Saving Lives From Anal Cancer
Paulette Crowther, second from left and wearing a wig because of her chemotherapy, with her children, (from left) Camille, Tristan and Justine Almada, on New Year’s Eve 2009.Paulette Crowther’s three children were grown and she was plotting a midlife career change when a routine colonoscopy picked up cancer, but not of the colon — of the anus.
The diagnosis was a shock. Ms. Crowther, a 51-year-old mother of three from New York City, had had no symptoms and was feeling just fine. It felt like a bolt from the blue. The cancer had already spread.
But as Ms. Crowther and her children scoured the Internet for information, they couldn’t help but wonder whether the cancer could have been prevented, or caught earlier at least.
Some 80 to 90 percent of anal cancers are caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV, the same kind of virus that causes cervical cancer. And decades earlier, when Ms. Crowther was in her 20s, she had been treated for cervical dysplasia, a condition that often precedes cervical cancer – and is also caused by an HPV infection.
If only she had known.
“We think Mom could have been saved if she’d been monitored and screened more often,” said Ms. Crowther’s oldest child, Justine Almada, 27. “Studies show that if you have cervical dysplasia, you’re at higher risk. At the very least, she should have been made aware of that.”
She added, “Anal cancer is quite treatable if it’s found early.”
The same types of human papillomavirus implicated in cervical cancer, HPV 16 and 18, are also linked to anal cancer. And in December, the Food and Drug Administration expanded the approved uses of the HPV vaccine Gardasil to include prevention of anal cancer and precancerous lesions.
Ms. Crowther — who was fiercely devoted to the brood she raised in Lower Manhattan, largely on her own after a divorce, and whom the children call their “best friend” — died last April. Within three months, Justine and her siblings, Tristan and Camille Almada, ages 25 and 23, had established the HPV and Anal Cancer Foundation.
The foundation’s aim is to raise awareness about the link between the human papillomavirus, an incredibly common sexually transmitted infection, and a whole list of cancers, each of which affects a relatively small number of people but which, taken together, affect tens of thousands. Besides anal cancer, HPV infections are linked to some gynecological cancers, like vulvar and vaginal cancers, certain penile cancers in men and certain head and neck cancers.
With a robust Web site — analcancerfoundation.org — and an expert scientific advisory board, the organization also aims to increase awareness about preventive screening, provide support to family members and caregivers and raise money for research on treatment, which remains limited for metastatic disease.
“What keeps us going is the thought that if someone had done this already, it could have prevented what happened to Mom,” said Camille, who recently stepped in to run the tax-exempt foundation.
The irony is that while Ms. Crowther was still alive, she never told anyone what kind of cancer she had. Experts say that’s not unusual for people with anal cancer, who often are ashamed of their disease. “The assumption most people make is that if you have anal cancer, you had anal sex,” Camille said. “That’s not true. Heterosexual men also have HPV in their anus, because HPV is so prevalent. But also: who cares if you had anal sex?”
Dr. Cathy Eng, an associate professor in gastrointestinal medical oncology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said: “It’s really important to emphasize that the average person is in fact a female in her late 50s, early 60s — that’s the average patient.” The actress Farrah Fawcett, of “Charlie’s Angels” fame, who documented her battle with anal cancer on film, was fairly typical; she was 62 when she died of the disease in 2009. Dr. Eng added, “People associate anal cancer in general with men who have sex with men who are H.I.V.-positive; that’s not the case.”
While men who have sex with men are at elevated risk for developing anal cancer, the disease strikes more women than men: cases are diagnosed in some 2,000 men and 3,260 women each year in the United States. The disease is on the rise, with new diagnoses increasing by 2 percent a year in both men and women, according to national cancer statistics. Each year, 720 people die of anal cancer.
Other risk factors include having a history of cervical cancer or other gynecological malignancies, having a suppressed immune system, an atypical Pap smear and testing positive for HPV 16 or 18. Having had multiple sex partners, having a history of sexually transmitted disease and having had receptive anal intercourse, even without full penetration, likewise increase risk.
Early symptoms like blood in the stool or a feeling of pressure can easily be mistaken for hemorrhoids. “An important message is: if your hemorrhoids don’t get better, you need to talk to your doctor,” Dr. Eng said.
There is no clear medical consensus on screening for anal cancer. Choices include a digital rectal exam or digital anal exam, done as part of a physical or gynecological checkup, or an anal Pap smear. Dr. Joel Palefsky, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, offers a screening procedure called high-resolution anoscopy, which may be an especially sensitive screening technique. But it is not widely available.
“If a woman has had cervical cancer, she is clearly at increased risk for anal cancer,” Dr. Palefsky said. “We’ve known about the connection for a while. People didn’t pay a lot of attention until recently.”
Another of the foundation’s goals is to destigmatize the disease and end the isolation many patients feel. “When you have cancer, you shouldn’t be ashamed of it; it’s terrible enough to have cancer,” Camille said
Reference Link
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/saving-lives-from-anal-cancer/
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
A Fast-Paced City Tries to Be a Gentler Place to Grow Old
To make it safer for older people, the city added four seconds to the time pedestrians are given to cross intersections like Broadway and 72nd Street.
New York City has given pedestrians more time to cross at more than 400 intersections in an effort to make streets safer for older residents. The city has sent yellow school buses, filled not with children but with elderly people, on dozens of grocery store runs over the past seven months.
The city has allowed artists to use space and supplies in 10 senior centers in exchange for giving art lessons. And it is about to create two aging-improvement districts, parts of the city that will become safer and more accessible for older residents.
People live in New York because it is like no place else — pulsating with life, energy and a wealth of choices — but there is some recognition among city planners that it could be a kinder and gentler place in which to grow old.
The city’s efforts, gaining strength as the baby boomer generation starts reaching retirement age, are born of good intentions as well as an economic strategy.
“New York has become a safer city, and we have such richness of parks and culture that we’re becoming a senior retirement destination,” said Linda I. Gibbs, New York’s deputy mayor for health and human services. “They come not only with their minds and their bodies; they come with their pocketbooks.”
The round trip back to cities among empty nesters, rejoining those who simply grow old where they were once young, goes on, of course, across the country, and New York is not the only place trying to ease that passage. Cities like Cleveland and Portland, Ore., have taken steps to become more “age-friendly.” But perhaps never has a city as fast-paced and youth-oriented as New York taken on the challenge.
