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This one begins, like a dime detective novel from the nineteen-thirties, in a dingy bar in lower Manhattan. And, like a lot of New York stories, though it may touch on history and backroom politics, sex and the supernatural, though it throws together billionaires and scrap-lumber salesmen, city councilmen and scholars of the occult, it's mostly about real estate—and the stubborn allure of old buildings and their secrets.
Ten years ago, a bar owner named David McWater took out a lease on a building at 211 Pearl Street. It was a plain brick structure in the Greek Revival style, with granite pillars along its base and a thin classical cornice. Its windows, three to a floor, once had sweeping views of New York Harbor—out across church spires and wooden piers, steam ferries and sailing ships, to the orchards and farms of Brooklyn. Now they looked out on the canyoned streets of the financial district. A family from New Jersey had owned the building for decades and had allowed it to fall into disrepair. The floors were layered with plywood and carpet, the walls with wood panelling. (The first floor had been an Irish bar called Rosie O'Grady's.) Next door, at 213, the building it leaned against was in even worse shape: a jagged crack ran down the length of one wall, it was later discovered, slowly separating the façade from the sides.
Still, it was a sweet deal. The building at 211 had five floors, the rent was only five thousand dollars a month, and the lease was for twenty years. It was strictly a commercial property, and McWater was required to fix it up, but he had planned to do so anyway. His two partners, Ray Deter and Dennis Zentek, owned a popular beer bar in the East Village. They wanted to re-create the bar on a more lavish scale, with exposed brick and antique fixtures. It would make an elegant speakeasy, they thought, for young bankers and lawyers—a ghost of the neighborhood's past.
Dave and I have known each other since our high-school days, in Oklahoma, twenty-five years ago. He was a skinny basketball player then, with feathered brown hair and a loose, cocky walk. He's bulkier now and more imposing, with ruddy cheeks and a raucous laugh and eyebrows that beetle up when he's delivering a punch line—the kind of loudmouthed operator you can imagine in a tuxedo and a bowler hat, carving up beefsteaks near Tammany Hall. As an undergraduate at New York University, Dave paid his tuition by running a sports agency from his dorm room. (One of his clients was John Starks, who went on to become a star for the New York Knicks.) Later, he was a regular at the World Series of Poker. Along the way, he managed to become the majority owner of eleven bars in downtown Manhattan, even persuading me to invest in one on the Lower East Side. Compared with most real-estate deals, he told me, 211 Pearl seemed like easy money. "It was a beautiful thing," he said.
His crew spent the next few months gutting the building. Beneath the linoleum, they found oak boards and terra-cotta pavers; above the acoustic tile, a pressed-tin ceiling. When they pulled down the wooden panelling, the bricks behind it, salvaged from earlier buildings, read like a miniature history of Manhattan: ragged courses near the bottom, from Dutch buildings of the sixteen-hundreds; larger bricks higher up, still flecked with paint, from British homes; the newest courses on top, cleanly laid in the eighteen-thirties, when the clay shores of the Hudson River were lined with kilns. Best of all was a piece of brickwork on the first floor: a cryptic arrangement of three pyramids, like the mark of some mystic order. "It was a strange thing," Dave told me. "But it made a great conversation piece: 'What the hell is that?' "
Then the money ran out. Dave had hoped that the renovation would cost about a quarter of a million dollars. But after two years he'd spent twice that much, his partners had pulled out, and the bar was only half finished. What's more, the building's easygoing owners had sold it to a shadowy corporation called Chicago 4. Dave had been hearing talk on the street of a developer snatching up property in the neighborhood. The plan, he'd heard, was to demolish the whole block and replace it with a high-rise condominium and office complex. The new owners couldn't afford to wait twenty years for Dave's lease to run out, it seemed. They needed 211 torn down.
New York demolishes more old buildings every month than most American cities have standing. In a single week last September, the list of scheduled demolitions ran to six pages; in an average year, about two thousand buildings are torn down. As you walk through neighborhoods like SoHo or Greenwich Village, it's easy to imagine Manhattan as one vast historic district, camera-ready for any period from the Civil War on. In fact, fewer than three per cent of the city's million or so buildings are protected as landmarks.
Lower Manhattan is both the city's oldest neighborhood and its most rebuilt. "It seems like they knocked everything down there fifty years ago," Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, told me recently. If this is where New York began, it's also where it has most had to reinvent itself. "That's the peculiar pattern of development in Manhattan," Bankoff said. "It spreads north and then it doubles back—and then it does it again and again."
A few months after 211 Pearl Street was sold to Chicago 4, Dave McWater received a legal notice from his new landlords—the first of several. By failing to make necessary repairs and by using the building as a residence, the company argued, Dave was violating his lease. The complaints grew more specific as time went on—one claimed that the elevator shaft wasn't properly sealed and that some windows had not been replaced in a "first class" manner—but the essential message stayed the same: the building had become an eyesore.
"I said to the judge, 'This is horseshit,' " Dave told me. " 'They're going to make me pay forty thousand dollars to renovate a building they're tearing down.' " The real reason for the lawsuits, he said, was the demolition clause in his lease. If the building was torn down before its term ran out, he was entitled to up to a million dollars in compensation. "They were taking a shot," he said. "Maybe I'm a loser and they can just evict me. If not, maybe they can harass me so much that they can talk me down from the million dollars."
Dave managed to fend off the lawsuits for a while. But by the spring of 2000 he had spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and he still had some expensive repairs to make. He decided to fight back. No. 211 Pearl seemed to be one of the oldest buildings left in lower Manhattan. If he could dig up its history, he thought, the city might just declare it a landmark. In the meantime, the mere possibility might scare the owner into settling.
He thought he'd give Alan Solomon a call.
Al lives in the East Village, a few blocks from Dave's office on Avenue A. He has been, at various times, a real-estate agent, footwear salesman, environmental activist, T-shirt designer, candy vender, and amateur historian. He now sells reclaimed lumber and spends his days visiting demolition sites, scouring the wreckage for things to salvage. Al is small and slight, with short black hair that he combs straight back. He has pale, finely molded features, a longish nose, and green eyes capable of sudden, unnerving directness. When he's on the hunt for material—joists from a police-horse stable on Hester Street, say, or beams from an abandoned snuff warehouse in New Jersey—he walks with his shoulders squared, his baseball cap pulled down low, and weaves his way through scaffolding and plywood barriers, construction pits and chain-link fences, as content amid the city's detritus as any raccoon.
Al has spent his life among junk. He grew up north of Boston, where his father owns one of the largest scrap-metal yards in New England, Solomon Metals. As a boy, Al used to go there on weekends and rummage through piles of radiators and barrels of broken pipes. He'd fish out a few treasures—copper pots, pewter doorstops, Art Deco ashtrays, and brass molds from toymakers—and sell them at the flea market next to the local drive-in. "All this stuff you see in SoHo or Tribeca nowadays, in artifact stores," he told me. "A lot of it, thirty years ago, was just flowing into scrap."
Al's father had inherited the business from his father, and for a while Al seemed likely to do the same. He got a degree in finance from Boston University, worked for a bank in Ireland for a few months, then came home. He worked at the scrap yard for eight years, mostly processing metals and dealing with customers. Then, in 1996, he moved to New York. "I'd just turned thirty," he told me. "I wasn't married, and I was sort of thinking, If I'm ever going to try and do something, this is the time." What, exactly, that something was he didn't know: "It was into the unknown." Al arrived in January and took a job in Macy's shoe department to get him through the winter. He found a rentstabilized apartment, twelve feet square, and built a sleeping loft with old safety barricades, striped orange and white. Then he did what he'd always done: walked around the city and found pieces of it to save.
I'd known Al a little when I lived in Boston, and after I moved to New York I periodically got word of his newest ventures. Our friend Todd Wiener remembers having a beer with Al in the Village one night and talking at length about tires. They were clogging up landfills, Al said, and ought to be put to better use. Todd asked him what he meant. "You could use them to make yarmulkes, for instance," Al said. Then he reached into his backpack and pulled out a small rubber cap. It was made from scraps of old inner tubes, stitched together with heavy nylon thread. Todd turned it around in his hands for a minute, not sure what to say. It looked like something that Frankenstein's monster might wear if he were Jewish. "Of course, if it goes into production the stitching will have to be a lot nicer," Al said.
Not long afterward, Al developed an interest in manhole covers. The oldest ones in New York dated to the mid-eighteen-hundreds, he found, and were often beautifully embossed. Yet they were regularly sold for scrap. By looking up the city's scrap-metal sales through the Freedom of Information Act, Al located sixty of the covers at a yard in East New York. He bought the lot for three thousand dollars, and brought them to an ironworker in Williamsburg. Then he had them turned into coffee tables. They never sold very well, though: each table weighed more than two hundred pounds.
Al's projects always had the same quirky yet earnest quality back then—part business venture, part recycling effort, part idealistic prank. After 9/11, he spent days walking around the city collecting newspapers in foreign languages. He copied some letters, Arabic script, or ideograms from each one and silk-screened them onto T-shirts in the form of an eye chart. Along the bottom, in small print, he wrote "Peace on Earth."
Dave met him during his gumball period, when Al was installing candy machines in the East Village. (The machines were perched on recycled signposts, and part of the profits went to Amnesty International.) The guy was a little odd, Dave thought, but he seemed to have a talent for research. When Dave hired him to do some genealogical work, Al tracked down Dave's great-great-grandfather in the 1850 Illinois census. "Al was always finding out little things," Dave told me. "He'd just be hanging around the block, and people would tell him these juicy tidbits. He had that whole working-man thing going on." Digging up the history of 211 Pearl Street seemed just the job for him.
Al first tried to verify some of the rumors that Dave had been hearing. He went to the Surrogate's Court building, at 31 Chambers Street, where the city's property records were kept, and spent a few days in a musty room on the third floor, spooling through microfilm. As Dave had suspected, most of the block had changed hands recently. The names on the deeds sometimes had a similar ring—Chicago 4, Atlanta 5—but the buildings all seemed to have different owners. It was only later, when Al showed Dave photocopies he'd made of some lawsuits related to the properties, that the two began to notice a pattern: the same attorneys and staff appeared again and again. Chicago 4 and the others were just fronts. Almost the entire block belonged to a single owner: the Rockrose Development Corp.
Rockrose had made its name, ironically, by resuscitating old buildings like 211 Pearl Street. The company was founded, in 1970, by three brothers from Iran: Kamran, Henry, and Frederick Elghanayan—the first a Harvard Business School graduate, the second a lawyer, the third an engineer. They'd started out in Greenwich Village, converting warehouses and welfare hotels into condominiums, then moved on to larger projects, including an office tower on West Fifty-seventh Street by Cesar Pelli. Pearl Street was their most ambitious project yet: Rockrose hoped to build towers of up to a million square feet on the block, including a new trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange.
"I can't think of any reason that we would need or want to let people know what's going on," Jon McMillan, Rockrose's director of planning, told me recently. "Imagine that you own 213 Pearl and you read in the paper that Rockrose is assembling all of the block to build a new home for the Stock Exchange. The later you hold out, the more money you get." In 1997, he said, when the development was first conceived, Rockrose consulted a survey of lower Manhattan by Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia. None of the Pearl Street buildings were mentioned. "We just looked at them and saw tenement," McMillan said.
Landmarks in New York have to be presented for public review, approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and affirmed by the City Council. The criteria are fairly vague—everything from the Woolworth Building to the Wonder Wheel has made the grade. But most landmarks have at least one of three unusual qualities: great beauty, unique architecture, or enough neighbors in a similar style to form a historic district. No. 211 had none of these. "It didn't have the romance of South Street Seaport or the sex appeal of Wall Street," Al told me. "It was just a place where everyday merchants bought and sold and moved goods." The story of Pearl Street was mostly the story of people like Al.
He spent the next seven years consumed by it. At first, Dave paid him twenty dollars an hour for his research. But as Al's interests grew more esoteric he went off the clock. He examined tax records and nineteenth-century directories, read histories of bricklaying and nail manufacturing. He plowed through archives and libraries in New York, New Haven, Rochester, and Boston. He turned himself into the foremost authority on the history of a single block.
He began with the street—the oldest in New York. It was called Pearl by the Dutch, he learned, when it ran along the East River and was paved with crushed oyster shells. It was crooked then and it's crooked now: a cow path that became, for a while, the city's liveliest thoroughfare. It was the first with running water, the first with natural gas, and the first with electric lights. (Thomas Edison's first power plant was just a block north of 211.) Before the Revolution, the Sons of Liberty met at Fraunces Tavern, at No. 54, where George Washington often took his dinner. When the war was won, the Army celebrated by marching down Pearl Street.
By the eighteen-thirties, New York had begun to feel, for the first time, like the center of the universe. Its population tripled between 1825 and 1850, and the American economy flowed through its port. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, slashed the cost of shipping goods inland, and New York was the primary gateway, via the Hudson, for ocean freight from Europe and Asia. Two-thirds of all imports came through the city.
Pearl Street was the city's wholesale district. Goods would arrive by horse and cart from the docks along Front Street, and get hoisted by pulley into the upper floors of "counting houses," then sold in the stores downstairs. Merchants would come in from towns throughout the Territories, the historian Paul Johnson, who has written widely on nineteenth-century New York, told Al. They would place their orders for the next twelve months—carpets and linens, corkscrews and thimbles, bone china, smelling salts, and teakettles—then head back up the river. Pearl Street was the nation's storefront in those years, the first World Trade Center, as Al later put it, gridlocked with wagons at every working hour: a microcosm of the city to come.
