Thursday, May 3, 2007

Arts Library Planned in Brooklyn Hits a Snag

Museum of the City of New York/TEN Arquitectos

The latest plan for the BAM Cultural District no longer includes the Visual and Performing Arts Library designed by Enrique Norten.

By ROBIN POGREBIN;Published: May 3, 2007

The new arts library designed by Enrique Norten that was supposed to rise like the prow of a glass ship near the Brooklyn Academy of Music now seems likely to sink, unrealized, into the pavement.

 

The New York Times

 

All the same, planners say they have raised money for a new theater designed by Hugh Hardy for the academy and hope to break ground next year.

Eight months after the city stepped up its role in overseeing development in what is known as the BAM Cultural District, in Fort Greene, projects are being assessed as viable or unrealistic.

“The library project as designed has not proved to be feasible,” said Kate D. Levin, commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. “However, there is a continued commitment to build on that site and have some component be a library.”

With a revolving door of directors, the Brooklyn Public Library system has not raised any of what it estimates as a $135 million price for the Visual and Performing Arts Library. Initially, the system had planned to break ground on the project in 2005, with a grand opening this year. But two of its directors have come and gone since planning began, and a third, Dionne Mack-Harvin, assumed her post only in March.

In a statement, Ms. Mack-Harvin said yesterday that she still hoped to see a library built in the area. “While at this time we do not have the funds needed to build the V.P.A. as originally envisioned, we are still looking at options for funding, including seeking partners to assist in financing,” she said. “We realize the importance of providing free resources and services to Brooklynites — especially in this rapidly growing area.”

Mr. Norten said he still hoped to design the project in its altered form. “It will have to be a completely new design, but it could be even better,” he said. “I’m very excited about revising all of this.”

With its cantilevered glass envelope, Mr. Norten’s library had drawn wide praise as a bold and colorful design that would anchor the district’s artistic ambitions. Alan H. Fishman, the chairman of the academy, said he was sorry to see it go. “The design was so captivating,” he said.

Meanwhile, he said, the academy has raised enough pledges to move ahead with designs for a $40 million annex on Ashland Place, bordered by Lafayette Avenue and Hanson Place, that is to include a 300-seat theater, education activities and archives. Mr. Hardy, the architect, is also designing, with Frank Gehry, a new home in the cultural district for the Theater for a New Audience, at Lafayette Avenue and Ashland Place.

Mr. Fishman is also co-chairman of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, created last summer as an umbrella organization to coordinate planning in the area as the city sought to jump-start a languishing redevelopment effort. Among the groups consolidated under the partnership were the BAM Local Development Corporation, which had previously overseen the arts district; the Downtown Brooklyn Council; the Fulton Mall Improvement Association; and the MetroTech Business Improvement District.

Joseph Chan left his post as a senior policy adviser in Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff’s office last September to become president of the partnership.

“I think what you see is tangible progress on all of the major initiatives,” Mr. Chan said. “We wanted to put every project on a design and construction timeline, with clear lines of accountability and a clear set of expectations and milestones.”

The city has $75 million in financing allocated for the cultural district through fiscal 2009. “We want to make sure there is an appropriate marriage of resources, capability and intent for every project we do,” Mr. Doctoroff said.

Some Brooklyn arts executives say the new leadership has made a difference. “This has been a very positive development,” said Harvey Lichtenstein, the former academy impresario who is now chairman of cultural planning for the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. “It gives it stronger backing from the mayor’s office, from the city and of course in terms of connections.”

The BAM Cultural District was conceived in 2000 as a $650 million effort to revitalize the area by converting vacant and underused properties into spaces for arts organizations. Since then, with the explosion of Brooklyn’s residential real estate market, developers have become an important force in the arts district.

Plans now call for a new headquarters for Danspace Project, which commissions and presents contemporary choreography, to be built at Ashland Place and Fulton Street, with a 20-story residential tower on top. A formal request for proposals went out to developers in February, and responses are due on May 18. David Walentas, the developer behind much of the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, said he would submit a proposal.

Mr. Walentas said he would consider being part of a revised library project that would also include private uses. He declined to elaborate.

The chosen developer is expected to pay for the building’s structure and the apartments, half of which are to be affordable housing. “The city wants to see as big a contribution as possible from the development team,” Mr. Chan said.

Meanwhile, some of those involved are concerned about whether Danspace will be able to raise its own share, estimated at $10 million to $15 million. “They’re a small organization and they’ve never done this kind of fund-raising,” Mr. Lichtenstein said. “But I’m going to help them.”

The city said it had not yet determined its contribution to the Danspace headquarters, which is intended to offer affordable studio space to a multitude of choreographers.

In a few weeks, the Theater for a New Audience, an Off Broadway company that produces Shakespeare and classical drama, is expected to present new designs for a building that would be its first permanent home. The landscape architect Ken Smith was selected in December to design a public plaza and streetscape for the new district. In March the city issued a request for proposals for a multilevel underground parking garage topped by a public plaza in the district.