The Department of City Planning predicts that in 20 years, New York’s shares of schoolchildren and older people will be about the same, 15 percent each, a sharp change from 1950, when schoolchildren outnumbered older residents by more than 2 to 1. By 2030, the number of New Yorkers age 65 and over — a result of the baby boomers, diminished fertility and increasing longevity — is expected to reach 1.35 million, up 44 percent from 2000.
Their economic power is significant. About a third of the nation’s population is over 50, and they control half of the country’s discretionary spending, according to a recent report by AARP, a group representing the interests of retirees. In some ways, the city has tackled the toughest challenges of making itself attractive to its older residents and those across the country who might consider retiring to the Upper East Side or Brooklyn Heights.
Crime has been in decline for close to two decades; the city has added more parkland than at any similar period in its history; and the 311 system has made dealing with the bureaucracy of government agencies and social services more manageable.
Now, the city is looking to enhance life here in more modest, but meaningful, ways. The New York Academy of Medicine adopted the idea of creating an age-friendly city from the World Health Organization in 2007, and went to the City Council and the Bloomberg administration for financial and political support. The academy has held more than 30 town hall meetings and focus groups with thousands of older people across the city. This summer, it is holding more intimate focus groups in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side.
What people say they want most of all is to live in a neighborly place where it is safe to cross the street and where the corner drugstore will give them a drink of water and let them use the bathroom. They ask for personal shoppers at Fairway to help them find the good deals on groceries. They want better street drainage, because it is hard to jump over puddles with walkers and wheelchairs.
“No bingo played here” could be Ms. Gibbs’s motto. She is the conceptual artist behind the city’s initiative, working with the Academy of Medicine. She is at the tail end of the boomer generation, having turned 51 on Sunday, her silvery bob a rebuke to fears of aging.
“The whole conversation around aging has, in my mind, gone from one which is kind of disease oriented and tragic, end- of-life oriented,” Ms. Gibbs said, to being “much more about the strength and the fidelity and the energy that an older population contributes to our city.”
One of her ideas is to hold a contest to design a “perch” to put in stores or on sidewalks where tired older residents doing errands could take a break. When boomers talk, she listens.
On Thursday, Dorian Block, a policy associate at the academy, held a focus group at the Carver Houses, a city housing project at 103rd Street and Madison Avenue in East Harlem. Sixteen people showed up. (Some meetings have drawn hundreds.)
They complained about broken elevators and litter, and some confessed to being lonely. They said that more stores should have public bathrooms. Now, said Dolores Marquez, 72, “I go to McDonald’s and then I take a coffee because I have to go to the bathroom.”
The academy plans to incorporate the results of the focus groups into two pilot aging-improvement districts, one in East Harlem and the other on the Upper West Side, somewhat akin to business-improvement districts.
The exact details of how the districts will function are still being worked out, but the goal is to create a public-private partnership that would encourage businesses to voluntarily adopt amenities for the elderly. Examples could include window stickers that identify businesses as age-friendly; extra benches; adequate lighting; menus with large type; and even happy hour for older residents.
The new districts will be run by the academy, and eventually handed over to community groups and expanded to other neighborhoods, said Ruth Finkelstein, the academy’s vice president for health policy. Some worry that what the Bloomberg administration is proposing is a menu of quick and dirty solutions for older residents while, in a tough economy, traditional services like senior centers and bus routes are being cut back.
“When we’re talking about age-friendly, it should not only be the boomers who have retired from law firms, as opposed to the people who have worked all their lives and are now living in Brownsville,” said David Jones, president of the Community Service Society, which advocates for poor people and immigrants.
Fredda Vladeck, an expert at the United Hospital Fund in “naturally occurring retirement communities,” said she worried that the city would forget the frail older people. Ms. Gibbs said the point was to build on what is already there, and to make life better for everyone.
The city enlisted students at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to develop a walking survey that, if adopted, will rate the city’s age-friendliness by standards like the frequency of cracked sidewalks and hospitals.
Slowing the pace of life is tough in New York, where every red light is viewed as a challenge. But the city is trying. While most adults average four feet per second when crossing the street, older residents manage only three, transportation experts say. So signals have been retimed at intersections like Broadway and 72nd Street, where pedestrians now have 29 seconds to cross, four more than before.
Even senior centers are being redefined as places with artists in residence, like Judy Hugentobler, a sculptor from Staten Island. Ms. Hugentobler is teaching art classes at the Educational Alliance’s Sirovich Senior Center, on East 12th Street, in exchange for being able to use the kilns, clay and glazes in her projects.
“Senior centers are great, but they have a stigma whether you like it or not,” said Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of the Upper West Side. “It’s just not for everybody. But what is for everybody is a bench. What is for everybody is discounts at the grocery store when you’re over 65.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/nyregion/19aging.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1&pagewanted=all
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Bloomberg’s Man in Albany Is Young but Seasoned
ALBANY — Just when Micah C. Lasher thought it was safe to finally sleep one recent morning, three words appeared in his in-box: “It’s a sham.”
An article by Mr. Lasher in “The Spectator”, the Stuyvesant High School newspaper, dated Feb. 4, 1998.
Mr. Lasher had stayed up all night helping write a bill to increase the number of charter schools in New York, a cornerstone of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda. But amid the frenzy, a highly contentious provision had slipped by him: the State University of New York would lose its power to approve charter schools.
Charter advocates, including the one who had complained via e-mail, were seething. Mr. Lasher raced to the State Capitol, and in a feverish two hours of speed-dialing, helped to broker an agreement among lawmakers, the governor and the mayor to restore the university’s role.
An hour later, the Assembly passed the bill.
“The adrenaline was pumping,” Mr. Lasher said. “This needed to be nipped in the bud immediately.”
As Mr. Bloomberg’s chief negotiator, Mr. Lasher, 28, is the wrinkle-free face of City Hall, balancing the roles of bulldog, policy wonk and peacemaker for a mayor who is not shy about comparing lawmakers to lunatics.
“He can go to war with you on Monday and break bread with you on Tuesday,” Austin Shafran, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats, said of Mr. Lasher.
In an office near the State Capitol, Mr. Lasher and eight staff members scrutinize every significant piece of paper floating through the Legislature.
They assemble color-coded memos — yellow to support, pink to oppose — on topics like playground equipment and workplace harassment.
Then there is the politicking. On a recent day, just when Mr. Lasher thought that a long-shot effort to eliminate seniority protection for teachers was slowly picking up support, his BlackBerry hummed with news: two lawmakers were having second thoughts.
