LEED

Friday afternoon: it is happening as I type this. At the office from which I'm writing this post, my co-workers are celebrating Friday afternoon by enjoying Cuban food from a nearby spot (spoiler alert: the consensus is that plantains are delicious); I am celebrating it by trying to figure out an unobtrusive way to watch the New York Mets' spring training tilt against the Florida Marlins from my cubicle (spoiler alert: there isn't one) and, for whatever reason, considering getting some Cuban food. On the off chance that things are similarly un-hectic at your place of work, I'm going to take a break from my usual gnarly riffage on green building issues of the moment to single out a nice, somewhat lengthy feature by the New York Observer's Roland Li that makes for an interesting afternoon read.

Local banks still exist, but are increasingly the sort of thing grandparents talk about walking past on their way uphill to school (and then again, on the uphill home) back in the old days. The tellers knew your name, the locations were convenient, there were no grandiose jerkweeds in a back room tranching and re-tranching your mortgage, then making trillions of dollars worth of bets on whether or not you'd pay it back, and then going out for steak and yelling profanities at each other. Commerce Bank was one such nice-guy local bank -- except for the unfeasible dual-uphill-location thing -- before it was purchased by Canadian banking giant TD Banknorth back in 2007. As so often happens with your bigger banks, TD Bank went about alienating New Jerseyans (admittedly, not difficult) by acting like a Canadian Banking Giant.

Back in 2009, Stephen delivered a nice post on 100 Gold Street, a green low-rise condominium development in Brooklyn's Vinegar Hill designed by Anthony Morena's REDD Group. The list of green features at 100 Gold Street will be familiar to gbNYC readers -- you've got your dual-flush toilets and your low-VOC and recycled and locally sourced finishes and your Energy Star appliances and so on -- but are no less impressive for their familiarity. Just because those green finishes and fixtures are frequently seen at gbNYC doesn't mean they're ubiquitous by any stretch, and 100 Gold had (and still has) a legit claim as both the first green condominium in Vinegar Hill and one of the greener condominium developments in Brooklyn. What it doesn't have is any intention of pursuing LEED certification that might attest to that.

There are presumably people out there who don't enjoy a good hotel room, but I don't know any of them. Not to get too "Up In The Air" on you here, but there's something about those fluffy pillows and big goofy comforters and imposingly glossy dark wood desks they don't even really expect you to use. Something kind of cool and different, yes, but also something that causes even the most virtuous carbon-footprint-watchers among us to forget ourselves and all of a sudden become the sort of people who think, "well, I might as well leave the air conditioning on blast, so that it'll be nice and cool when I return to the room in seven hours." And that -- along with a host of really dumb industry practices like leaving lights on in vacant rooms (which gets called out in the Urban Green Council's massive recent report) -- is why hotels are some of the least-green big buildings in any city.