Not all of Brooklyn is enthusiastic about the way the district has evolved. Some public officials worry that the private development will price out local residents, and complain that Brooklyn cultural groups have been sidelined.

“I want indigenous organizations incorporated into the district,” said City Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents Fort Greene.

Yet other projects are still being dreamed up. Mr. Lichtenstein, for example, said he would like to see a “major visual art facility.”

“I always had this crazy vision of Brooklyn being the Left Bank of New York,” he added. “It’s not so crazy anymore.”

Posted by M at 21:12:29 | Permalink | No Comments »

All His Rooms Are Living Rooms

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Off the Wall Patrick Blanc, a French botanist who made his name with the plant wall, is an unusual mix of scientist and artist.

By KRISTIN HOHENADEL; Published: May 3, 2007 Créteil, France

ONE April afternoon in a rented bungalow in this small city on the outskirts of Paris, a Kelly green Madagascar lizard slithered across a plant-covered wall. In the next room, a blue-green Malaysian frog balanced on a Thai pandanus branch, still as a stone. Birds careered from room to room — in this house, the doors to the outside are closed to keep them in — dodging human heads as they went, and pausing only briefly to perch in the rhododendron leaves growing up the wall above the aquarium.

The house, and the elaborate ecosystem inside it, are home and laboratory for Patrick Blanc, a 53-year-old French botanist and the inventor of the plant wall, a kind of vertical garden, as he puts it, that grows without soil on a durable frame of metal, PVC and nonbiodegradable felt.

 

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Lush Life A tangle of plants covers the living area at Patrick Blanc’s house near Paris, which serves as a kind of laboratory for his work.

Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Front yard at Mr. Blanc’s house.
Fred Dufour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A wall he designed for the Quai Branly Museum, covered in 200 plant species.

Since 1988, Mr. Blanc has created dozens of these botanical tapestries in public and private spaces around the world, including the Marithé & François Girbaud boutique in Manhattan, the Siam Paragon shopping center in Bangkok and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. It is only fairly recently, though, that his work has begun attracting serious international attention, thanks to high-profile projects like the Jean Nouvel-designed Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which opened in 2006 and has an administrative center covered in 200 species of plants — a city building seemingly made of leaves.

“I like to reintegrate nature where one least expects it,” Mr. Blanc said as he sat at a table in his overgrown back garden, smoking a Vogue Menthol and drinking chilled white Jurançon. (“I leave the water for the plants,” he said.) He wore green shoes and shocking green highlights in his hair, and brandished a two-inch thumbnail painted a glittery shade of forest green.

“We live in an era where human activity is overwhelming,” he continued. “I think we can reconcile nature and man to a much greater degree. People become much more sensitive to nature when they suddenly see a plant wall in the Métro” — where he has not yet built a plant wall, but hopes to. “It calls out to them much more than plants in a garden.”

But while most of his plant walls present nature through formally elegant design, the plants in his home, and his home itself, are another matter. The house is a tangle of leaves with a mold-smudged ceiling and a sitting area formed from mattresses covered in the bright orange robes of Thai monks. Fraying photographs of Mr. Blanc in faraway jungles are taped to the walls, which are covered in many places with bamboo shades. Out in the front yard, a jumble of iris japonica, Chinese epimedium and carex leaves covers one wall, a plant wall experiment begun five years ago.

“We call it our little jungle bungalow,” said Mr. Blanc’s longtime partner, Pascal Héni, a singer who is well known in India by the stage name Pascal of Bollywood. Mr. Héni’s tidy office is the only room in the house with a door, aside from the toilet room. (Plastic beaded curtains do the trick elsewhere.)

Andrée Putman, the French interior architect and designer, first saw Mr. Blanc’s work at the house several years ago, and hired him to create a much-publicized vertical garden in the courtyard of the Pershing Hall hotel in Paris in 2001. Although the wild look of the interiors at Créteil seems to have little in common with her own highly refined work — “Don’t you find it touching that someone who has had such great success would keep his little cardboard house?” she said — she clearly values it as an expression of Mr. Blanc’s personal style. “He is very surprising,” she said. “Very fresh and sincere. And there’s a very strong sense of his character in that singular house.”

Ms. Putman called his plant walls revolutionary. “It’s like a magic trick,” she said. “There is no soil in this operation, and yet the plants seem to grow faster. It creates a rather miraculous atmosphere.”

Mr. Blanc has long practiced his botanical experiments at home, beginning with a crude version of the plant wall that he created at 12, when he planted flowers on a mesh frame along the walls of his parents’ garden in the Paris suburbs. After reading about how rooting plants in water can purify them of nitrates, he grew rhododendrons in his aquarium, training them to climb the wall as they do here in Créteil.

Fascinated by plants that flourish without soil and in low light, he went on to study this phenomenon at Pierre & Marie Curie University in Paris and traveled to Malaysia and Thailand for the first time in 1972 to observe how plants managed to grow on rocks or in forest underbrush. This research has been the foundation of his botany career — he has been a researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris for 25 years — and central to his work with plant walls, which thrive indoors using artificial lighting. A fixture in the French media, he has also published a handful of books for a general audience about his work.