“Are you kidding me?” he repeated in disbelief, adding an expletive the second time, even though the bill’s chances of passing were slim.
While Mr. Lasher is praised as an honest dealmaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of policy, some lawmakers, particularly those critical of Mr. Bloomberg, say his intensity can be stifling.
“He can be a real nag,” said Kevin Sheekey, who, when he served as deputy mayor, had hired Mr. Lasher. “He’s constantly pushing. That’s very helpful in the job.”
Mr. Lasher, still plump-cheeked and bright-eyed, has yet to get a driver’s license. Despite his age, however, he has built an impressive résumé. He was a secret weapon to Manhattan politicians as a teenager, and in college he created a powerhouse consulting firm.
As a child growing up in the Upper West Side, he made a name for himself as a magician. He performed tricks like the Ambitious Coin, in which a half-dollar vanishes, on NBC’s “Today” show. And by age 14, he had published a 224-page book of tricks.
The youngest member of a neighborhood club of Democrats, he was responsible for cleaning out the clubhouse. Elected officials, taken aback by his zeal and shrewd mind, were soon approaching him for advice.
“He demonstrated to me more political acumen than people who spent a lifetime in this business,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president and a former assemblyman, who relied on Mr. Lasher as an informal adviser when he was 17.
The prodigy loved winning, and he became so emotionally attached to his candidates that after one of them, Deborah Glick, lost a race for Manhattan borough president in 1997, he retreated to a corner of a West Village restaurant and cried.
He developed his political muscles at Stuyvesant High School, where he warred with school administrators as editor of the student paper, The Spectator.
A long-simmering conflict escalated when he published an April Fool’s edition that mocked teachers and criticized seniority rules. The school promptly shut down the paper.
What followed was a classic Lasher crusade: an all-consuming campaign to restore free speech. Mr. Lasher and his allies flooded the school with fliers and petitions, forcing the administration to eventually give in.
Amid Stuyvesant’s overachievers, Mr. Lasher was no star student. He enrolled at New York University, where in the wee hours of the morning he built a political consulting firm.
The result was SKDKnickerbocker, now one of the city’s most prominent firms, which created fliers for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and counts among its clients 1199/S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East.
At Knickerbocker, he helped manage 76 campaigns — roughly three-quarters of them successful — and practiced a distinct brand of politics: cunning, idealistic and fiercely competitive. But his ardor has sometimes gotten him into trouble.
In 2001, when he was 19, Mr. Lasher helped design a now-infamous handout leaflet that contributed to the downfall of Mark Green, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor. The handout included a controversial New York Post cartoon that graphically depicted Mr. Green’s rival, Fernando Ferrer, kissing up to the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. Green won the nomination, but with the party not united behind him, he narrowly lost the election to Mr. Bloomberg.
In an interview, Mr. Lasher described the episode as “something that I deeply regret being a part of,” emphasizing his inexperience at the time.
Mr. Lasher likes to say he has picked candidates he believed in, and aside from Mr. Bloomberg, they were all Democrats.
He is a devout liberal who winced at the mayor’s effort to change term limits to allow himself to run for a third term, friends say.
But last year, when Mr. Sheekey invited him to join the mayor’s Department of Education and help make it more politically astute, Mr. Lasher accepted.
Last summer, he coordinated the successful effort to have the Legislature renew mayoral authority over the city’s public schools.
Mr. Lasher enjoyed working at the Department of Education so much that he three times turned down an offer to become director of state legislative affairs.
“He was really pushed into the job,” said Mr. Sheekey, who is an executive at Bloomberg L.P. “This is an office that is more important than any single city commissioner.”
In Albany, Mr. Lasher has become a master multitasker. His recent duties have included finding ways to entice television crews to film in New York and resolving a dispute between Apple and legislators over how it sells its iPad.
Mr. Lasher has worked hard to counterbalance his boss’s sharp tongue. When he learned in April that the mayor was planning to denounce a proposal to cut property taxes as “craziness,” Mr. Lasher was instantly on the phone with Senate Democrats, who had championed the idea, taking the heat.
“The mayor can be a little harsh,” said Assemblyman David I. Weprin, a Democrat who represents eastern Queens. “You really want someone in the position who can smooth things over.”
Mr. Lasher’s quick rise has fed rumors that he may be gearing up for a political race of his own. He had hoped to run for the City Council in 2009, but he abandoned his plans after term limits were extended.
Now, Mr. Lasher says he has made no definite decisions about his future, though he has not ruled out vying for a Council seat in 2013.
“Do I want to succeed and do interesting things and continue to take on more responsibility? Absolutely,” he said. “Do I have some grand plan for what that’s going to look like? Absolutely not.”
For now, Albany beckons. The budget is two months overdue, summer is approaching and the mayor is fuming. Whether a young political wizard can emerge as an effective ambassador for a city of eight million remains to be seen.
“The chick just hatched,” State Senator Bill Perkins of Harlem said. “Let’s see what happens when it becomes a real rooster.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 9, 2010
An article on Monday about Micah C. Lasher, the chief negotiator in Albany for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, referred imprecisely to the controversial use of a cartoon by the mayoral campaign of Mark Green in 2001. While the cartoon, depicting Fernando Ferrer and Al Sharpton, was reprinted in a handout leaflet that Mr. Lasher helped design, it was not part of an advertisement for television or for a print publication.
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/business/06novel.html?th&emc=th
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Pairing neighbors with the elderly
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- New York native was outraged at lack of options to nursing homes after mother’s stroke
- She started an initiative to pair elderly with neighborhood volunteers to help with daily needs
- So far, about 50 volunteers are tending to the needs of 27 older adults
New York (CNN) — “Before my mother’s … experience, I never even looked at seniors on the street,” said Irene Zola. “They were pretty much invisible to me.”
In 2008, Zola’s mother, Faye, was admitted into a nursing home after suffering a stroke.
“I knew from that very first night I would have to spend a lot of time there,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave my mother in a place where people were ignoring her.”
Four months later, Zola’s mother passed away.
“I was outraged that our culture doesn’t have a place for very old people except in nursing homes,” she said. “I decided that I wanted to do something about that.”
A New York native and 30-year resident of Morningside Heights — a neighborhood on Manhattan’s upper west side — Zola researched the senior population and how their needs were being met and found a solution in her own backyard.