In 1831, the tax records showed, a middle-aged soapmaker named William Colgate built a counting house at 211. The land had had a succession of owners by then, beginning with Cornelis van Tienhoven, a noted Dutch rogue and Indian fighter. An English alehouse had stood nearby for a while, then the home of the skipper of a ship called the Angel Gabriel. But Colgate had something grander in mind. He belonged to a group of Yankee merchants, strict Protestants, who tried to serve as the city's conscience. They were teetotallers and abolitionists, gave great sums to charity, and campaigned to convert the city's prostitutes to chambermaids. "While the guys on Front Street were buying mansions and racehorses, the guys on Pearl Street were rolling money into social causes and the religious press," Johnson says.
Colgate was both an ingenious businessman and a fervent populist. His soap business made him wealthy—it would one day become the Colgate-Palmolive Company—yet he left the Presbyterian Church for the Baptist in order to be closer to ordinary people. Al could find no record of who designed Colgate's counting house, but he suspected that it was Ithiel Town, who founded one of New York's first architectural firms, in 1829. Town was an avid student of architectural history, and he introduced the Greek Revival to the city. (He and his partner, Alexander Jackson Davis, later designed Federal Hall, in Manhattan, and the state capitols of Indiana and North Carolina.) He was the same age as Colgate, moved in the same social circles, and had built a similar counting house down the street for the abolitionist Lewis Tappan. Both buildings had Doric columns, carved stone lintels, and other classical details meant to reflect the country's roots in Greek democracy. Both were designed to embody the dignity of honest labor.
Leafing through old broadsheets and auction announcements, Al was able to track the tenants at 211 over time. Seth Low, one of the founders of Brooklyn, ran a Far East import shop there in the late eighteen-thirties, selling cork, coriander, Turkish opium, and Chinese gongs. Others sold chemicals, hardware, linens, and silks. At one point, Al heard that Herman Melville had written "Bartleby the Scrivener" there. The only evidence for this, however, was that Melville was born on Pearl Street, and that he had compared Bartleby to a bar of Windsor soap—a Colgate brand. ("That seems to be the only product placement in the story," Al said.) Melville also described Bartleby as staring at a brick wall for long periods, and huddling beneath some "Egyptian" masonry—passages that came to seem more telling as time went on.
A few months into his research, Al showed Dave a bar graph that he'd made with a spreadsheet program. It showed every building on Pearl Street in 1834, arranged by location and tax value. Dave's building was one of the highest bars on the page—the fifty-first-most-valuable building in New York, according to Al's examination of city records. It was also one of only a handful of buildings still standing on Pearl Street from that time. In the winter of 1835, a gas pipe burst at the corner of Pearl and Beaver Streets, triggering a fire that swept through seventeen blocks of lower Manhattan and consumed more than six hundred buildings. Nos. 211, 213, and 215 Pearl were north of the fire, and just managed to escape it.
Dave was impressed, and told Rockrose about Al's research. But he never had to apply for landmark status. In October of 2002, Rockrose agreed to pay close to the full compensation in the demolition clause. The company had gathered almost all the land it needed, and, after 9/11, the state began offering cut-rate Liberty bonds to developers. It was time to clear ground. "Part of me wanted to keep going," Dave told me. "But you can only fight billionaires for so long. I was beat. There was cash there, and I was taking it."
Al, though, had just begun. A day or two after Rockrose took possession of 211, Al hand-delivered a sheaf of documents and a "request for evaluation" to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. "It wasn't about Rockrose and me anymore," Dave told me. "Al believed—he honestly believed—that building deserved to be there. And there was no stopping him."
One afternoon not long ago, I visited the scrap lumberyard in Greenpoint where Al was working. (He has since started his own company, Solomon Wood.) I found him at his desk, inside a long, shedlike building, past a sign that read "Dog in Office!! He's cool if you're cool!" Some chunks of refinished pine were sitting in a cardboard box on an armchair, and a book on identifying woods by their cellular structure lay open on the desk. I glanced around at the mahogany furniture and the bottles of old Scotch in the bookcase. "The office isn't indicative of the pay scale," Al said. The room belonged to his boss—those were his family pictures on the shelves—but he hardly used it. Al had moved in four years earlier, an office squatter of sorts, and quietly become the company's prime scout.
The story didn't surprise me. Al has a gift for going unnoticed, then somehow taking charge. He can seem half as clever as he really is. His voice has a low, vague honk to it—an echo of Boston's North Shore—and he tends to get tongue-tied. Most of the time, he can fight his way clear with a flash of oddball wit. But he sometimes stays stuck for long stretches—eyes frozen wide, as if someone had just barked at him in Chinese. As a boy, he told me, he lost his voice a lot. When his mother mentioned this to the family doctor, the doctor said, "Tell him not to talk too much." Al seems to have taken this advice to heart.
Reclaimed lumber had become one of his passions since studying 211 Pearl. More than three trillion board feet of wood have been put into American buildings since 1900, he said. Of that, about a billion and a half board feet are torn out every year. When his boss's father founded the company, in 1933, he got the wood for free—demo crews were happy to have it hauled away. Now the yard paid up to two dollars a board foot for old pine. Weathered hardwood was in such demand that barns across the Midwest were being pulled down for scrap, and eco-conscious celebrities like Bill Gates were using reclaimed wood in their houses. One bar on the Lower East Side was panelled entirely with cypress boards from pickle barrels.
The best reclaimed wood is finer than anything freshly cut, Al said. A few years earlier, he had sold me some old joists for a bookcase I was making. The wood was Southern longleaf pine, four inches thick and heavy with resin. It had twenty growth rings to the inch—twice as many as the plantation pine at Home Depot—and felt hard as oak. When I'd sanded and oiled it, the wood glowed a deep amber and looked nearly translucent. Afterward, Al sent me a Times article that he'd found online, about the building that the joists had been in. It was dated December 13, 1892. "All the shining lights of the east side political world assembled at the opening of the Comanche Club at 207 Bowery last night," it began. "Among those present were Mr. 'Silver Dollar' Smith, Mr. 'Dry Dollar' Sullivan . . . and Barney Rourke, the Napoleon of down-town politics."
The yard was full of such ghosts. Its two-acre lot was covered in piles of blackened boards and splintered beams, interspersed with stacks of new lumber. Al showed me some long, tapered joists from a schoolhouse built in the eighteen-fifties, and others from a nineteenth-century factory in Chinatown. The latter were Eastern white pine, hand-cut in Maine and hauled south by oxcart. The trunks were so long and unwieldy in those days, he said, that the logging roads didn't turn left until they got to the city's latitude. Across the yard, a forklift had deposited a stack of lumber under a hangar to dry. Al pointed to some strips of molding, delicately fluted, about twelve feet up. They came from the Marquand stable, on East Seventy-third Street (now a two-family house), which was once owned by Joseph Pulitzer. "I call it Pulitzer Prize pine," Al said.
To Al's eyes, the city was a vast boneyard. There was enough old-growth timber buried in its buildings to make a national park, he said; enough stone to fill a thousand quarries. Sing Sing marble, Onondaga limestone, brownstone from Paterson, New Jersey, and Dorchester, Canada—the latter so hard it could hold an edge for a hundred years; everything cut too thick and built too stout, for fear that it might not bear up in buildings of such dizzying height. Five full floors! Even the nails had stories to tell. They were hand-forged in the eighteenth century, slab-cut from strips of iron in the nineteenth, and snipped from rounded wires in the twentieth. Al dug them out with a crowbar and sent them to an iron yard. In the scrap business, history was just another raw material.
While we were talking, a truck clattered into the yard and pulled up next to the office. A pair of construction workers climbed out—one tall and slope-shouldered, the other short and squat. "This should be interesting," Al said. The scrap yard had recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and his boss's son had started a lumberyard, taking some of the company's employees and clients with him. "We had cops down here six months ago, breaking up a fight," Al had told me. "I'm not sure how I've managed to stay around. It's like Masada." Two weeks before, Al's boss had bought some beams of Douglas fir from the guys in the truck for two thousand dollars. But the check had bounced, and now they'd come to collect.
When the larger of the two men saw Al, he ambled over and laid a thick forearm around his shoulders. He bent his head down to Al's ear—he was a good six inches taller—and spoke to him like a teacher informing a young boy that recess was over. "Alan, I want to talk to you," he said. "What's the problem here? Seriously, what's the problem? You don't want to pay the money? Your boss don't want to pay the money?"
"Listen . . . "
"Big operation on Metropolitan Avenue—you got a fuckin' million dollars of stock over here. Explain to us what the fuckin' problem is!" He was shouting now, his nose inches from Al's. His sidekick stood behind him, slapping the back of his hand into his palm and repeating the words at a higher pitch. "We want the fuckin' money! (Give me the fuckin' money!) There's no fuckin' games with us. (No games!) I don't want to hear no bullshit. I want cash. Done. If someone's gonna rob me two thousand dollars, I'm gonna get satisfaction out of it. I'll break your face and your boss's face, too."
"That's against the law."
"I want my fuckin' money! (I want cash, now!) It's ridiculous. It's adolescent is what it is. You see my hands? You see my hands? I go to work every fuckin' day. I'm gonna fuck somebody, I'd rather tell you to your face: Go fuck yourself. Don't beat around the bush like a fuckin' squirrel, like a fuckin' rat, like a weasel. Weasels operate this way."
Al stood there quietly, eyes peering out from under his cap, and waited for the noise to subside. ("Did he call me a rabbit?" he asked me later, after his boss had come out to talk to the men. "No, he called me a squirrel. But my boss called me a little fuckin' rabbit once.") He was used to this sort of thing. When he was growing up, even some of the best junk yards operated on a kind of understanding between sellers and buyers. One side would try to skimp on material—mixing some iron in with the copper, for instance—the other on weight. "It was almost like a magic trick," Al said. "You're sliding these weights across the scale, deducting pounds, using your body motion to conceal it."
He watched his boss and the two men drive off to the bank, to get the two thousand dollars, and shook his head. He was tired of working this way. He'd read a history of the scrap industry, "Cash for Trash," that traced its swindles back to the early eighteen-hundreds. If he'd become a little obsessed with 211 Pearl Street, he said, it was because it told a different kind of story about American business.
When William Colgate built his counting house, in 1831, the city was as corrupt as it would ever be. Pickpockets and confidence men prowled the streets, and every auctioneer had a shill or two in the audience. (In 1834, a local merchant anonymously published a memoir called "The Perils of Pearl Street.") Men like Colgate and Lewis Tappan were a deliberate counterforce to all that vice—"an outpost of evangelism in the middle of sin city," as Paul Johnson put it.
To Al, 211 was more than a charming vestige of old New York. It was proof that you could make a buck without screwing your neighbor."I know that's not enough to make the building a landmark," Al told me. "I knew that from the beginning. And certainly Rockrose had the power to demolish it. But, if I was going to try to save something, why not that?"
Less than a month after Rockrose bought out Dave McWater, in the fall of 2002, scaffolding began to rise around 211. None of the buildings on the block had yet been torn down, but Al had heard that 211 was to become an entrance to an underground parking garage. An eighteen-foot Dumpster appeared along the curb, and blaze-orange signs, warning of poison, were stuck on the walls. "When they put up the rat-baiting signs, you know the wheels of demolition are in motion," Al told me.
In early November, the Landmarks Preservation Commission began to review Al's documents on 211, and to survey similar buildings in the area. But such reviews usually take months, and Rockrose quickly applied for a demolition permit. Before the commission could decide whether to save the building, the Department of Buildings had granted permission to destroy it. Rockrose's secrecy had done its work. The development, Jon McMillan said, "was under the radar."
And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Early in February, 2003, bright-red flyers began to appear throughout the neighborhood: "Rally to Save 211 Pearl Street." Al had spent the previous few weeks on the phone and at his fax machine. He'd called historians and architects, preservationists and politicians, and drummed up an impressive roster of supporters. Letters had come in from Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields ("a matter of grave concern") and Representative Jerrold Nadler ("an exceptional example of early Greek Revival architecture"), from State Senator Martin Connor ("may be of major historic importance") and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver ("worthy of individual landmark status"). The building at 211 was "a rare surviving relic of the process that made New York into America's great city," Paul Johnson wrote. "The notion that it should be demolished to make room for a driveway is silly. New York City has more respect for itself than that."
On the day of the rally, a blizzard struck. Lower Manhattan was ankle-deep in slush, and Pearl Street was a wind tunnel of pelting sleet and snow. By lunchtime, only about twenty-five people had gathered at the coffee shop across from 211. "It was kind of a huddle," Al told me. Still, among the protesters were Senator Connor and Alan J. Gerson, a city councilman, and their speeches had the desired effect.
Within a few weeks, a story on the building had appeared in the Times. By spring, 211 Pearl had been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places. More important, the State Historic Preservation Office had reviewed Al's materials and come to a decision. It had no direct power to preserve the building, but it did oversee the use of Liberty bonds. Rockrose had been granted a hundred and seventy million dollars' worth of the bonds. In order to keep them, the state office declared, the developer would have to preserve the façades of both 211 and 215 Pearl Street (213 was still privately owned). The rest of the buildings could go.
Once, this might have been victory enough. Even landmarks, like the Hearst Building on West Fifty-seventh Street, are occasionally gutted and reduced to false fronts—"façadicide," it's sometimes called. But all that Al could see was how much would be lost. Walking through 211 one day, he stopped in front of the strange brickwork that Dave's crew had uncovered five years earlier. It was built into what looked like a pipe chase: a thin column that jutted from the left wall, about five yards from the entrance. There were three pyramids arranged in a column: the top and the bottom were formed of bricks laid on end; the center triangle was carved into the wall, and the cuts were filled with mortar. The design was about ten feet tall and three feet wide—too elaborate for a tradesman's mark and too uncommon. No architect or workman that Al knew had seen anything like it. More than a century and a half earlier, it seemed, someone had stood at that spot and laid these stones just so. Why?