“He’s a curious character because he is the symbiosis of a scientist, an artist and a communicator,” said Stéphane Martin, the director of the Quai Branly Museum. “He has created a personality with his green hair, a look and an image.”

In addition to exterior walls, Mr. Blanc installed vertical gardens in the museum’s administration offices. “It puts me in a good mood when I come into the office,” Mr. Martin said. “His walls are at once beautiful, friendly and funny. They look from certain angles like a forest that is standing up on its own.”

Mr. Blanc approaches his projects the way a landscape architect would. “If a wall is going to be seen from up close,” he said, “I pay attention to the texture and form of the leaves; from a distance, the colors must be considered.” He prefers leaves to flowers and avoids plants with trailing vines. “I’m sensitive to the architecture of leaves,” he said. “I use plants with curves.”

A plant wall begins as “a two-dimensional surface, like a painting,” he said, “and as the plants grow it develops volume.” It does not, however, need to be trimmed, he added, and the density of the planting prevents weeds from sprouting. He pointed out that a wall he designed at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris nearly a decade ago has never been pruned. “It’s superb,” he said. “Very natural and very beautiful.”

One wall in the living room of his home is 25 years old. He pointed out that it is the use of artificial materials that allows for this endurance. “People often have a hard time understanding that by using materials which are not biodegradable, it allows biology to install itself, and to last,” he said.

Construction costs for the walls vary, but in general, Mr. Blanc said, the materials cost about $680 per 10 square feet, plus labor. He takes a percentage of the overall cost of a project, and leaves the installation to gardeners, though he does visit the site during installation to make corrections.

Thanks to projects like the Quai Branly Museum and the outdoor wall for the BHV, a popular Paris department store, which Mr. Blanc completed this spring, plant walls have become increasingly fashionable in France, and various imitators have stepped in to offer alternatives, including less expensive do-it-yourself systems with hanging clay pockets or iron grid systems. “In human society, as soon as there’s something new that seems to work, it’s normal that everyone wants to do it,” Mr. Blanc said. “It’s like what people said about Édith Piaf — around her, even the hobos wanted to be singers. If I’m imitated, it’s good.”

But he has been careful to copyright his walls, like works of art. “When I am invited into museums to create permanent works, I am treated like an artist,” he said, “meaning someone capable of choosing the plants and the plant sequences that will function together in the long run. If someone wants to copy one for himself, it’s no problem. But they’re protected from being reproduced for financial gain or public recognition.” (He added that he never copies himself: “Out of the question.”)

A recent exhibition in Paris of Mr. Blanc’s work, which included experiments in growing plant ceilings, was so popular it was extended twice. “In the tropics I always noticed how hanging plants grow from the top down at cave entrances,” he said. “It’s interesting to show that plants don’t always have to grow upward.” But his main focus remains the plant walls. He said he is planning to concentrate increasingly on improving public spaces with them in years to come.

“Humanity is living more and more in cities, and at odds with nature,” he said. “The plant wall has a real future for the well-being of people living in cities. The horizontal is finished — it’s for us. But the vertical is still free.”

Posted by M at 21:05:13 | Permalink | No Comments »

First Architect, Then Tenant

Jamie Kripke for The New York Times

Resident Architect John Randolph answered an ad for a rental described as “homely on the outside, completely designed on the inside” and soon found himself living in a house he had renovated for a client years before.

By ALLISON ARIEFF; Published: May 3, 2007 ; SAN FRANCISCO

IN ancient Rome, to prove the soundness and reliability of the arches they built, engineers were forced to stand beneath them. Architects, one could argue, should be made to do the equivalent and take up temporary residence in the houses they design. But for John Randolph, 49, who runs the firm Randolph Designs here, moving into a former client’s home wasn’t a test but a salvation.

 

Jamie Kripke for The New York Times
Simple Plan The house is small but has a densely layered interior.
Jamie Kripke for The New York Times
Built-in furnishings, including a storage unit in the entry. The minimalist detailing reflects the original owner’s desire for a pared-down life.
Jamie Kripke for The New York Times
Mr. Randolph’s roommate, Susan Kralovec, sits at a wooden table, one of a number of pieces of furniture designed for the house.
Jamie Kripke for The New York Times
The renovation introduced unusual elements like a Japanese soaking tub hidden under the wood-slatted bathroom floor.

Two years ago, Mr. Randolph was going through a difficult period both professionally and personally. Architectural commissions were slow in coming and a 15-year relationship with a girlfriend was ending, which necessitated his finding a new place to live. He searched for months for a suitable apartment. Then one night he went online to Craigslist and typed “North Beach,” his dream neighborhood. “Instantly, this place popped up,” Mr. Randolph recalled. The listing — a one-bedroom house described as “homely on the outside, completely designed on the inside,” with features like a four-foot-deep Japanese soaking tub — sounded perfect, but also very familiar. Mr. Randolph sent an e-mail to the homeowner and asked: “Is this Zachary Smith? If so, it’s John. If not, please call anyway because I’m interested!”

