Building With The Older Gods: Empire State Building, "Ground Zero" "Mosque" and Etc.

It has been quiet around the blog of late, I know. Just a few goofy videos and that one long What's It All Mean post from a few days back. I hear my public asking: David, where is the legendary fire in the belly? Where are the overlong and too-fervent exegeses on the myriad awfulnesses of Papa John and The Giant Rum-Glazed Pork Butt Known As Guy Fieri? Whither the searching examinations of your own random one-off writing goofs?

To all of this I can only say: calm down, America. The fire is still in the belly. It's just that the belly has been spending a ton of time on Metro North of late, helping the belly-owner's wife move into a new apartment in New Haven, CT. And also building some Ikea furniture. For this, the belly has been rewarded with a trip to lunch at Blue Hill at Stone Barns -- wedding gift certificate in effect, there, which made the cost a bit less ridiculous -- and a brief vacation from freelance-related anxiety. But the fire is there. The pride is back!



What an unbelievable American!

So, yeah: I have been doing husband things, and also briefly did some going-to-New-Hampshire-and-jumping-in-a-lake things, which was incredibly nice. But I've also done some writing stuff of late that -- because that is what this blog is supposed to be for -- I should mention here.

The first of these -- in that I started it first, and submitted my first draft like three and a half weeks ago -- is a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the greening of the windows in the Empire State Building. It was fun to report, although I keep bumping up against the fact that, despite all my years writing for (some) money, I have never really mastered the arid/informative news article style. This is not to say that my prose is just too vibrant and unforgettable for this sort of thing, so much as it is to say that I just lack confidence in my ability to write that sort of piece, and thus make it a lot harder than it probably is. Also that my prose is too vibrant and unforgettable for the strictures of the form. Anyway, this is why the good lord made editors, I suppose. At any rate, it's here, and has a neat video attached by Maya Pope-Chappell.

Of course, part of the fun of this stuff is being your own editor. Which is another way of saying "essentially writing without an editor." That's what I'm more or less able to do at GreenbuildingsNYC, where I'm both managing editor and head writer and (because why not) also shop steward and ombudsman and headwaiter. It's a great gig, in that regard. It's also great because I periodically get to pop off with 1,500-word pieces about Park51, the not-at-Ground-Zero non-mosque that every out-of-town clown and fame-humping media-bigot feels entitled to criticize. It's a non-story, in the end -- an opportunity for more un-reporting and corny SEO-ed link-whoring from a media that's essentially taking August off. But even though this whole dumb kerfuffle doesn't really matter -- doesn't matter relative to disaster in Pakistan, for instance, or really matter to many of us who actually live here in New York City -- it still has a certain importance as another chapter in New York's blessedly endless process of becoming itself. For many words on that -- almost all of which I'm proud of, despite my suspicion that an editor may have helped somewhat -- check out my piece on Park51 at gbNYC.

Upon The Roof, or the Thrills and Bummers of Writing For gbNYC

So, part of my day gig at The Real Estate Place I Won't Name involves writing and editing short, nominally pithy write-ups of different luxury rental buildings and condominiums in Manhattan. (The rest of the job: suicidal ideation, avoiding being proselytized by super-religious co-workers, hearing stridently hetero agents awkwardly gay-bait one another) This has benefited me in a couple of ways, most notably reminding me how incredibly many places in this city I cannot currently afford to live in and reassuring me that all those places contain essentially the same apartments.

There are exceptions, of course, but the unconscious real estate ogling even resolutely starving-artist fucks like myself fall prey to in NYC recedes somewhat once you've written about a couple hundred luxury condos. I love lower Manhattan, but I'd sooner move to Staten Island than live in one of the depressingly "fully loaded" office-to-condo conversions in the Financial District that were built as Awesome Amenitized Dorms for Finance Douches(tm) before that industry ate cosmic shit. Ditto for the identikit luxury rental spots in Hell's Kitchen built for the same purpose, which attempt to make up in indoor driving ranges and billiards rooms and "residents-only lounges" what they lack in mass transit access or being surrounded by anything but windswept parking lots. This isn't to say that the Upper East Side is the hugest improvement on a windswept parking lot when it comes to, say, bars that aren't total nightmares of beer-ponged sadness. But while it's reassuring to know that our goofy co-op isn't necessarily any less appealing than other places to live in Manhattan, another building-related writing gig of mine does kind of bring home the degree to which living in New York City could be a lot better than it is. That woudl be my daily bloggy work at Green Buildings NYC.

I like the gbNYC work a lot, for the most part: it's interesting to me, for one thing, and the guy who created the site has been my friend since kindergarten. More to the point, it's definitely more useful for me to know and write about green building than about, say, the Mets or the odious Papa John Schnatter. Largely because of the shape into which this city forces the lives of its residents, living in New York is inherently very sustainable -- New Yorkers' per capita carbon footprint is astonishingly small, weird though that may seem -- but a great many of the buildings in New York are old and inefficient and many DON'T EVEN HAVE RESIDENTS-ONLY LOUNGES. The one in which I live is inarguably one of those, and I was actually startled to discover that it was actually not one of the alarmingly many (often quite nice) buildings on the Upper East and Upper West Sides of Manhattan using the ultra-nasty, super-toxic boiler sludge known as Number Six heating oil. My wife and I are planning to have some cocktails on our building's roof tonight before making dinner -- this is rocking hard by our standards, and if we watch some Friday Night Lights afterwards one of us will likely black out from overexertion -- which sounds pretty great until you remember (or are told by me) that our roof deck consists of a dozen square feet of pavers surrounded by a vast expanse of very hot tar paper on which we're technically forbidden to step foot. Upper East Side, man.

Or, "Upper East Side, man, but also weirdly par for the course." All that tar paper is terribly inefficient, of course -- it traps heat and thus both makes the building hotter (taxing our always ready-to-fail HVAC system) and contributes to the Urban Heat Island thing that makes Manhattan a good couple degrees warmer than, say, Queens. But, as with all those buildings rocking Old Number Six -- which is literally an oil production byproduct that's barely used as a heating source elsewhere in the US -- it also just doesn't need to be this way.

Whitewashing the roof would be cheap and help the HVAC out a lot, but a green roof could turn the space into something transcendent (and also cool the building considerably, help with stormwater runoff, etc). Green roofs are also very expensive and, as I wrote at gbNYC earlier last week, not really catching on in New York City. Some of those gbNYC posts can be kind of tough sledding for those who don't ordinarily care about green building stuff -- this one, for instance, is kind of a big deal, but probably won't seem so to you -- but I think this one is a pretty good introduction to what I'm doing over there, and I recommend it. I also recommend living someplace that prioritizes giving residents an awesome lawn 30 stories above the street over giving residents a computerized golf simulator, but good luck finding one.