“[A] friend said, ‘What about having some people in our neighborhood taking care of the elders who live here?’ ”
Borrowing on that idea, Zola started Morningside Village in 2009, an initiative that pairs the elderly in her neighborhood with local volunteers who assist them with their day-to-day needs.
“Sometimes it’ll be a stroll, or shopping or helping them pay their bills. We’re their daughters and sons helping them to manage their home life,” said Zola, 64.
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All the seniors and most of the volunteers live within a 24-block area. Volunteers range in age from 18 to 81 and include college and graduate students, doctors, lawyers and social workers.
“I wanted to establish something to support the aging-in-place community and bring people across generations together,” Zola said.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 40 million people older than 65 live alone. That number is expected to grow as baby boomers reach their twilight years.
“Families are living far away from their older mother [or] father. So who’s there to take care of old people?” Zola said. Older parents often don’t tell their children about their needs because they fear being a burden or being put into a nursing home.
“This is one way a community can help provide informal care that really makes a difference in the lives of the old people,” she said.
Morningside Village is just one initiative of Zola’s nonprofit, Support Our Seniors. In addition to its efforts to improve the quality of elder care, the group hosts an annual awards event to honor older adults and is working with educators to create high school and college courses to increase the visibility of the elderly.
All Morningside Village volunteers go through the group’s application process and orientation. They are advised how to interact with seniors and given wheelchair and emergency training. Zola pairs a veteran volunteer with a novice and then teams them up with a senior with similar interests.
In addition to companionship, volunteers provide a wide range of assistance tailored to the needs of the elders, including help with home management, grocery shopping and meal preparation as well as accompanying them to doctor’s appointments.
For 96-year-old Dolores Saborido, Zola’s group not only helps her face the challenges of living independently, it also provides her with hope. In the past year, Saborido has fallen twice. The second fall left her bedridden and depressed until a friend introduced her to Zola.
“When I first met Dolores she spent her days thinking about how her casket would look,” Zola said. “We got her a whole team of doctors, and now she has six to seven visits from Support Our Seniors’ volunteers every week. She doesn’t talk about caskets anymore.”
About 50 volunteers are tending to the needs of 27 elders. Zola believes that by limiting its reach, the group can maximize the feeling of community. That’s the case for 24-year-old volunteer Caroline Pavloff.
“It’s nice,” Pavloff said. “It’s made me feel more connected to my own neighbors and my own neighborhood.”
Still an active volunteer herself, Zola said her neighbors have turned into family. She said she hopes to see Morningside Villages pop up across the country and plans to help those who want to replicate the program.
“Some people believe that old age is a time when people stop learning, but it’s not. And so why not live life to the fullest to the end?” she said. “That’s what I love to see.”
Reference Link
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/06/03/cnnheroes.irene.zola.seniors/?on.cnn=1
Courtesy
Cable News Network
Terrariums Make a Comeback
A magnifying glass helps Michelle Inciarrano work in a tiny terrarium
IT was an unseasonably hot Saturday in April, and the three dozen terrariums on display in a booth at the Brooklyn Flea were sweating, the moisture turning into beads on their glass containers. Katy Maslow and Michelle Inciarrano, who were selling the miniature gardens, answered questions from passers-by. An antique magnifying glass sat nearby, for those who wanted a closer look.
Katie Goldman Macdonald makes terrariums in her studio apartment in San Francisco.
Some of their creations have an irreverent sense of humor: small verdant worlds that feature scenes like muggings, complete with tiny shadowy scoundrels. Others are simpler, more elegant arrangements of stones and mosses.
The two friends, who spend most of their weekends “antiquing and junking,” Ms. Maslow said, use repurposed vessels like old apothecary jars, cake stands and decanters to make the terrariums, which seemed at home among the vintage furniture and clothing and artisanal food at the market in Fort Greene.
Ms. Inciarrano, a 33-year-old photography student, was the one with the green thumb, who suggested they fill their finds with plants and figurines, said Ms. Maslow, 31: “I had not thought of terrariums once in my whole life.”
But in less than a year the pair had created so many, each working in her Brooklyn home — Ms. Inciarrano, in the Marine Park apartment she shares with her husband, and Ms. Maslow, in the bright, modern two-bedroom she owns with her siblings in Midwood — that they decided to sell them, calling the enterprise Twig Terrariums.
“The fine-art side of us is totally satisfied by this, and the craft side too,” said Ms. Maslow, who holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and maintains a Web site for a family business in the entertainment industry. “I like designing little worlds.”
Long a fixture of elementary school classrooms, terrariums have recently begun gaining favor with young design enthusiasts and creative types. But today’s look nothing like the fish-tank structures and kitschy miniature greenhouses that were popular in the ’70s.
These terrariums marry the current rage for Victoriana with the growing interest in handmade crafts and all things do-it-yourself. Add to that a touch of locavore fervor, as more urbanites take to terraces and fire escapes to grow flowers and herbs in pots.
Grace Bonney, the founder and editor of the blog Design Sponge, said that she gets inquiries about terrariums — how to build them, where to buy them, which plants work best — every day. In her own home, she has three. “Terrariums are coming on the tail end of the cabinet-of-curiosities trend we’ve been seeing for the past few years,” Ms. Bonney said. “But they also touch on a few other movements: budget-friendly décor and gardening. I’ve seen more and more of my readers becoming interested in gardening, but they want to start off slowly.”
Part of the appeal of building a basic terrarium is that it does not require a great deal of gardening know-how. While regular house plants can demand considerable attention, terrariums offer a bit of nature — and the sense of calm it can confer — in a contained, easy-to-care-for way. And once a closed terrarium reaches a state of equilibrium, in which there is neither too much moisture in the container nor too little, it can more or less sustain itself.
“Having these in my home has changed the way I feel about my home,” Ms. Inciarrano said. “It feels more peaceful and in order.”
Like Ms. Maslow and Ms. Inciarrano, Tanesha Smith-Wattley, 31, sells terrariums at the Brooklyn Flea, though she skips figurines in favor of found objects — a sake cup, say, or a piece of driftwood.
Ms. Smith-Wattley, a fashion stylist for the Web site Bluefly, said she came up with the idea of making terrariums when she was searching for centerpieces for her wedding, held last September. She had never done anything like it before, but “right or wrong, I thought, I can make these,” she said, relying on her design skills.
The leftover materials from the wedding became the terrariums she sold at the Flea, under the name Small World Terrariums. She now makes them for events, too, and sells them through a store called Task in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, creating compositions in containers she buys from suppliers in the flower district, Target and T. J. Maxx.
