar and bike racks and LEED points, and while Tapestry will undoubtedly rack up plenty of those, the idea of a building that’s really integrated into its community — both through access to mass transit and through the subtler and stronger ties that are the foundation of the real urban landscape — is a good deal more appealing. Rose, as we’ve seen again and again, really seems to get this more than most NYC mega-developers. Branding is branding, and it’s obviously in Rose’s interest to be seen this way, but the amount of energy that the Rose Companies have devoted to low-wattage nonprofit green developments like the green public housing complex Dinkins Gardens — as well as inviting No Longer Empty to hang out at Tapestry all summer — suggests that there’s somewhat more here than talking-of-talk. The fact that half of Tapestry is set aside for middle-income (30 percent) or low-income (20 percent) housing suggests as much as well. In short, as impressive as Tapestry’s roster of green building features is, there’s every reason to expect that the greenness of this building is more than an on-message paint job. Well, either it means that or it means that I’m inclined to read too much in to a cool-seeming public art show. Either way, consider the gbNYC seal of approval granted.

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