The reply confirmed Mr. Randolph’s suspicion that he had renovated the same house years earlier. And Mr. Smith, who now lives in Italy and rents out his North Beach home, was happy to have his former architect as a tenant, believing no one would take better care of the place.

Mr. Randolph received the Smith commission in 1993, when he was a partner with Bruce Tomb in Interim Office of Architecture, or IOOA, a studio known for work that blurred the boundaries between art and architecture, like the Latrine Project, a permanent installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, Calif., that added exposed plumbing, working and non-working sinks and sound-magnifying partitions to a bathroom. The architects, who dissolved their partnership in 1998, “had a passion for repurposing — reuse and misuse of materials and technology,” said Mr. Tomb, using chemistry lab materials for tables or latex tubing as an aesthetic element of sinks or toilets.

The firm’s enigmatic work appealed to Mr. Smith. A Zen Buddhist and musician who then belonged to the popular 90s rock band the Loud Family, he was trying to live simply and hoping to spend about $150,000 to renovate the 1,000-square-foot fixer-upper he had bought that year for around $250,000. He had owned a house before, on the East Coast, and “always hated it,” he said from Italy, “because it felt like the kind of place I would walk into and say, God, I could never live here.” So the project brief for this new, run-down house was simply to turn it into “a place I would be overjoyed to live.” After talking to Mr. Randolph and Mr. Tomb, he said, “I had this immediate sense that they would be great partners on the project.”

One cost-saving measure was to leave the home’s exterior virtually untouched: then, as now, the 99-year-old, single-story, wood-frame stucco structure has what one might charitably call minimal curb appeal. That was just fine for its owner, a quiet guy who didn’t want to draw attention to the place. Mr. Randolph also saw virtue in the home’s simple outward appearance. “Its banality is its power,” he said.

Where so many home renovations today seem to add — height, square footage, stuff — this project centered on subtraction, particularly stripping back ceiling tiles and floorboards. “The design we did was about editing,” Mr. Randolph said, “about exposing the surfaces that had been covered.”

Peeling back the layers, the architects discovered a surprise in the form of reused ceiling beams and other materials that suggested the home was built from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake. “You can actually see fragments of other buildings in the foundation — brick, granite, terra cotta — just a mishmash of debris,” Mr. Randolph said.

Inspired by this palimpsest, the three collaborators developed a complex, layered design for the once-modest house, almost all of it concentrated on the single 61-by-23-foot living level. They created built-in furniture and surprising architectural moments, like the meditation pit sunk into the floor of the bedroom and the Japanese tub, hidden under a wood-slatted shower floor.

In the hall, walls were constructed of heavy-gauge steel with galvanized zinc plating; an acidic mixture of water and lemon juice was used to give them luster. Recalling work they had done for a previous client, Lewis Baltz, a photographer who wanted to display his work without pushpins, the architects created a magnetized wall for Mr. Smith to create free-verse poetry with magnetic letters.

Like many IOOA projects, the renovation was characterized by its unconventional use of conventional materials and technologies, especially in the kitchen, where the architects installed the sort of stainless steel appliances that were mostly found in restaurants at that time. “We saw these kitchen appliances not as branded implements of food-porn, like nowadays,” Mr. Randolph said, “but as generic, dumb boxes” clad with metal and associated with industrial use. The stainless steel was used as color. “It was part of a greater functionalist aesthetic we were working with,” Mr. Randolph said.

Equally functional are the kitchen walls, which are made from what Mr. Randolph jokingly calls prison stucco, a water-resistant building material used in shower rooms at several California correctional facilities. The countertops are fashioned not from expensive black granite but from broken billiard tables, because pool tables are made of slate, “typically the cheapest of stones,” Mr. Tomb said.

“We were working with sustainable materials, but back then it was called salvage,” Mr. Randolph said. Although such materials are inexpensive, he added, they are intended for industrial use and have held up remarkably well, as have both the built-in furniture and a few custom pieces that Mr. Randolph designed for Mr. Smith.

When Mr. Smith lived in the North Beach house, he spent much of his time on the floor, sitting on meditation cushions or on the carpet. Mr. Randolph, who shares the small house with a roommate who lives in the one room above the main living level, has maintained the minimalist décor, bringing little more than a couch and a Scissor table, one of his designs, with crisscrossing legs.

Reflecting on the unusual opportunity to interact with his own work on a daily basis, Mr. Randolph said the commission-turned-home has reassured him that “I’m on a path that makes sense, that I should perhaps trust my intuition more.” He added, “the more I’m here the more it grows on me.”

Indeed, the house seems to have served its new resident well — with one exception. “For a bachelor this house is perfect,” Mr. Randolph said. “For platonic roommates, this house becomes smaller than anything you could measure.”