Still, Ms. Smith-Wattley describes herself as “just a girl sitting in my living room” making terrariums.
Long a fixture of elementary school classrooms, terrariums have recently begun gaining favor with young design enthusiasts and creative types, marrying the current rage for Victoriana with the growing interest in handmade crafts and all things do-it-yourself. At left, a terrarium meant to evoke a city park, made by Michelle Inciarrano of Twig Terrariums in Brooklyn.
The artist Paula Hayes, on the other hand, could be considered the high priestess of terrariums, having elevated them to objects of art with her exquisitely cultivated creations in custom-made, hand-blown glass vessels.
At Sprout Home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Tassy Zimmerman, one of the store’s owners, sells terrariums with whimsical elements.
A hanging terrarium at Sprout Home.
Describing them as “primordial,” she theorized that terrariums appeal to the human desire to nurture living things. “It’s this beautiful little world you can care for in your apartment, because you probably can’t go buy a piece of land,” said Ms. Hayes, who lives in Brooklyn.
THE precursor to the terrarium, the Wardian Case, was devised in 1829 by Nathaniel Ward, a physician by trade and an enthusiastic botanist, who noticed that a fern he was growing in a jar was flourishing, sealed off from the polluted London air. So innovative was his discovery — and so useful in the age of sea travel, for it allowed for Europeans to bring tropical plants home with them on voyages in which fresh water was scarce — that it was displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, holding a fern that had not been watered in 18 years.
Nowhere is it more apparent that Dr. Ward’s scientific instrument has become something primarily aesthetic — and a fixture on the design scene — than at the downtown creative studio and storefront Partners & Spade. The terrarium on display there, a collaboration between the landscape designer Lindsey Taylor and the Brooklyn firm Atlas Industries, is a large glass cube on a metal stand, a prehistoric landscape contained in the most modern of forms that sells for $9,500.
Anthony Sperduti, a partner in the business, said: “People are blown away by it. One said they wished they could live inside it, it was so bucolic.”
Those who can’t afford such high-end design — or would rather make it themselves — can often be found at Sprout Home, a serene garden store in Williamsburg, an offshoot of a Chicago store.
On a recent afternoon, a long-limbed young woman clad in leggings and a cardigan with the look, if not the provenance, of a vintage-store find, approached the counter carrying a cloche. The glass was smudged with thumbprints, suggesting that the jar had been handled by an untold number of admirers at a flea market before she bought it. She asked for help creating a terrarium, telling the woman behind the register, “I’ve never made one before, but I looked it up on the Internet and was totally obsessed.”
Tassy Zimmerman, one of the store’s owners, said that several such customers come in every day asking about them. “There is definitely a huge craze,” she said.
A YouTube video of Ms. Zimmerman demonstrating how to make a terrarium has been viewed almost 24,000 times since it was posted on Design Sponge; by comparison, Ms. Bonney said, the average video on the site that is not part of an ongoing series garners about 10,000 views.
In addition to offering classes and premade terrariums priced between $50 and $250, Sprout sells the materials for constructing one — which come with a step-by-step instruction sheet (also available on the store’s Web site) — and accessories like miniature feathered birds and crystals.
Ms. Zimmerman said she had a handful of customers who had been inspired to hold terrarium-making parties after watching the video on Design Sponge, buying soil, charcoal and rocks in bulk.
Flora Grubb, a landscape designer who owns the 28,000-square-foot nursery Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco, said her average terrarium customer is a little younger than her typical client, and is not generally an avid gardener.
“It’s a design-y set,” Ms. Grubb said. “They are interested in plants from a design standpoint, not a horticultural standpoint.”
Many are drawn in by the creative aspect — deciding whether to make a tropical terrarium, for example, or one of “the really artistic terrariums,” she said, which “take an artistic hand to make.”
In the last year, she said, the best-selling item in her online store has been a kit for building a terrarium in a small glass bubble. “We sold a gazillion of them,” she said.
Katy Maslow, left, and Ms. Inciarrano have created many of their terrariums in glass containers they found at flea markets and antique fairs. Within a year, the friends had amassed so many that they decided to sell them under the name Twig Terrariums at the Brooklyn Flea market in Fort Greene.
One of Ms. Grubb’s customers, Katie Goldman Macdonald, 26, is a women’s apparel designer for Old Navy with a special fondness for succulents. Ms. Macdonald grew up around plants — her father has a master’s degree in botany — and has made around 100 terrariums over the years. She has sold about 40 of them in the past eight months, she said.
Ms. Macdonald has her ovoid glass containers hand-blown in Oakland, Calif., and builds her terrariums in her plant-filled studio apartment in the Mission District. Her sleek creations, filled with the architectural, slightly alien shapes of her succulents, would not be out of place in a room furnished with midcentury modern pieces.
She described making a terrarium as a sort of science experiment, albeit one conducted with color, texture and visual composition in mind.
“They fit with the current infatuation with all things old and scientific,” she said, “and this Victorian idea of science as beauty and something you want to display in your home.”
Ms. Macdonald initially made some terrariums to sell at a craft fair at work, figuring that her colleagues, who are “obsessed with aesthetics,” she said, “would be fascinated with having beautiful arrangements in their home that they can look at and not have to do much to.”
That is one of the main draws of terrariums, she said: they are good for people who love plants but do not actually enjoy gardening.
“There are those people who go to Marin and hike on the weekends, but I think people live in cities because they are city people,” she said.
“I tried to start a garden on a city farm for a while, but I realized that I am not really an outdoorsy nature person,” she added. “Terrariums are a way to be connected to that while staying indoors.”
Making Your Own Ecosystem
Assembling a terrarium requires little more than a glass container, gravel, soil and plants. Noel Rose, the owner of Anchor Aquarium Service in Brooklyn, a company that builds large terrariums and aquariums, provided some basic instructions.
Spread gravel, preferably a natural kind like pea gravel, an inch or two thick in a glass container. Mr. Rose recommends using a 10-gallon fish tank, which is inexpensive and has a large opening that makes it easier to work in, but smaller containers like fishbowls will also work as long as they are transparent. Whatever size you use, it helps if your hand can fit through the opening.
Putting a layer of sphagnum moss or burlap over the gravel is optional, but it will keep the dirt that goes on top from seeping into the gravel. Next, spread about a quarter-inch layer of charcoal over the gravel to absorb odors. Then add at least two inches of potting soil, or more depending on the types and sizes of your plants.