The first time I saw "the artifact," as Al had taken to calling it, was in late winter of last year. Al had written to say that he was making a last push to preserve the brickwork, and asked if I would like to see it. I agreed, though a little uneasily. I'd begun to wonder if his obsession with 211 wasn't edging into something less rational. His talk of Colgate and the Great Fire of 1835 had gradually given way to discussions of esoteric philosophy and Jungian psychology. He'd been spending a lot of time at the New York Public Library and the Masonic Grand Lodge—a hulking high-rise on West Twenty-third Street, with spooky Egyptian murals and ceremonial chambers—studying books on hermeticism and sacred geometry. When he came out, his ring binders were filled with pyramids, Fibonacci sequences, and elegant gyres that twisted in on themselves.
Early on, I knew, Al was just trying to hold on to the building a little longer—grasping for another argument that might allow him to save it. But the more he studied the symbol the more it seemed to fire his imagination. If the building was a window onto New York's early businesses, he came to believe, the artifact offered a glimpse of its beliefs.
The city in the mid-eighteen-hundreds was as much a religious crossroads as a mercantile one. Cults and superstitions of every stripe passed through on their way up or down the Erie Canal: Mormonism, Shakerism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and the fiery revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The city was too cosmopolitan to be seized by any one movement for long—they flared brightest in the Burnt-Over District, around Rochester and Buffalo. But every heresy had its moment here. People spoke to the dead and travelled to astral planes, practiced alchemy and sought transcendence through sex. "It was the most creative period of religious invention since the seventeenth century," Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, told me. "And I'm persuaded we don't know the half of it."
The merchants of Pearl Street were more hardheaded than most, but their sobriety sometimes led to extremes. Finneyites launched temperance crusades, hoping to pave the way for a thousand years of Christian perfection. Millerites left their jobs and wandered the streets, preaching apocalypse. (Jesus, their calculations showed, would return on October 22, 1844.) Elijah Pierson, who ran a business at 211 before Colgate bought the land, declared himself the prophet Elijah the Tishbite, spoke to God on an omnibus, and tried to raise his wife from the dead. When that didn't work, he joined a partner-swapping religious cult in Ossining. "It was just a kind of spiritual hothouse," Paul Johnson, who co-authored a book on the Ossining cult with Sean Wilentz, told me. "There were people walking around claiming that they were Jesus, and others were getting arrested for witchcraft. And it was really tough to figure out who was crazy." When a newly anointed prophet arrived at the Battery to preach, Johnson said, he had to fight for space.
Arcane symbols are common to most cults and fraternal orders, and pyramids were much on the public's mind in the eighteen-thirties, when many Americans first saw pictures of Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns. So Al's research cast a wide net. He sent letters to the Odd Fellows, the American Bible Society, and the Carpenter's Guild in Philadelphia. He made calls to historians at Princeton, Columbia, Hamilton College, and the University of Michigan. One scholar said that the symbol looked vaguely kabbalistic. Another tied it to the holy trinities of Egypt, Babylon, and Israel. Still another said that it might be a Biblical code—the number of bricks in each row could refer to book, chapter, and verse. Most said that it looked Masonic, but Thomas Savini, the director of the library at the Grand Lodge, was unconvinced. There was no record of Colgate's having been a Mason, he said. Besides, the order preferred to meet in public lodges—not to carve secret symbols into walls. "That seems more Hollywood Mason than real Mason," he added.
By the spring of 2003, demolition had begun, and Al was no closer to a final answer. Even the guys in the demo crew had a theory: the symbol was an Illuminati shrine, they said. Maybe a hunk of gold was buried behind it. "I'd had some notion that if I got enough people to comment, by some sort of mathematical process I'd come up with an answer," Al told me. "But I just had no clue. Maybe it was a little unrealistic. You weren't going to send them books of sacred geometry and get them to turn the bulldozers off."
When I arrived at Pearl Street one morning last February, most of the block had been levelled. Nos. 213 and 215 were still teetering on their foundations, but 211 was an empty shell: only the sidewalls and the façade were left. The artifact was intact for now, but a crew was coming to tear down the wall that day. Al was there to salvage what he could.
I found him out front, hunched against the cold, wearing a woollen cap and oversized gloves. He had spent the past few weeks trying to tie up the last loose threads of his research, he said. On one memorable morning, he had even brought a psychic to 211 Pearl Street, on the premise that an occult symbol ought to be examined at least once on its own terms. Tall and pale, with long black tresses and wearing a fur-lined overcoat, she had floated about for a while and held conversations with the bricks. The building was filled with an "enormous sadness," she said. Then she asked Al if one of the architects had lost a child. (He said he didn't know, but that there had been a double homicide there in the sixties, when the building was a Chinese restaurant.) When she was done, she concluded that the artifact was a "retired portal"—a transmitter of ancient teachings, now defunct.
Al had come up with a more convincing theory. In the previous seven years, he'd gone from scrap salesman to scholar. He had exchanged hypotheses with professors at the Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, at the University of Amsterdam ("Hogwarts for postgrads," he called it), presented a paper on the symbol at the University of California, Davis, and given a talk at the Royal Library in The Hague. The key to the symbol, he said, seemed to lie in the work of Ithiel Town, the architect. Town was famous, in his time, for having the largest private library in the country—more than eleven thousand volumes. Among them, Al discovered, were works of magic, alchemy, and esoteric philosophy that dated to the Middle Ages. There was no appreciable evidence that Town's dabblings had carried over into his work. But one day, while looking through a book on Town's buildings, Al came across a passage that referred to some mathematical sketches Town had made. The sketches, Al later discovered, were kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale.
The Beinecke is a Rubik's Cube-like structure, built without windows, to protect its collections from the sun. Natural light seeps in only through the thin-cut marble walls, suffusing the rooms with a golden glow. Town's notebook arrived in a cardboard box, its pages bound with a red ribbon. The paper was brittle and faintly jaundiced with age, but the drawings, stippled in India ink, were perfectly clear: pyramids, gyres, and golden rectangles—just like those in Al's ring binders.
For Al, though, the true epiphany came later, a few blocks away. The same book that had sent him to the Beinecke had contained a footnote that referred to a portrait of Town. The painting had once belonged to Yale but was now hanging in a church of Town's design, at the center of the New Haven green. Al found the portrait in a dusty, dimly lit corner of the vestibule. It showed the architect sitting in his study, surrounded by books, blueprints, and illuminated manuscripts. Near the center, beside an open book of psalms, Al could just make out a notebook covered in geometric drawings. One of them showed a set of interlocking triangles: "a near-exact match," Al later wrote, for the symbol at 211 Pearl Street.
Now all of Al's esoteric reading and the months spent staring, Bartleby-like, at the bricks seemed to come together. Town was both a Christian and a student of the esoteric, he reasoned, so the symbol must have elements of both traditions. The triangle at its center might represent the Holy Trinity; those above and below it, the old alchemical symbols for earth and cosmos, fire and water—the dualities that define existence. In the Middle Ages, Christ was sometimes called the Universal Alchemist: he who transmuted water into wine, bread into flesh, leaden hearts into gold. Perhaps that's what was meant here. Pearl Street was all about business, but Colgate and Town wanted something more. Their symbol was a kind of philosopher's stone, Al concluded. It was a reminder, in plain brick and mortar, that mere commerce could be transformed by ethics and charity.
Or so he liked to believe. "With this thing, there's always a sense that the more you talk about it the less you say," he told me that morning on Pearl Street. The artifact stood a few feet away. Earlier that week, after considerable lobbying from Al and the office of Councilman Gerson, Rockrose had paid for the brickwork to be sawed free from the wall. It had been crated and injected with foam, and encircled with nylon straps. Now, as we watched, an excavator shovel bent down and lifted it gingerly from its moorings. It remained suspended for a moment, high above the construction site, as if no one knew quite what to do with it. Then the shovel swung over and deposited it on a flatbed truck, bound for a warehouse in the Bronx.
"I kept telling Al, 'This is the stupidest, most boring thing I've ever heard,' " Jon McMillan told me. "But he just kept slogging on. It was his personal mission to get this thing saved whether anyone cared or not." He shook his head. "It was kind of charming and impressive in a way," he said. After 211 was gutted, in 2003, Al hung around the demolition site for days, gathering all the scrap lumber. "The funny thing was, he tried to sell it right back to us later," McMillan said. "He just never gives up."
We were sitting in the lobby of 2 Gold Street, the first of two new high-rises on the block. McMillan, who is fifty, was lounging on a sofa, beneath a map of old New York, showing me some computer renderings of the development. He has pale-blue eyes and wispy brown hair, lightly combed over. His honeyed tan glowed nicely against his cream-colored shirt, and his slender frame had an elegant slouch to it, like the stem of a clay pipe. As he spoke, his voice rose and fell quietly, and his hand traced curves in the air.
This was the last undeveloped land in lower Manhattan, he said—"a golden opportunity." Rockrose had managed to clear eight structures from the site, but it had been too late to get the new Stock Exchange building. (It ended up on Broad Street.) Instead, the company had decided to erect two residential towers, one of fifty-two stories, the other of twenty-eight. "I was fascinated by the idea of sky culture," McMillan said. "There are so few social amenities down here that people have had to colonize the tops of these buildings. When you get up there, you look down at all these incredibly romantic rooftops and people sunbathing. It's a very sexy scene."
McMillan and I spent the next hour touring the tower—a glass-and-steel structure of "excruciating banality," as Andrew Dolkart, the architectural historian whose survey of lower Manhattan Rockrose consulted, described it. It was designed to appeal to young professionals, McMillan said, so rents were low by Manhattan standards—a little more than three thousand dollars a month for a one-bedroom. Here and there, bits of old buildings that once stood on the site had been incorporated into the design: a classical pediment from a bank, for instance. But Rockrose's plan to preserve three façades on Pearl Street had fallen through. Nos. 213 and 215 had since been bought by another developer, the Lam Group, which wasn't using Liberty bonds. Rebuilding the façades was still an option, but someone else might have to pick up the tab. "Where is Al Solomon when we need him?" McMillan said.
We stepped onto a balcony on the third floor, and looked out over the remains of 211. Its sidewalls were gone now, and the back of the façade had been stiffened with girders and corrugated steel. On the first floor, the granite pillars had been knocked out like two front teeth, making way for the driveway to the underground garage. Below us, in the construction pit, a crew was preparing to lay the foundation for the second tower, next to piles of broken bricks from the counting houses. "I kind of like the idea of saving only the façade," McMillan said. "It somehow makes it seem more important, that it was worth doing this fancy engineering to preserve it." He paused and cocked his head. "From most angles, it's hard to tell that it's only a façade," he said.
Nostalgia is a fool's game in New York. Every building here stands on the bones of others, often more beautiful. Every generation erases a little collective memory, convinced that it has something better with which to replace it. Had the cycle stopped when Whitman groused about New York's "pull-down-and-build-over-again spirit," or when Wharton wrote that the city of her youth had vanished like Atlantis, no skyscraper would be standing now. Still, sometimes we lose more than we gain. Structures like 2 Gold Street have none of the giddy ambition of the Chrysler Building. They aren't meant to reinvent the city; they're simply "value engineered" to squeeze the most square footage from the least cost. New Yorkers used to build as if every tower were the last. Now we build as if it were only the first.
A few days after I spoke to McMillan, Al and I drove up to the Bronx to see the artifact. The warehouse in which it was stored, at Al's expense, was near the East River, in the shadow of an overpass of the Bruckner Expressway. It was surrounded by grizzled brick lumber mills and cast-iron lofts—squint your eyes and you could see lower Manhattan fifty years ago. Inside, a grayish light filtered through a bank of grimy, wire-reinforced windows, and rows of wooden crates stretched off into the dim distance. The warehouse was used mainly for art work, the manager told us. "Chuck Barris, that guy from 'The Gong Show,' keeps his stuff here." The artifact lay on the floor to the left, between a Greek mosaic and a nine-foot bronze of what looked like the Michelin Man. "We paid extra for the guard," Al said.
He pulled a few screws from the crate and pried open the cover. The artifact had become more mysterious in the previous few months, he said. Some people had suggested that it might have been built after the counting house, by a later owner or tenant. So Al had brought in three experts to analyze its bricks and mortar. The first, from Fordham University, had found that the bricks were quite old—probably from before 1850. The second, from Columbia, had found that the mortar was "consistent with historic mortars." But a third, more detailed study, by a private firm called Testwell Laboratories, had found that the mortar was modern: it contained a type of cement first developed in the nineteen-fifties.
So what was it? An original piece by Town, a reconstruction of one, or a modern sculpture made with salvaged stones? The symbol had become a Rorschach test, Al said, an inkblot. You could see in it any belief or time period that you wished. He reached into the crate and snapped off a piece of the mortar. "Is it sophisticated or is it crude?" he said. "Is it lead or is it gold?"
We sat in the faint light for a while and stared at the bricks, though no Egyptian mysteries unfolded for the moment. "I have no idea what the symbol means," Sean Wilentz had told me. "And that's another reason to keep it. Because New York, to me, is becoming less and less mysterious. Its ghosts, its revenants, they don't have a place to walk anymore. They are being squeezed out. And this is a little place where they can gather. I don't mean to sound like an occultist, but a little bit of strangeness is important to Manhattan. And this thing is strange."
Al dragged the cover over the crate and screwed it back down. There'd been talk of reinstalling the artifact on Pearl Street, he said, as a historical exhibit. But if that fell through he could probably find a place for it. By now, the wood he'd salvaged from 211 was scattered across the country. He'd sold some to Calvin Klein for an apartment in Miami, some to Julian Schnabel for his place in the West Village, and some to a set designer for a music video by Madonna and Britney Spears. He was happiest, though, about the pieces he'd sold to a crew at Ground Zero. They were laying the foundation for the Freedom Tower and needed something to shore it up. He had just what they wanted, he said, and he told them the story of a little building on Pearl Street. ♦