Posted by M at 20:59:16 | Permalink | No Comments »

Angelenos told to keep their paws off dog park

Pets without a Santa Monica tag are barred from the off-leash area, angering a nearby L.A. neighborhood.
By Martha Groves, Times Staff Writer; May 3, 2007

Mar Vista residents have a bone to pick with Santa Monica.

Under the Santa Monica city code, only dogs with tags from that city are allowed in the off-leash area of the new Santa Monica Airport Park, which opened Sunday at the northwest corner of Bundy Drive and Airport Avenue.

The situation has prompted howls of protest from indignant Angelenos, including Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who noted in a statement that L.A. residents live close by and will be affected by traffic to and from the location but won’t be able to exercise their dogs there. Rosendahl, whose district includes Mar Vista, added that he was hoping to work out a compromise with Santa Monica officials.


“I have a responsibility to protect Los Angeles residents from unfair practices,” Rosendahl said.

The Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles begins just across Bundy from the Santa Monica Airport.

Many residents have complained for years about noise and pollution from jets that use the airport. Exclusion from the off-leash area has added another point of contention.

Tom Ponton, vice chairman of the Mar Vista Community Council, said it was ridiculous that Santa Monica was barring Los Angeles dogs from a park “in Mar Vista’s backyard, which most of us can walk to.” He added that Mar Vista residents “pay a lot of taxes in Santa Monica … when we eat in a restaurant or patronize a business.”

Barbara Stinchfield, Santa Monica’s director of community and cultural services, said the ordinance at issue dated from the early 1990s, when the city began building off-leash areas at the request of residents. It now has a dog run and two other dog parks, both in the Ocean Park neighborhood, that are intensively used. The city has 5,500 licensed dogs.

She noted that the vast majority of the eight-acre airport park, which features a large grassy area, a soccer field and children’s play equipment, is open to all visitors and leashed dogs, no matter their addresses. Only the off-leash dog park area, at less than an acre, is restricted. The limit at any given time is 45 dogs and owners.

Stinchfield said the city was considering trying to define a radius that would include portions of Los Angeles whose residents could use the dog park. “We looked at ZIP Codes and census tracts, we drove around and tried to define a boundary, but it was very difficult,” she said. Another possibility, she said, would be a pilot program that would provide 15 dog licenses for Los Angeles neighbors. “If the capacity were there, we’d increase the number of tags,” she said. Any such change would have to be approved by the Santa Monica City Council. (The dog license fee is $15 for spayed or neutered dogs, and $50 for unaltered dogs.)

Los Angeles has only nine off-leash dog areas for the entire city, Stinchfield said. That, she added, helps explain why Los Angeles residents are frustrated.

Richard Bloom, a longtime Santa Monica councilman, said the city had “been in discussions with Councilman Rosendahl for over a year to figure out how we can be good neighbors to Los Angeles.” He added that the city was expecting usage of the new dog park “to be intense because of the pent-up demand.” The airport park is the city’s first new park in about 25 years, he said.

On Wednesday, none of this hullabaloo was bothering Otis, a 9-year-old chocolate Labrador that was munching on wood chips covering the ground at the off-leash area. But dog walker Jennifer Mielziner, who showed Otis’ Santa Monica tag to an officer at the gate to enter, was critical of the rule.

“Santa Monica is one of the worst,” she said. “They’re really fascists. It makes no sense that people across the street can’t walk their dogs over here.”

Melissa Kast managed to talk her way through the gate with two big dogs, an Alaskan malamute and a malamute-German shepherd mix, both with Los Angeles tags. Like most other dog walkers and owners interviewed at the park, she said the off-leash area should be open to everyone.

Expressing the opposite view was Susan Hughes, a Santa Monica resident with Bruny, half-beagle, half-shepherd. “I hate to be provincial,” she said, “but my honest opinion is that it’s fine with me” to limit the space to Santa Monica dogs.

Posted by M at 20:51:11 | Permalink | No Comments »

Tax Cuts Weighed to Retain Homeowners

By Nikita Stewart; Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 3, 2007; B02

The D.C. Council is considering substantial breaks on inheritance and real estate taxes, and the plans could cost the city almost $100 million in revenue over the next four years, officials said yesterday.

Some council members said the proposed cuts are a way to encourage homeowners to stay in the District. But a report scheduled for release today by a think tank concludes that the legislation would most benefit the city’s wealthiest residents and do little for people who don’t own their homes.

“This is a city that is divided by income already,” said Ed Lazere, who wrote the report. Lazere is executive director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, which analyzes District tax and budget issues.

Under one of two bills, which will be debated tomorrow by the council’s finance and revenue committee, the council would limit real estate tax increases on owner-occupied housing to 5 percent a year starting in fiscal 2008. Currently, the city has a 10 percent cap.

The second measure would extend an estate inheritance tax exemption from $1 million to $3.5 million in 2009. That change is similar to exemptions established by states and the federal government.

Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) is sponsoring the estate tax legislation, with Kwame R. Brown (D-At Large) and David A. Catania (I-At Large) as co-sponsors. Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), chairman of the finance and revenue committee, is the sole sponsor of the cap legislation.