Finally, place your plants inside the terrarium. Smaller containers will hold two or three, and some might hold only one. Mr. Rose suggests using very small, relatively hardy plants that do well in medium-moisture environments, like pathos, ferns, moss, ivy and bromeliads.
Water or mist the terrarium sparingly, but keep it moist. If you’re using a container with a cover, monitor the terrarium for a month or two to make sure it does not get too moist (condensation will form on the glass, and mold and fungus might appear on the plants and in the soil). Adjust the lid, or remove it, to temper the amount of moisture; eventually it should stabilize, and the terrarium won’t need as much care. Terrariums without lids require more water and care, as moisture is lost to evaporation.
Either way, “It’s an ongoing experiment,” Mr. Rose said. “You’re trying to create a microclimate — that’s what separates a terrarium from a flowerpot.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/garden/03terrarium.html?pagewanted=1
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
The Crew Behind a One-Woman Show
WORKING VERSION Marilyn Minter with her crew of assistants.
YOU were the child of glamorous but emotionally absent narcissists; your own credo is “Never take advantage of anyone.” You were drunk or high for much of the 1980s; you got sober when you realized that no matter what quantities of drugs and alcohol you consumed they no longer had an effect. You were an art-critical flop who spent decades in the professional wilderness; you were then so suddenly taken up by the establishment that collectors now stand in line for your work. Your pictures sell for $400,000; you insist that you will never give up teaching, so what if it pays two cents?
Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
THE SPOT Marilyn Minter’s loft as studio. Her manager calls it “the closest thing there is to a Renaissance workshop.”
You are Marilyn Minter, a 61-year-old painter with galleries in New York and Los Angeles, a newly published monograph (Marilyn Minter, Gregory R. Miller & Co., $60), a museum show opening Friday in Cleveland and another one-woman show in preparation. Your work, which critics have alternately praised or condemned for the attention it pays to the luster of fashion and pathology of glamour, has seldom been more desirable. And so, on a given Friday — last week, let’s say — six assistants arranged around the perimeter of your Mercer Street loft are helping to make your new work.
“I think we probably have the closest thing there is to a Renaissance workshop,” said Johan Olander, Ms. Minter’s studio manager, meaning that no person can be considered the sole author of any work bearing Ms. Minter’s name.
And, as if to confirm this, Natalia Yovane, Ms. Minter’s “blocker,” was filling in what looked like a paint-by-number schema devised either to blind a person or drive her onto a ledge. With mindless mechanical delicacy, Jenny Morgan and David Mramor were applying “second coats” to another image, smearing wet enamel on a pair of enormous lips that looked like a pointillist abstraction up close. Chris Oh and Agata Bebecka, the so-called “finishers,” dabbed paint onto a nearly finished picture, patting each stroke with an index finger to create a lustrous sheen.
It was only when a viewer stood away from the paintings that a mouth, or an elegantly shod foot splashing through silvery liquid came into focus. “We used cake decoration, that silver powder they use to decorate fancy cakes, suspended in vodka,” Ms. Minter said, referring to the liquid depicted in one painting. “Water wasn’t viscous enough.”
Tall, pale-complexioned and with sharply blue eyes, Ms. Minter has a disarmingly candid manner, a ready laugh and a painting style that defies easy characterization. Some consider her work photo-realism; she prefers to call herself a “photo-replacer.” Shooting the staged images for her paintings with analog film, she then subjects them to 80 or more rounds of PhotoShop manipulation before transferring the results to aluminum panels and handing them over to Team Minter, her crew.
“At this point, my primary job is as a generator of imagery,” Ms. Minter said. “If I did this alone, it would take me a year and a half to finish one piece.” And that would doubtless trouble her passionate collectors, among them Madonna and Tom Ford.
It is no secret that artists rely on armies of assistants to facilitate their output. Jeff Koons, for instance, employs scores of fabricators, conservators and technicians. By contrast, Ms. Minter’s production amounts to a cottage industry. Like the owner of a mom and pop deli, she lives above the store, or rather, behind it, her domestic life wedged into the perimeter of a loft she has occupied since the bicentennial. “I’m a late bloomer in the art world,” the artist said as she laid out paper plates and cloth napkins for lunch.
It was 2 p.m., time for the weekly Friday pizza delivery. “I was basically in a coma for 15 years, and then spent the next 10 being told I had nothing to offer,” Ms. Minter added. “So by the time so-called success came along, I had the tools to stay right-sized.”
Asked what exactly that meant, Ms. Minter said: “I can still hear it when someone says something’s a stupid idea.”
This does occur.
“Remember when you made that horrid wet drip on her chin?” Mr. Olander asked, referring to a painting Ms. Minter created from a photograph of Pamela Anderson with some unidentifiable liquid running from her open mouth.
“The water didn’t look like water,” Ms. Morgan said. What it looked like was … well, never mind.
“They were fighting me constantly and kept adding more and more wetness” to the image, Ms. Minter added, until finally the water looked less suggestive. Thus Ms. Minter managed to skirt any unwanted associations with the hard-core pornographic imagery she deployed early on in her career — to the distaste of collectors and general feminist scorn.
“The most debased imagery around is pornography and fashion,” said Ms. Minter, who has probably done as much as any painter to exploit the distinct visual vocabulary of commercially stimulated desire. “The problem was, in the beginning I was touching on things that were way too loaded and it almost killed my career.”
In the case of the Pamela Anderson picture, shot from a portrait commissioned to celebrate a marriage that never took place, Ms. Minter decided in the end that her assistants were right. The drip was all wrong.
“Everybody around here has an opinion,” Mr. Olander said.
“But,” Ms. Minter said, “I have the final say.”
That goes for pizza as well, since Ms. Minter, who is as good at abstinence as she is at succumbing to pleasure, quit eating meat at about the same time she stopped doing drugs. There were three pies for lunch on Friday and not a pepperoni in sight. As the painters put down their brushes and plastic palettes and came to the table, Ms. Minter conveyed the impression, unusual in the atelier of a successful artist, of being equal parts den mother and benevolent despot.
“I choose people to work for me based on integrity and good energy,” she said. “Also,” she said brightly, “everyone in here had a painful background.”
“Not really,” Ms. Bebecka, the finisher, demurred.
“What do you mean?” Ms. Minter said. “You were abandoned by your parents in high school.”