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Flights » From Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (ADD-Bole) » To Athens, Greece (ATH-Eleftherios Venizelos Apt)
Learn about flights from ADD to ATH
Click here to find $547 flights
On this page, you'll find a collection of useful information on flights from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (ADD-Bole) to Athens, Greece (ATH-Eleftherios Venizelos Apt). When you're ready to search, click here for the cheapest flights!
Cleverlayover is a flight search engine for cheaper flights. We find savings by looking at all the possible ways to get from your origin to your destination, including searches that look at each possible layover location individually. For example, if you're flying from ADD to ATH, we'll search for flights from ADD to every other airport and then flights from those airports to ATH. After piecing together those flights, we can find savings that the other search engines don't show you.
When to book
The best day of the week to book your flight is onTuesday
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subset: commoncrawl


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How did you plan and schedule your NanoDays event?
June 10, 2009
For this installment of the NanoDays Blog, I want you to answer the question: How did you plan and schedule your NanoDays event? Here are some specific questions to help get you thinking.
- What was the size and scope of NanoDays at your institution?
- What critical paths did you take from envisioning NanoDays to hosting it? Were your expectations met? If they were, what advice do you have for others? If they weren't, how did you handle it?
- Did you use any social networking or web-based services to help plan, schedule, recruit, advertise, or follow-up? If so, which ones and how'd it go? If not, how come?
- If this was your second NanoDays, what did you do differently in planning and scheduling this year?
- Regardless of how many NanoDays you've hosted, what will you do differently next year?