It is not clear whether a majority of the council members will support the bills, but members have reduced the cap twice since fiscal 2004. Members who support the legislation said it is necessary to prevent residents from moving out.

“I actually know people who have established their residency at their second homes in Florida or Delaware to avoid that estate tax,” Schwartz said. “We’re losing out on income and other taxes when they move. . . . Sometimes, it’s a penny-wise and pound-foolish policy.”

Natwar M. Gandhi, the city’s chief financial officer, found that the estate tax legislation would cost the city $38.5 million in revenue from fiscal 2008 through fiscal 2011. And the city would lose $58.9 million from fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2010 with the change in the tax cap, Gandhi said.

The 10 percent cap reduces property tax revenue by $165 million annually, Gandhi said.

Schwartz said she thinks the property tax relief offered by the proposed 5 percent cap is fair. “Those who pay more get more back. Those who pay less get less back, but everybody benefits,” she said.

However, she added that she wants more information about how the loss in revenue would affect city services. She described the impact of the estate tax change as minimal.

Lazere disagreed, saying both bills are tax breaks for the wealthy.

Homeowners in wards 2 and 3, well-to-do areas in Northwest, would receive 52 percent of the tax relief, according to the report. About 6 percent would benefit homeowners in wards 7 and 8, east of the Anacostia River, Lazere’s report says.

The tax reductions would not help the city’s neediest residents, many of whom rent their homes and are strapped by high income taxes, Lazere said.

“A family of four with income of $30,000, for example, pays more in income tax in D.C. than in all but eight states,” the report says.

Evans defended the tax proposals, saying the District has strong rent-control laws that provide relief for lower-income residents.

Rising property tax assessments appear to be the larger problem, he said. “I’d like to do more, but the voices we’re hearing the loudest are those people who own homes,” Evans said.

Although the 10 percent cap is far lower than the 25 percent cap on tax increases in place five years ago, residents say they cannot keep up with their assessments, Evans said. “Just because you live in wards 2 and 3 doesn’t mean you are rich,” he said. “We have a lot of people who are middle-class.”

Posted by M at 16:53:01 | Permalink | No Comments »

Library Repair Could Hit $20 Million

Fenty Moves to Line Up Funding for Quick Recovery From Georgetown Fire

By Susan Levine; Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 3, 2007; B01

Rebuilding the fire-ravaged Georgetown public library could cost between $15 million and $20 million, a sum that D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty yesterday committed to allocating without delay so that the doors can reopen “as quickly as possible.”

Fenty (D) has drafted emergency legislation to direct all excess revenue in fiscal 2007 and 2008 toward the library and historic Eastern Market, which also was hit by a three-alarm blaze Monday. One city official estimated yesterday that as much as $80 million could be made available.

“It’s important that there not be any gap in the reconstruction” of either site, Fenty declared.

As officials continued to assess damage to the library — taking stock of the branch’s contents as well as to the Georgian-style building — they had good news about the Peabody Collection that documents Georgetown’s past through extensive records, maps, photos, books and clippings.

Perhaps 80 percent of the collection, housed on the library’s east side, suffered far less harm than initially feared. The ceiling there held, and the archives escaped smoke and flames.

“The material is wet but not burned,” Ginnie Cooper, chief librarian for the city, said against the backdrop of a charred and partially collapsed second-floor roofline. “We can deal with wet.”

The mayor, Cooper and other city leaders toured that devastated upper floor yesterday afternoon after recounting the fire department’s response. Inexplicably, the department was not immediately called when flames broke out about noon, and by the time crews arrived, the roof was engulfed and starting to cave in, Chief Dennis L. Rubin said.

Firefighters had other problems once they reached the library, at Wisconsin Avenue and R Street NW. The two closest fire hydrants were not working, forcing them to pull water from two blocks away. Officials later revealed that more than 50 hydrants across the city are not in working order. But firefighter union officials warned there are probably more, because hydrants often aren’t tested until a fire breaks out.

The department has not determined how the fire started but said it is focusing on an accidental cause, possibly electrical. Electrical problems also are suspected in the fire at the Eastern Market, which destroyed 13 businesses inside the landmark on Capitol Hill. Hydrants at that scene were working.

Fenty labeled the hydrant issue a “huge priority” and said the city will work with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, the quasi-independent agency responsible for maintaining them. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) requested a congressional hearing on the matter.

“There is ample reason to be concerned that the problem in Georgetown may not be an isolated one,” Davis wrote to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In a subsequent interview, Davis said he wanted to determine whether the District needed federal help in providing regular inspections and maintenance of its 9,300 hydrants.

City leaders dismissed the need for such assistance in unequivocal terms yesterday. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), who represents Georgetown, tartly urged Congress to attend instead to national concerns. Separately, he and colleague Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) said they would ask for a council review of the hydrants’ condition and WASA operations.