“I wasn’t abandoned and I was in college,” Ms. Bebecka said, shrugging off Ms. Minter’s dramatic reimagining of her Polish girlhood.
“Pay no attention to her, she’s in total denial,” Ms. Minter said amiably.
At that Ms. Bebecka shot Ms. Minter a look of affectionate indulgence, with an expression that said: “Love that nutty broad.”
Still, as the clichés suggest and Ms. Minter insisted, it may be the setbacks, the childhood dysfunction, the battle for sobriety and critical approval that forge the spirit of an artist. At any rate, hardship does tend to winnow out the committed from those seeking art careers because they’d like a job where you get to work in a T-shirt and sweats.
“I really never had any money until recently, and I’m still not sure I have it,” the artist said, pouring herself a Diet Coke. “For years my income from art was $16,000 a year, so believe me I don’t take any of this for granted. But I’ve been around long enough to understand the role of artists in our culture, who we are and what job we perform.”
And what is that, a visitor inquired?
“We’re the elite of the servant class,” Ms. Minter said. “I know my place.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/fashion/03Gimlet.html
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Throwing a Lifeline to a Teenager in Need
Jenny Goldstock Wright visits Alexander Carno, 17, at his home in Harlem every week.
Alexander Carno passes too much time staring out the window of the tidy bedroom he shares with his grandfather, relying on binoculars to take him down 19 flights to the Harlem street below. Sometimes, being a 17-year-old boy, he notices a girl, or watches his old friends, hanging out and laughing. Sometimes, he stares at the corner where he was shot last December, remembering the moment when he realized, as bullet met bone, that his legs no longer did as they were told. “I tried to run,” he said recently. “But nothing’s faster than a bullet.”
Jenny Goldstock Wright met Alexander Carno at a hospital where he was recuperating from a gunshot wound.
With dizzying speed, the pace of his life slowed to a crawl. It now takes patience no teenager has to move to the door with a walker, to wait for a visit from a friend, to wait for someone to call someone who could arrange for the right paperwork.
But once or twice a week the phone rings or the apartment ringer sounds, and a woman with no official title or longstanding relationship to Alex tries to move his life into fast-forward.
Jenny Goldstock Wright met Alex in the recreation room of a Westchester rehabilitation hospital where her grandfather, 95, was recovering from a stroke. It came out that the two men — one young, one old — had both grown up in Harlem, three blocks away and 80 years apart. “It was like he was a neighbor or something,” Alex said.
Bonds form fast in hospitals: Families see each other’s pain and fear, and they understand it, from fierce firsthand experience.
“I just felt instantly he was a good kid, and lonely and scared,” said Ms. Goldstock Wright, a 39-year-old philanthropic adviser who lives in Katonah, N.Y. She doesn’t know all the details of Alex’s injury — he told her he had been shot over a Marmot winter jacket he was wearing — or even much about his past life. (The police said the case was still under investigation.)
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” she said. “The system’s treating him like a throwaway. He deserves better.”
Alex’s mother died five years ago, and although his grandfather, now his guardian, is clearly loving, he is 75 and couldn’t make the trip to Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, where Alex was being treated, with great frequency. So even after her grandfather left, Ms. Goldstock Wright kept visiting Alex, first at Burke, then at the subacute care facility where he was transferred, and now at the Harlem apartment where he lives with his grandparents. She asks questions; she brings him home to her own family.
Alex broke into one of his wide, ready smiles when Ms. Goldstock Wright showed up on a recent afternoon. It was quickly apparent she was there to work as much as to visit: Was he eating? Had there been progress in his legs? Sitting in his living room, she made him appointments to get his leg brace fixed and to see the dentist. (She would accompany him to both.) She couldn’t help but notice that he needed a haircut. “You say you’re concerned about having game with the ladies,” she said. “How’s your game going to be with a big kicking Afro?” Alex laughed.
“He doesn’t talk like that with me,” said his grandfather, Jeremiah Matthews, half-listening in from the kitchen. “She gives him a lift. And I don’t always know how to get through things, who to talk to — she took some of the burden off of me.”
If Alex connects with Ms. Goldstock Wright, it’s no doubt because she might be the one person as impatient as he is to make progress. “She just does things faster,” he said. “I don’t have to ask her to do it. She just does it.”
At times, she seemed even more impatient than Alex: Why wasn’t he getting out of the apartment more in the wheelchair? Why were his grades so low? He occasionally responded with silence and folded arms. She pushes, he admitted later. “But then I start realizing that she’s helping,” he said. “And so it’s not frustrating.” Her chief goal right now: daily rehab for Alex, as opposed to the three sessions a week he now attends.
Health care hurdle-jumper: It ought to be a profession, but who would pay for it? So the most vulnerable go without, or hope against hope that the person who has taken on the job, unofficially, won’t quit, that good intentions won’t fade, or the conditions for the relationship won’t change.
Does Alex ever worry that Ms. Goldstock Wright will one day stop calling? “Nah,” said Alex, flashing that same ready smile.
Saying goodbye, standing at his walker, he wrapped a long arm around her shoulders in an awkward half-hug. He knew she would come back, and as fast as she is, it wouldn’t be fast enough.
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/nyregion/01bigcity.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Cellphone in New Role: Loyalty Card
Sam Altman, left, and Alok Deshpande, co-founders of Loopt.
Loyalty cards — those little paper cards that promise a free sandwich or coffee after 10 purchases, but instead get lost or forgotten — are going mobile. And merchants are looking for ways to marry the concept to games that customers can play to earn more free items and, it is hoped, spend more money.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Checking locations of places to shop for possible reward points on the Loopt Star mobile game.
Instead of collecting paper cards and fumbling through wallets at the cash register, customers are increasingly using their cellphones to track their visits and purchases, and receive rewards.
Some start-ups, like CardStar and CardBank, store existing loyalty cards on cellphones with scannable barcodes. And companies including Motorola and a start-up called mFoundry are providing retailers with the technology to build cellphone loyalty cards.
Loopt is one of several start-ups — including Foursquare, Shopkick and Gowalla — that are experimenting with ways to use cellphones to bridge the digital and physical worlds and turn the tasks of everyday life, like buying coffee and running errands, into a game.
On Tuesday, Loopt, one of the first services to let people use cellphones to share their location with friends, is taking its concept a step further by introducing Loopt Star, a mobile game that rewards people for frequently checking in to particular places. People will compete to earn “achievements” and become “boss” of certain locations, and Gap, Burger King and Universal Music plan to use Loopt Star to reward loyal customers.