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seriously big baby is the starting center for the magic? is someone injured or is this their normal lineup.. thats terrible
Nice work on the game thread my dude, i love the songs u chose...especially full clip and incarcerated scarfaces
I love the way J Kidd gets so many calls in his favor
Melo looks like he's havin relapses of Melo-Iso
LOL @ the Orlando announcers calling Brewer "Corey".
He's 3-4, I'll take it
What Knicks team is this?
C'mon Tyson. You 7'1 how could you let that dude get 2-3 boards and then score on you...WAKE UP!!!!


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Vibrant Palm Springs Oasis
A trio of designing women (and 2011 New Trad designers!) turn a second home in Palm Springs into a family-friendly oasis
Only a trio of native Southern California designing women—principals of Bonesteel Trout Hall Interiors—can take a chunky limestone house in the desert of Palm Springs and turn it into a fresh, family-friendly oasis that evokes the best of Mexico, Morocco, and France while still keeping it vibrantly earthy and comfortable.
Creating the getaway for Texans Reena and Mike Blumenfeld was like working with old friends. "This is the third house we've done for them, so there is a great comfort level," says designer Heidi Bonesteel of Bonesteel Trout Hall, the design firm named after herself and partners Michele Trout and Jill Hall. "Reena literally handed me an old blue picture frame, half of a gourd, and a piece of French limestone as inspiration."
Photography: Karyn R. Millet
Living Room
Along with a few magazine clippings of French farmhouses and stacks of wonderful old textiles from all parts of the globe, the designers ran with all of the homeowners' design fuel while collecting more inspiration from their own memory banks. "I loved being able to relive our travels in Europe, smell the smells of Morocco, and take trips in my mind as we put the house together," says Heidi, adding, "Both Michele and I agree that travel is probably the most important inspiration for us as designers."
Clever placement of the back-to-back twin sofas makes the most of the ample living room space. One sofa faces the fireplace for cozy warmth during chilly desert nights, while the other sofa faces a broader conversation area and television. A low, chunky, wood coffee table invites guests to put their feet up, while a round leather-topped ottoman provides impromptu seating.
Blue-Green Accents
A wingback chair in lime green and aqua tones lifts the living room's neutral mood while conversing with the blue-green accent pillows on the hemp-colored sofas.
Color in the Kitchen
The resulting exotic look of the home is deliberately tamed by large-scale natural tones, though the cool, measured waves of aqua blues and citrus greens running throughout the house keep the big wraparound-style villa from feeling overwhelming.
French farmhouse-blue cabinets lend a chic note to the limestone-walled kitchen.
Whimsical Chandelier
Both whimsical and weighty, the beaded turquoise chandelier graces the neutral-colored dining room with a visual lift, while the strong pear shape and density of the beads keep it from looking too wimpy against the rough-hewn French-style Texas limestone on the walls.
Rustic and Refined
"It's a delicate balance of being restrained and earthy at the same time," explains Heidi, on how she and Michele (who've been friends since their student days in the UCLA architecture program) were able to achieve a look that's both rustic and refined. Adding texture to every surface—the rough limestone, raw, aged-wood ceiling beams, ostrich-pebbled headboard—the team concentrated on adding the tactile to every last detail. "I think that's what the new traditional is all about—texture," notes Heidi.
Massive raw-wood beams on the ceiling and high-contrast dark wood trim keep this creamy white hallway from looking stark. The pair of elongated ceiling pendant lights came from Berbere World Imports in Los Angeles.
Refined Master Bedroom
Refined texture in a biscuit-colored grasscloth on the walls and a pebbly ostrich skin on the upholstered headboard lend a note of the exotic to the bedroom.
Vibrant Bedroom
Color and pattern play in one of the bedrooms. From the bed skirt to the canopy, the headboard to the lampshade, vibrant but comfortable is key.
Glamorous Guest Room
A lush peacock-hued velvet-upholstered headboard and pillow sham promise comfort and warmth to guests. The lampshade trimmed in matte gold adds glamour to the vignette, as do the soft gold nailheads on the headboard.
Doors to the interior courtyard are flung open.
Courtyard Casbah
The result of the designers' work is an earthy yet exotic retreat that combines a dash of colorful chic with modern restraint in happy proportions.
Details on the following slide.
Pillow Detail
"Reena brought us this huge stack of fabrics, rugs, and weaves from all of her trips. We cut the fabrics up to make pillows and used them outside. She gave us really great things to work with." The effect is that of a warm and restful casbah lounge.
Designer Portrait
Bonsteel Trout Hall's five things:
- Don't be afraid to use color, and if you are a bit shy, then choose a neutral background and add one color, repeating it throughout the scheme.
- Try to invest in one or two well-designed, well-made pieces of furniture, because they will stand the test of time.
- Always use texture when you can to achieve a more current look.
- At every opportunity, try to use a wall covering rather than paint on your walls. And if you want to start slow, have fun in the powder room and wallpaper the walls with something daring.
- If you see something interesting on your travels, take it home with you and add it to your space for a bit of soul.