“I see absolutely no value in Congress stepping into our affairs,” Evans said. “It’s an issue we can handle and we will handle, and I do not appreciate the congressman grandstanding at our expense.”

Yesterday’s walk-through by officials provided a stark look at what Georgetown residents lost this week. The westernmost upstairs room, one of two housing the children’s collection, is a sodden, blackened shell open to the sky. Exposed are steel beams, felled and twisted by the intense heat.

Amazingly, despite a sagging, dripping ceiling, some books in the middle room are unscathed. Several young-adult series on shelves against a wall appear ready for checkout. “It could have been a lot worse,” a hard-hatted Fenty said.

Interim arrangements are being made all around. The fire department’s Engine 5 on Dent Place plans to relocate two support trucks to allow for a temporary reading room. Georgetown University has invited the community into its library. Cooper promised to resume children’s programs and station a bookmobile in the neighborhood within weeks.

Some items of the Peabody Collection are beyond repair, including oil paintings that apparently were soaked. “They look like etchings on canvas now,” Cooper said.

The collection will be sent to several locations for repair, including the Smithsonian Institution, which has taken possession of census volumes and other rare books. Much material will head to Texas in a white freezer truck. Once there, the technical division of Belfor Property Restoration will begin a process of thawing, washing, reshaping and ultimately freeze-drying the records and other items.

From Fort Worth, Kirk Lively, Belfor’s director of technical services, explained how water in a document “goes directly from ice to vapor without passing through the liquid phase.” And, in so doing, the document is saved — from mold, from deterioration, from ruin.

Not all of the collection will require major work. Some metal filing cabinets in the Peabody Room protected their contents completely. “In some cases [the material] was dry,” Cooper said before the tour. In others, “sopping wet.”

On the sidewalk outside the library sat dozens of plastic-lined boxes of records, labeled and taped and ready for loading in the 53-foot “Thermo King” truck. By Monday, the truck should be in Texas.

“I am much more optimistic,” Cooper declared.

Staff writers Keith L. Alexander, Allison Klein and David Nakamura contributed to this report.

Posted by M at 16:51:34 | Permalink | No Comments »

Big Dig job may have used wrong epoxy

Total of bolts affected not clear; probers ask who knew

By Scott Allen and Sean P. Murphy, Globe Staff | May 3, 2007

Contractors apparently used the wrong adhesive to install at least some of the bolts in a Big Dig tunnel ceiling that partially collapsed last summer, project records show, prompting criminal investigators to focus on whether the mix-up was a significant factor in the accident that killed a Jamaica Plain woman.

Invoices from the 1999 ceiling construction job show that Modern Continental Construction Co. received and apparently used at least one case of a quick-drying epoxy to secure ceiling bolts to the tunnel roof rather than standard epoxy, which the ceiling designers had specified.

The distinction was crucial to the safety of the ceiling: The “fast-set” epoxy holds 25 percent less weight than standard epoxy and is not recommended for suspending heavy objects overhead.

It is unclear how widespread the use of fast-set epoxy was, since most sales records don’t list the epoxy type, but state criminal investigators are looking seriously at the possibility that the weaker epoxy was used in the ceiling section that collapsed when 20 bolts popped out on the night of July 10, 2006, according to representatives of several firms under investigation.

The investigators also want to know why no one raised the possibility that the wrong epoxy had been used when ceiling bolts started coming loose during construction of the Interstate 90 connector tunnel.

“If [workers] used the wrong stuff, which appears to be the case, the issue is who knew about this or were they reckless about letting the project go forward with the wrong stuff?” said a consultant to one of the firms involved in the ceiling project, who asked not to be named so as not to anger prosecutors who are presenting their evidence in secret to a Suffolk County grand jury.

Paul F. Ware, the special prosecutor leading the state’s criminal investigation, has sent investigators back into the tunnel over the last few days to collect more ceiling bolts for lab analysis, according to a letter from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which manages the Big Dig tunnel system, to the companies involved in the ceiling project. The tests could help investigators determine the strength and type of epoxy that was used.

Use of fast-set epoxy in the ceiling is one in a series of missteps that may have contributed to the accident and, at the least, point out oversight lapses in the $14.6 billion Big Dig project.

The Globe has previously reported that, to save time, Big Dig managers and designers eliminated half the ceiling bolts called for in the original ceiling design and that construction workers made numerous mistakes during installation of the bolts that could have weakened them. The newspaper has also reported that ceiling bolts in the area of the collapse were safety-tested with a weight now regarded as too low, potentially allowing defective bolts to pass.

If the bolts were held in place by fast-set epoxy, the ceiling would have had little, if any, margin of safety left. Bolts secured with fast-set epoxy could safely carry 4,285 pounds each, rather than the 6,350 pounds the designers had planned on, based on their final report to Big Dig managers on the ceiling. Two independent engineers who have reviewed the ceiling’s specifications for the Globe estimated that the ceiling’s weight was close to 5,000 pounds per bolt, which is more than bolts secured with fast-set epoxy were designed to bear over the long term.

