David's blog

Did you hear that? Just now? The screaming sound? That was me, sorry. I kind of lost it a little bit, Earl Weaver style, after losing a 700-word post on smart meters and submetering that probably would have been the best thing you read all day/week. Well, maybe not, but honestly we'll never know because Drupal doesn't have a "save draft" option or autosave and I am honestly just way too full of rage to even try to write it again right now. But here's the short version.

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.

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.

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.

New York City is full of green buildings large and smallish that opt not to pursue LEED (or other) certification for various reasons. But no un-certified green building in NYC has the pedigree of 700 Broadway. George Post's 19th-century classical revival beauty in the East Village bills itself, justifiably, as New York's first green green building, thanks in large part to a series of (way, way ahead-of-their-time) building-wide green upgrades made by former tenants The National Audobon Society. By just about any standard, 700 Broadway remains one of the greenest office buildings in New York City.

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.

Regular gbNYC readers are familiar with our complicated relationship with Mayor Bloomberg. Yes, the diminuitive orange squillionaire is perhaps a bit too eager to put the brakes on progress at the behest of NYC's mega-developers, but Bloomberg has also contributed mightily to New York City being one of the greenest big cities in the world. Is he tacky, jerky, peremptory? Yes, yes, and yes, but given his aforementioned good works and the fact that local government is where the green action is these days, gbNYC has basically no choice but to give the Mayor a modified, limited hat-tip on sustainability. That said, his vaunted MillionTreesNYC thing is another story.

Ah, The Hamptons: decadent and expensive and and materialistic and full of nightmarish reality show types screaming wine-breath 'I'm not here to make friends'-type stuff at each other over sodden $40 lunches. And yet also... The Hamptons: beautiful and still comparatively unspoiled in parts and near enough to Amagansett's "Lunch" restaurant and the great St. Peter's Catch Fish Store and Channing Daughters winery and a bunch of other cool things that it's hard not to like it.

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.

The ins and outs of green building and green real estate are not the hardest things in the world to learn, and my byline on this blog is a testament to that. I am, professionally, more or less a sportswriter, but simply by reading a lot and badgering the eff out of Stephen via gchat, I'm occasionally able to muster a comparatively convincing imitation of someone who actually knows what he's talking about. No, no, hold your applause until the end of the paragraph. Hold it because, despite my increasingly solid bluff game, urban planning and zoning and other macro-level green issues confronting New York (and other cities) remain something I don't totally get. So while I've enjoyed reading the mighty Streetsblog's three-part treatment of NYC's zoning issues, I will confess to being more out of my depth than usual, here.