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I have for your today a delicious Dal Makhani with a Raisin Nut Pilaf.February is always a busy travel month for me, and that's one reason I've failed to feed my blog these last few days. Now I travel a lot- both for work and pleasure- and I truly enjoy it. But since I went vegan, travel has posed some new challenges. Being on the road is not always easy for a vegan, and particularly for one who won't just settle for salads and soups.There are many stories of woe: I have struggled with French onion soup covered in a layer of thick cheese even after telling the room service repeatedly that I DON'T want any dairy in it. I have had tomato soup and pasta served up to me as "dairy-free" when it clearly contained cream or cheese. And I have been asked at meetings, after making a request for vegan food, if I would eat chicken or seafood?Still, it is not impossible either. I almost always have managed to feed myself fairly well even while stuck in the middle of nowhere. And sometimes there are surprises along the way that make you just want to scream for joy!Last year, for example, Desi and I took a road trip into parts of the deep south. You can imagine how nervous I was. And while I did eat more than a few salads, I found at least two restaurants that served truly memorable vegan meals- one in Huntsville, Alabama, and another in lovely Louisville, Kentucky. Both had a variety of sandwiches that were not just vegan but simply delicious and very very nutritious- always an important consideration when you're on the road.
In Mexico, on vacation, I found restaurants willing to substitute leche de soya for regular milk in my morning cereal. In Costa Rica's Monteverde, we stayed at a resort run by a Quaker couple that served the most delicious vegetarian and vegan-friendly dishes. And in New Orleans, known mainly for its seafood and meat dishes, we managed to track down a handful of restaurants that served many delicious vegan-friendly dishes.Big cities like New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco and Boston are typically easier to find vegan food in, as is my hometown of Washington DC where there are some vegan restaurants and even a vegan bakery that whips up delicious treats.But no matter where we are, Desi and I look forward with great excitement to eating, as often as we can, at Indian restaurants: we have often walked miles and miles, be it Paris or Amsterdam or Mexico City, to track down a restaurant we had heard of. He because he loves Indian food. I because I not only love Indian food, but as a vegan I know I can find something that's safe for me to eat as well as hearty and delicious.
It's not always that simple, though. India's long tradition of lacto-vegetarianism encompasses kindness to animals, but Indians also consider milk and other dairy products gifts of the cow who, as everyone knows, is revered by Hindus. Veganism is rarely practiced among Indians, although Mahatma Gandhi came pretty close to it many decades ago (he did return to drinking goat's milk, he said, for health reasons). Of course, Indian cattle suffer the same cruel treatment that cattle bred for dairy or meat anywhere in the world suffer, but that's another story for another day.
Anyway, the result of this love for milk, of course, means that even Indian vegetarian food is not always animal-product-free. And finding out what is free of ghee or butter or cream is not always easy.
While I often have to shun my old restaurant favorites like Dal Makhani and Palak Paneer, I have found ways to veganize these recipes in my own kitchen. The results almost always have been good beyond belief. A big advantage is, veganizing the recipes also ends up making them more nutritious.
Today I am sharing my recipe for a vegan Dal Makhani, a popular lentil dish from North India that's often found on restaurant menus. Of course, there is no "makhan," or butter, in this dish which I substituted instead with vegan sour cream. If you don't have any on hand, coconut milk- although not a typical ingredient of North Indian food- would give equally delicious results.
To go with the vegan Dal Makhani, I made a pretty easy but delicious nut-and-raisin pilaf.
Hope you enjoy this dairyfree version of this Dal Makhani, a classic Indian dish.
Try these recipes next:
Hyacinth Beans Masala Rice Pilaf
Instant Pot Vegan Dal Makhani
Dhabay ki Daal
Raisin and Nut Pilaf
- 2 cups basmati rice
- 4 cups water
- 1 tbsp cumin seeds (jeera)
- 1/2 cup peas
- 1/4 cup raisins
- 1/4 cup chopped cashew and/or pistachio nuts
- Salt to taste
- 1 tbsp canola oil
- Heat the canola oil in a large saucepan with a tight-fitting lid and oven-safe handles.
- Add the cumin seeds and stir until they sputter, flavoring the oil.
- Add the rice and stir until the grains start to turn opaque.
- Now add the water and salt and let it come to a boil.
- Turn the heat to low and add the peas.
- Cover the saucepan with tinfoil and place the lid over it, to ensure a tight seal.
- Place the saucepan in a preheated 350-degree oven.
- Remove from the oven after 20 minutes. Be very careful because the handles will be screaming hot. Do not open for at least 10 more minutes because the rice is continuing to cook in its steam at this point.
- Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, heat 1 tsp of canola oil. Add the nuts and toss them about until they start to turn golden. Add the raisins, stir for about 30 seconds, and turn off the heat.
- Pour the nuts and raisins into the rice pilaf and with a fork, fluff gently to mix.
- Serve hot with the Dal.
Vegan Dal Makhani
- 1 cup udad dal or black gram
- 1/4 cup red beans or rajma
- Soak the gram and the rajma for at least four hours or preferably overnight , then cook until tender with a little salt.
- 1/4 cup vegan sour cream (like Tofutti's Better-than-sour-cream, available at Whole Foods)
- 1 tbsp oil
- 1 large red onion , chopped
- 1 large tomato or 2 medium tomatoes , chopped (can substitute with a 14-oz can of diced tomatoes)
- 1 tbsp ginger , grated
- 1 tbsp garlic , chopped into a very fine mince or grated
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 2 heaping teaspoons of garam masala
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1/2 tsp turmeric
- Heat the oil in a large saucepan (you can also use a mix of vegan "butter" like Earth Balance and oil)
- Add the onion and saute for a few minutes until it becomes translucent. Add the sugar and continue to saute until the onion starts to brown.
- Add the ginger and garlic and stir for a minute.
- Add the tomatoes, chili powder, turmeric and garam masala. Stir and cook until the tomato starts breaking down and the juices thicken.
- Add the cooked lentils and beans. Let the dal come to a boil, then turn the heat to low and let it simmer gently for about 10 minutes until all the flavors come together.
- Add the lemon juice and stir in.
- Add the vegan sour cream, turn off the heat, and stir to mix the sour cream into the dal. Check seasoning and add more salt if needed.
- Garnish with fresh coriander (I didn't have any, so I used some kasoori methi which I added to the dal in the final few minutes of cooking.)


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Lace knitting at its best
A note from Kathleen: We've got a treat for you—a new eBook filled with beautiful lace knitting patterns and the technique help you need to knit them! Whether you're a beginning or an experienced knitter, there's something here for you. I've invited Editor Eunny Jang here to tell you about it!
There is something uniquely satisfying about knitting lace.
I've seen lots of metaphors for it—a butterfly emerging from a cocoon; a flower blooming—but to my mind, there is enough romance in the simple reality of lace knitting: Execute a few easy, repetitive maneuvers with two sticks, and a length of string transforms into delicate, airy fabric traced with pleasingly intricate patterning.
|Oslo Walk Shawl by Susanna IC
|Pembroke Wrap by Andrea Rangel
|Wheeled Lace Shawl
by Kristin Omdahl
For me, the greatest pleasure of knitted lace is in that sense of transformation, of possibility—there's a kind of magic to that idea, that such simple building blocks can yield such wonderfully rich effects. The most elaborate lace leaves, waves, and flower petals all come from decreases and yarnovers. Richly ornate geometric motifs are the same, just positive and negative space combined in clever ways. Art underlined with solid knitting logic. Amazing!
As the editor of Interweave Knits, I've been lucky enough to work and share ideas with knitting designers who explore every aspect of knitted lace—from those steeped in tradition and history to those investigating what lace can do when pushed to its limits.
Just as every knitter has her own particular set of factors that go into the projects she chooses, every lace designer has different aims and goals for her designs. This collection of designs from the pages of Interweave Knits covers a wide spectrum, from intricate heirloom-inspired pieces to clever modern ones—something to satisfy everyone.
Knitted lace means something different with every project. I hope that as you page through this collection, you feel a sense of discovery and exploration—and the urge to knit.
So go ahead and download your copy of An Introduction Guide to Knitting Lace, with 5 Favorite Patterns!
Happy knitting,
P.S. Have you knit a lace pattern? Share your expertise with us in the comments!