For retailers, these games and apps offer a new form of mobile marketing that goes well beyond a minibanner ad by rewarding consumers, individually, for their loyalty. And unlike paper cards, stores can use the data they collect from people’s cellphones to learn more about who their customers are and how they behave.
No one in advertising has ever been able to figure out how to do “one-to-one, real-time marketing,” said Drew Sievers, a former advertising executive who is now co-founder and chief executive of mFoundry. “The mobile phone is where that will actually probably happen. It’s the only thing connected and always with you.”
Loopt has offered search or banner ads on its mobile apps, but advertisers told the company that instead, they wanted a mobile loyalty card, said Sam Altman, Loopt’s co-founder and chief executive.
“Instead of advertising with a banner, it’s offering users incentives for good behavior,” he said. “They’re trying to turn existing customers into better ones.”
Loopt Star is Loopt’s effort to play catch-up with some of these other services, particularly with Foursquare. Loopt, which started in 2005, was one of the first companies to popularize broadcasting one’s whereabouts to friends. But Foursquare, founded last year, is a popular newcomer. It turned location-sharing into a game with its badges, mayorships and rewards, and into a marketing tool for businesses, including Tasti D-lite and Pepsi, to track and reward loyal customers.
Loopt has 3.4 million registered users to Foursquare’s 1.4 million users. But Foursquare’s gaming elements are quickly attracting new users. Mr. Altman said Loopt built Loopt Star in response, and last year acquired a start-up called GraffitiGeo that builds similar games.
“We respectfully just sort of knocked off those gaming elements, but added new things,” he said.
People register for Loopt Star using their Facebook log-ins, so they can share their location and compete in the game with their Facebook friends and alert their friends about recent purchases and special deals.
Retailers can choose which actions they want to reward and what the prizes will be. Gap is sending customers a 25 percent discount coupon after they check in twice to a Gap store. Burger King is offering a soda with a sandwich or a coffee with a breakfast sandwich to people who check in three times. Universal Music will send five free songs to people who check into any bar along with two friends.
Stanford University is using Loopt Star over graduation weekend. When students check in to at least two of the official school events, they will get a prize. Once they have left Stanford, they will be able to use Loopt to find fellow alumni, said Ian Hsu, Stanford’s director of Internet media outreach.
Starbucks will use Loopt Star to give frequent customers an honorary barista badge, symbolized by a green apron. Starbucks also offers a barista badge on Foursquare, where people compete to become “mayors” of places, and the coffee chain is giving mayors $1 off Frappuccinos.
Starbucks has its own iPhone loyalty card, built by mFoundry. Customers collect stars in a cup on their phones every time they make a purchase and get a free drink every 15 visits.
Starbucks could use the data from the cellphones to send personalized offers, like a chai Frappuccino coupon in the afternoon to people who drink chai lattes in the morning, said Brady Brewer, vice president at Starbucks overseeing brand loyalty and the Starbucks card.
“We’ve tried to build a program around recognition — knowing who you are and what you like — and in some ways, that relevance comes from knowing about purchases from data” collected from the loyalty program, he said.
Shopkick is creating a program, expected to begin later this year, that will reward people for showing up and spending money at any of the partner stores, which include American Eagle Outfitters, Best Buy and Macy’s.
Cyriac Roeding, Shopkick’s co-founder and chief executive, says these types of mobile apps are a counterweight to comparison-shopping apps, like RedLaser, that drive people to other stores. “You have to find new ways to keep your customers engaged and bring them back, because you know there are apps that drive them out of the store instead of into it,” he said.
Another competitor, Gowalla, is getting traction. InterContinental Hotels Group is using Gowalla to give gift cards and airline miles to loyal customers of its hotels, and the New Jersey Nets gave prizes like jerseys and tickets to fans who checked into the arena or sports bars to watch games.
Tristan Walker, head of business development at Foursquare, said, “Everybody will be doing similar things in the future, but we hope to really build compelling solutions and innovate in ways that other people aren’t.” Businesses “see Foursquare as their new digital loyalty card of choice,” he added.
Most users will eventually choose one service, because they are unlikely to pull out their cellphones and check in using multiple services each time they arrive at a destination. And many other people are uncomfortable publicly sharing their location at all.
Mr. Altman is convinced that they will change their minds if they are rewarded for their patronage. “People are getting more comfortable so fast,” he said. “They see the upside is huge — run-ins with friends and cool specials.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/technology/01loopt.html?th&emc=th
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
NY skyscraper wins highest "green" certification
(Reuters) – The U.S. Green Building Council gave the Bank of America Tower its highest rating for environmental performance and sustainability on Thursday, meaning New York City’s second-tallest building is also its greenest.
The 54-story building completed in 2008 at a cost of $2 billion became the first commercial high-rise to win the “platinum” certification from the non-profit council that promotes environmentally friendly construction and design.
The certification was based on water and energy efficiency, indoor air quality, the environmental friendliness of construction materials and other criteria.
At 1,200 feet, it is the second tallest building in the city after the Empire State Building. Years before the building opened, Bank of America and developers from the Durst Organization decided to create an example at the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.
“They came to us and said they wanted to build the largest environmentally responsible building they could. That was our goal from the get-go,” said project architect Serge Appel of Cook+Fox Architects.
The building has its own 4.6-megawatt co-generation plant, and its floor-to-ceiling windows reduce the need for artificial lighting. The roof captures rainwater. Waste water from the sinks is recycled. The men’s rooms even have waterless urinals. The measures save an estimated 8 million to 9 million gallons of water per year.
The steel was made of 87 percent recycled material, and the concrete from 45 percent recycled content — in this case, blast furnace slag.
The project broke ground in 2004, four years before the financial crisis that led to Bank of America acquiring Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, and the accolade comes as Wall Street’s reputation with the public is poor.
“It’s helped with employee morale. In terms of how the financial services industry is seen by the public … a more buoyant economy and lower unemployment will make a bigger difference in our image,” said Anne Finucane, the bank’s global strategy and marketing officer.
Developers say the lower carbon dioxide content in the air helps people avoid that drowsy feeling in the afternoon, and spectacular views from higher floors are enough to keep eyes open.
“There’s a psychological advantage to being able to see outside the building,” architect Appel said. “It’s very different from the way buildings were built in the 1980s with tinted glass windows. It always looked like it was stormy outside.”
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64J3LW20100520?type=domesticNews
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
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