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Lanvin Parfums
This original print was published in a periodical from 1946.
We do not sell reproductions. Your art comes with a certificate of authenticity.
This original print was published in a periodical from 1946.
Your art comes with a certificate of authenticity.
Jacques Nathan
Framed advert
24.5 × 31.5cm | 9"44 x 12"2
Item #
- Frame Specifications
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Frame Specifications
Size: 32.7 × 42.7cm or 12.87″ x 16.81″
Frame material: anodised aluminium
Color: black
Mount color: beige
Glass: "float"
At VAA we deploy modern technology to preserve these antique illustrations. The uniquely hard-wearing frames we use are designed in Switzerland; their durability results from the process of anodising. Anodising is a surface treatment which protects and decorates aluminium using an anodic oxidation process. As a result of this, these frames are especially resistant to corrosion and heat, protecting this vintage art from wear and tear.
We frame each illustration ourselves in our workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland. The float glass we use is crystal clear with a very flat surface and carefully polished edges. The frames are 32.7 × 42.7cm (12.87″ x 16.81″). The result? We present you with a period illustration- a genuine antique- enclosed by a frame of the highest quality. In this way, we like to think we're bringing modern technology and antique artistry together.
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What do you get when you merge two .45 caliber pistols into one with a sleek new design?
A whole lot of compact stopping power, also known as the Arsenal Firearms AF2011.
The folks over at the Firearms Blog found this incredible new design created by Arsenal Firearms, who provided these photos and the video below.
The AF team is clearly proud of their achievement, writing on their site that:
"To commemorate the legendary Colt 1911-A1 in the Centenary by making a true industrial market-ready double barrel .45 caliber pistol. We achieved success in the brief span of 6 months, after intense and round-the-clock 3D designing, stereolithographic modeling and parts machining."
This is not an entirely new concept, and there have been many other double barrel pistols created in the past. In fact, ten years ago a Swiss armorer named Vivian Mueller cut and welded together parts of the storied Sig P210 for a similar effect. He successfully created a long slide, double barrel 9mm pistol that shot well. But the AF 2011 is the first time two pistols have been welded into one in a design that is shelf-ready and meant for sale.
That's right -- this model can be produced and sold in a mass market instead of just one-off collector pieces.
Now you may be wondering how the AF 2011 performs. Sure, it looks cool, and it certainly can throw rounds downrange, but what kind of patterns can it put on a target?
According to the AF team, the double barrel 2011 shoots cleanly and with good-enough accuracy:
"The gun can be handled by any shooter... [and] holds amazing and surprising target performance for the shooter: in fact, it will group all the 8 double .45 caliber rounds (16 bullets) held in the duplex, single columns magazines, in a target of the size of an orange at 15 yards and of a water melon at 25."
Whether you think you have room in your collection for the AF-2011 or not, you probably want to see this amazing piece of gun craftsmanship doing what it does best. So below is a video that gives you the full effect of the AF2011.
Right after he finishes off some shots, the test shooter in the video describes the stopping power in his hands:
"This was 8 double rounds.... in other words, it was 4000 grains of payload sent downrange in about 5 seconds. to achieve the same result with a single barrel 9mm pistol we would need to shoot about 30 rounds, with two changes of magazines, in about 30 seconds."
As described on the AF site, "it will knock down a bull."
Check out the video of the AF 2011-A1 in action on the range, via YouTube:
And in case you wanted even more specs from Arsenal Firearms:
"The AF2011-A1 can be ordered either with 2 independent triggers and one sear group (left or right, with user-interchangeability for right or left operations) or with 2 triggers permanently joined and the choice of 1 or 2 sear groups. The AF2011-A1 is available in mirror finish Deep Blue or with a 3400 Vickers surface hardness White Ash Nitrite coating."


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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's cabinet has approved a new energy plan to cut the country's reliance on nuclear power in the wake of last year's Fukushima disaster, but dropped a reference to meet a nuclear- free target by the 2030s, ministers said on Wednesday.
Since the plan was announced on Friday, Japan's powerful industry lobbies have urged the government rethink the nuclear-free commitment, arguing it could damage the economy and would mean spending more on pricey fuel imports.
Trade Minister Yukio Edano, who also oversees the energy portfolio, said the cabinet had approved the new energy plan.
"But whether we can become nuclear free by the 2030s is not something to be achieved only with a decision by policy makers. It also depends on the will of (electricity) users, technological innovation and the environment for energy internationally in the next decade or two," he said.
In abandoning atomic power, Japan aims to triple the share of renewable power to 30 percent of its energy mix by the 2030s, but will remain a top importer of oil, coal and gas for the foreseeable future.
Finance Minister Jun Azumi told a separate news conference that there needed to be flexibility in the policy to avoid putting a burden on the public in a country where nuclear supplied 30 percent of electricity before Fukushima.
All but two of Japan's nuclear 50 reactors are idled for safety checks after an earthquake and tsunami in March 2 011 devastated the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
Under the new energy plan, there should be strict implementation of a 40-year lifetime for reactors. It also said existing reactors shut after Fukushima should be restarted only if a new nuclear regulator confirms their safety and there should be no construction of new reactors.
The newly established Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) will decide whether reactors currently under construction are safe enough to start commercial operations, Edano said.
Asked if newly built reactors could run beyond the 2030s, Edano said a decision on this would be decided later.
Reactors currently under construction include the 1,373-megawatt Shimane No.3 unit of Chugoku Electric Power Co's and the 1,383-megawatt Ohma unit of Electric Power Development Co's. (Reporting by Risa Maeda and Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by Ed Davies)


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Winter Weekend Getaway in Rotorua
Enjoy the scenery, geothermal hot pools and culture and history and avoid the crowds during a winter weekend getaway in Rotorua.
If you are looking for family-friendly, all-weather activities where you can experience geothermal hot pools, local culture and history during your weekend getaway to Rotorua then check out our top tips below.
Rotorua Duck Tours
Rotorua Duck Tours is a unique, fun and family-friendly way to explore the geothermal wonders, history and culture of Rotorua. Starting from the central city, you hop aboard a World War II Amphibious Landing Vessel for a tour of the city highlights, which includes steaming geothermal features and historical landmarks. After your circuit of the city, you head out of town where you will splashdown into some of Rotorua's most stunning and culturally significant lakes. On your tour the friendly and knowledgeable guide will share information on not only the magnificent sights you see now but also the rich Maori history. The Ducks are fitted with removable rain screens and blankets to ensure that you can enjoy your tour in all weather conditions.
Rotorua Museum
The Rotorua Museum is located in the beautiful, centrally-located, Government Gardens and is an excellent choice to begin your exploration of Rotorua's history, especially on a wet and cold winters day. In addition to the excellent temporary exhibits, the Rotorua museum is home to a comprehensive exhibition on the 1886 Mt Tarawera Eruption, including an outstanding interactive simulator. The Museum itself is housed in a famous old bath house, making it the perfect location to exhibit Rotorua's longstanding designation as a world class spa town.
Polynesian Spa
A steamy winter's evening is a great time to relax and warm up at Polynesian Spa in their geothermal and mineral hot pools. The spa complex has something for all ages, the family pool area has a large heated freshwater pool with a small waterslide and two mineral hot pools. The spa also has an adult-only section which contains pools with both alkaline and acidic water as does the deluxe Lake Spa area. Those looking to be pampered can also enjoy one or a combination of the spa therapies, some of which include Rotorua's famous mud.
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Rotorua Duck Tours
Jump on board a guided sightseeing tour of Rotorua and the lakes in our Amphibious Landing Crafts. Splashdown onto pristine lakes surrounded by beautiful native forests. The perfect introduction to Rotorua's geothermal and Maori history!


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Democrat Jim Graham will seek a fifth term on the D.C. Council.
Graham announced his intentions Monday in an appearance on NewsChannel 8's "NewsTalk" program.
Graham has represented Ward 1 on the council since 1998. The ward includes Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights and other neighborhoods north of downtown.
Earlier this year, Graham's colleagues voted to reprimand him after the city's ethics board found that he improperly intervened in the lottery contracting process.
The 68-year-old Graham had long been undecided about a re-election bid. He formed an exploratory committee and conducted a poll to assess his standing. He faces three challengers in the April 1 Democratic primary.
Graham says he has a strong record of constituent service and advocating for the least fortunate. He is one of two openly gay council members.


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Photo By: John Woodcock Photography
Photo By: Kristada
Photo By: Richard Gayle
Photo By: Chipper Hatter
Photo By: Vervain
Photo By: Shutterstock/socool23
Photo By: Richard Caplan
Photo By: Jared Kuzia Photography
Photo By: Ryan Garvin
Photo By: Max Burkhalter
Photo By: Amy Bartlam
Photo By: Melanie Johnson
Photo By: Roehner + Ryan
Photo By: Vance Fox
Photo By: Nicole Baas Photography
Bright, Neutral Living Room Warmed by Afternoon Sun
In the living room, a neutral wall color and neutral built-in cabinets keep the space light and bright, while reflecting the warm sunshine that spills in from the large windows on the right side of the room.
Visit Original Photo
Blue and Brown Coastal Bedroom With Clock
Blue and beige in a range of patterns are a peaceful look for this coastal bedroom.
Kitchen With Green Apples
A trio of pendants and a dark, long countertop (in contrast to white walls) lead the eye down the length of this kitchen.
Contemporary White Kitchen with White Marble Counters and Bar
The kitchen in the Mathews house is now bright and airy after removing the wall and adding a bar with lots of counter space, as seen on Home Town.
Industrial Dining Room With Bubble Chandelier
Meals in this simple, refined dining room come with a view. The delicate, bubble-shaped chandelier is a nice foil to the heavier weight of the wood beam ceiling.
Modern Desk Area with Tropical Banana Plant Draperies
Botanical etchings of banana plants get a modern update in a textile collection by the New York Botanical Garden and Vervain. The hand-drawn pattern is named Musa Paradis.
Container Cactus Garden
Grow a container garden full of cacti and succulents.
Colorful, Whimsical Playroom in NYC
This contemporary playroom brings the outdoors in for a New York City kid, harnessing varying textures and bold colors to create a whimsical, fun-filled space. Colorful artwork gives a partial wall major punch.
Scandinavian Hall With Green Lights
Forest green barn lights lead the way down the hall off the mudroom. The light blue barn door makes for a cheerful color companion.
Gray and White Spa Bathroom With Shades
Gray-and-white tiles mark out a graphic rug of sorts in the center of this bathroom, pulling together the patterns used in the shades and even the sparkling chandelier.
Traditional Family Room With Midcentury Modern Floor Lamp
This cozy family room features traditional accents along with a contemporary gray upholstered sofa, midcentury modern floor lamp, and black painted french doors.
Cottage-Inspired Banquette Breakfast Nook
A built-in banquette with easy-to-clean striped fabric is the perfect kid-friendly choice for a cozy breakfast area. Drawers underneath provide extra storage, and a beaded chandelier makes for a striking focal point.
Gray and White Country Kitchen With Paneling
Designer Leanne Ford keeps this country kitchen feeling sophisticated with a striking dark gray and white color palette, accented by stainless steel lights and appliances, as seen on HGTV's Restored by the Fords.
Neutral Contemporary Bathroom with Tray Ceiling
Dark cabinetry and a three-sided vanity give weight to this spacious, elegant master bathroom. White marble with gray veining continues from the floor onto the tub surround and into the walk-in shower. A chevron-patterned stool provides a comfortable spot at the double vanity.
Glass-Top Desk in Midcentury Modern Office Space
In the small office space, a glass-top desk keeps the space feeling open and spacious.
Courtyard With Steel Fireplace
Metal with an intricate cut-out pattern makes a lovely shade over this home's sliding glass doors out to the courtyard. The shadows are equally a work of art.
Cabin Exterior and Driveway
Called the Ski Lodge in its original 1964 architectural drawings, this mountain home got new life with a careful renovation that preserved its rustic character.
Sapphire Blue Armchairs Meet Metallic Finishes
Opposite the sofa, two sapphire blue armchairs denote a more formal sitting area for entertaining guests. When paired with a copper side table and high-gloss pillows, the gems make an especially chic statement.
Bold Colored, Geometric Playroom
These homeowners needed a fun space that both their little boys and little girl could play and feel welcome in, so designers created a space full of bold, gender neutral colors and a design that focused on gender neutral, geometric shapes. With plenty of storage and toys for boys and girls hanging on the wall, this playroom is perfect for the pair of brothers, their sister and their parents to enjoy.


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'There's absolutely nothing in this speech'
We've talked a bit today about Mitt Romney's latest foreign policy speech – the 10th billed by his campaign as a "major" address on international affairs – and if you missed it, the video is now available. (The Romney campaign posted a transcript, which the candidate carefully stuck to via his trusted teleprompter, online.)
More Like This
Best of MSNBC
Foreign Policy and Mitt Romney
'There's absolutely nothing in this speech'


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Write a News Story
Meet a Pioneer Pilot
Amelia Earhart Home
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Amelia Earheat Disappeared
By: T F.
New Jersey, Age 9
Amelia Earhart disappeared in the Pacific Ocean on July 3, 1937. They sent some people who tried to find her but couldn't find her. Where are Amelia and Fred? Will we ever find them?
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1. Customizable: All keyboard drawers are widely adjustable and can tilt to produce an ergonomic design that works with you, not against you.
2. Room for your mouse: Our keyboard trays leave enough room for your mouse or come with attachable mouse trays, so you can scroll as ergonomically as you type.
3. Little cleaning required: From Microban to lycra covers, our keyboard trays stay clean, guard against germs and look great.
Try a keyboard tray today and alter the landscape of your workspace.


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Players are expected to attend all scheduled practices and games. An individual's playing time in a game will be in direct proportion to the amount of practices and games in which they have participated. If for any reason a player is unable to attend a scheduled event they must call or inform the coach or his designee prior to the scheduled day for an excusable absence.
Practice begins the first weekend in March and is conducted on both Saturday and Sunday. Practice during March will take place at Amsterdam Elementary School on Amsterdam Road or the High School Turf Field. In April, practices will be conducted on two weekdays (Mon, Tues, Wed or Thurs) and will be held at Docherty Park on Route 206 or at Amsterdam Elementary School. It is important to note that at anytime prior to practice, the time, location and date may change. To confirm that day's arrangements please check the website for updates.
When at Docherty Park, please park your car in the parking lot only and not on the grass. The police will come and tow your car while at the same time jeopardizing our ability to use the fields
Games are played primarily on weekends in April and May. Our April games are typically away while the majority of our May games are played at home. Please note that a scheduled game may be changed at any time so it is extremely important to check the website. All home games are played at the Hillsborough Lacrosse Complex Fields on Triangle Road or the High School Turf Field. Directions and field locations are available on the website under the Directions tab.
When playing home games at the Hillsborough Lacrosse Complex please park in the parking lot and not on the road leading into the complex in front of the concession stand. The police will come and tow your car while at the same time jeopardizing our ability to use the fields.
Also, when playing home games there are no spectators permitted behind each of the goals or behind the players bench. This is not only a lacrosse rule it is a requirement of the Lacrosse program in using the fields. Please comply and view all games from the parking lot side of the fields.
New Privacy Policy


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|The way to use the daily devotional:The words of God are "bread," "milk," "spirit," and "life" (Matt. 4:4;1 Pet. 2:2;John 6:63). We should "eat them" and "esteem the words of His mouth more than our (my) necessary food" (Jer. 15:16;Job 23:12).The children of Israel gathered and ate manna in the wilderness every morning. Likewise,we should eat the words of God every morning. The way to take in the Word for our enjoyment and nourishment is to pray with and pray according to what you read. Read and pray. Pray and read. Pray when reading. Read when praying. (Eph. 6:17-18)
|Request Free
Study Bible
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Subscribe To Neill Blomkamp's Elysium Followup Sets 2015 Release Date Updates
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Neill Blomkamp may still have the power to save science fiction, but he's going to have to continue working to prove it. The District 9 director's new film Elysium is a modest hit, but failed to live up to the expectations from Blomkamp's directorial debut-- no easy feat, of course, since District 9 was a massively profitable Best Picture nominee. But anyone who thought Elysium was a little too much like District 9 ought to like the sound of Blomkamp's next film, which THR reports has a release date. Sure, he's working in sci-fi again, and with Sharlto Copley… but with Copley playing a robot this time, things ought to be a little different.
Sony Pictures, which released both District 9 and Elysium, has set a March 27, 2015 release date for Chappie, in which Copley will voice a robot who is kidnapped by a group of gangsters, led by characters played by rappers Ninja and Yolandi Visser. Blomkamp and Copley have described the film as a sci-fi comedy, though that doesn't necessarily means it will get away from the social commentary that defined both District 9 and Elysium. 2015 is looking like a very, very crowded year already, thanks to projects like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Star Wars: Episode VII sucking up all the attention, but so far March isn't so bad-- Chappie will be opening directly against Fox's Penguins of Madagascar, which shouldn't be too much competition, but a week before that aforementioned Avengers movie, which means Chappie won't have long to get all those District 9 fans in line.
But that might actually be the best thing for it. Elysium baffled plenty of us when it opened in the same timeframe as District 9 but made way less, suggesting that the original South Africa-set sci-fi drama was the kind of lightning in a bottle that can't be repeated, even with something as similar as Elysium. Blomkamp knows as well as anyone that his best course is to change directions entirely, and by moving into comedy-- and making the truly bold move of casting rappers in his film-- Blomkamp might finally be able to escape those District 9 comparisons entirely.
For an idea of what Blomkamp might be going for in Chappie, check out his 2004 short "Tetra Vaal," which he says is the inspiration for the new film. There's no sign of the promised comedy, though, and the contrast between the futuristic robot tech and the slums of Johannesburg seems to have led directly into District 9, so there might be less of that in Chappie itself. "Tetra Vaal" is another reminder of the amazing stuff Blomkamp can do with a small budget and a big imagination-- and proof that, no matter how disappointing Elysium might have been, he deserves our attention for a good while longer.


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Made up of 8 banners, it showcases the most interesting items from the catalogued collections and demonstrates that business archives contain records relevant to individuals and communities today.
It will continue travelling to archives, museums and libraries throughout Wales. The Archives and Records Council Wales administrative officer will now organise the location of the exhibition, please get in touch if you would like more information about hosting it firstname.lastname@example.com


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Despite a deep economic recession, the U.S. green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double its size by 2015, says a new report by New York-based McGraw-Hill Construction. The value of green construction starts jumped 50% from $42 billion in 2008 to $71 billion in 2010, when it represented 25% of the all new building activity, and it's expected to reach $135 billion by 2015, according to the firm's Green Outlook 2011 report.
The growth has been particularly robust in the commercial sector, where one-third of all new projects are now built to green standards, according to the report, which projects a tripling of that volume in the next five years. "It's an amazing area of opportunity at time when the construction market is extremely challenged," says Harvey M. Bernstein, a VP of McGraw-Hill Construction. "In today's economy, firms that specialize in green or serve this market are seeing a tremendous advantage."
Why the growth?
Building owners surveyed said green projects reduce operating costs (13.6% on average for new buildings and 8.5% for retrofits), increase building values (10.9% for new buildings and 6.8% for retrofits) and increase their return on investment (9.9% for new buildings and 19.2% for retrofits.) In addition, the report attributes the rapid expansion to owners' desire for market differentiation, growing public awareness and an increase in government rules. As of September 2010, it says 12 federal agencies and 33 states had green building legislation and initiatives. It says local government initiatives jumped from 156 localities in 2008 to 384 localities in 2010.