After the accident, the tunnel ceiling was permanently removed in the area of the accident, and elsewhere in the connector the ceiling was reinforced with additional bolts and brackets.

Construction of the ceiling was supervised by engineers at the joint venture of Bechtel and Parsons Brinckerhoff, but responsibility for using the right epoxy is difficult to pin down. The Braintree office of Gannett Fleming designed the ceiling to be secured with standard epoxy, but that require ment is not highlighted in project documents. Modern Continental built the ceiling, but workers have said they weren’t told there was an important difference between the epoxies. Powers Fasteners of New York had a contract to supply the epoxy and bolts, but only through a small distribution company that bought the products wholesale and then delivered them to the job.

As a result, each company has said it bears no responsibility for use of the wrong epoxy. In fact, Powers Fasteners officials have told investigators that they aren’t even certain that the epoxy in the accident area was their product, even though, during construction, company officials visited the tunnel and provided technical advice to workers on how to install the ceiling bolts properly. Powers’ distributor, Newman, Renner, Colony of Plymouth, declined to comment.

The investigation into what epoxy was used has been hampered by both the imprecise sales records and the difficulty of chemically identifying the epoxy used in the area of the accident. The National Transportation Safety Board reported four months after the crash that it could not identify the epoxy taken from the failed bolts even after comparing it with samples of standard and fast-set epoxy. And the sales records that show what Newman, Renner, Colony delivered to Modern Continental distinguish between standard and fast-set epoxy in only one invoice.

State investigators in recent months have intensified their interest in Powers, sending company officials a fresh subpoena in March asking for documents concerning its role in the ceiling project. In addition, witnesses from other companies called before the grand jury hearing evidence in the case say they are being questioned closely about the type of epoxy used to hold up the ceiling.

“All the discussion outside the jury room is about the question of which epoxy was used and was it fast-set epoxy?” said an official for one of the companies under investigation who asked not to be named.

The focus on epoxy comes as Ware and his boss, Attorney General Martha Coakley, strive to meet a self-imposed deadline of June to decide whether to ask the grand jury to return indictments against anyone for criminal negligence in the accident. Legal analysts say that winning a conviction would require Coakley to prove that people or companies knew they were building a dangerous ceiling or they were so reckless that they missed obvious warning signs.

Before taking office in January, Coakley had raised doubts that the evidence was strong enough to prove criminal negligence, but, since Ware’s arrival on March 1, some in her office say they have become more optimistic that there could be enough evidence for criminal indictments.

But fixing responsibility for the epoxy remains challenging, in part because the design documents produced by Gannett Fleming and Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff say only in passing that contractors should use standard epoxy rather than fast-set for ceiling bolts. All of the safety calculations are based on bolts secured by standard epoxy, but the design specifications don’t explicitly forbid fast-set, and the fact that fast-set can support less weight than standard epoxy is contained only in a footnote.

Adding to the confusion, although fast-set epoxy cartridges were clearly marked, the workers installing the ceiling may not have known there was a difference between fast-set and standard aside from drying time. Construction workers on the ceiling project have said they used Powers Fasteners epoxy and bolts, but they don’t recall whether the label said fast-set.

Finally, the epoxy passed through many hands on its way to the tunnel. Sika Corp. manufactured the epoxy at a plant in Ohio, then shipped it to a warehouse in New Jersey in barrels marked with a prominent “FS” to denote fast-set epoxy, according to Sika officials. Powers then transported Sika’s epoxy to its plant in New York where workers repackaged it into small cartridges, placing Powers’s label on it. Then, Newman, Renner, Colony brought the cartridges and bolts to Modern Continental at the tunnel site.

Criminal investigators are focusing on a period in October 1999 when five ceiling bolts came loose shortly after the ceiling was hung from them, prompting Modern Continental officials to call in Powers Fasteners officials for advice. Over the next three months, officials from Powers, Modern and Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff discussed ways to install bolts more securely, but there is no evidence anyone asked: Did workers use the right epoxy?

As one lawyer with direct knowledge of the investigation put it, “Was the right advice given by the experts?”

Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com; Murphy at smurphy@globe.com.

Posted by M at 16:05:42 | Permalink | No Comments »

Automated public toilets get off to slow start in L.A.

Seven of the luxury loos have been installed so far, with up to 150 planned, but only one works. City bureaucracy is blamed.
By Cara Mia DiMassa, Times Staff Writer; May 3, 2007

The green, oval, vaguely Art Deco pod arrived in Pershing Square six months ago — billed as the answer to one of downtown’s most human of needs.

It’s a luxury automated toilet, the kind seen on the streets of world-class cities such as Paris and New York and a prototype for as many as 150 that officials plan to roll out across Los Angeles in the next few years.

Costing as much as a small downtown condo, it offers instructions in Vietnamese, French, Italian, Spanish, English and Braille, advising passersby to drop a quarter in the slot and step inside.

Unfortunately, the bathroom doesn’t work.


Six months after the arrival of the automated public toilet in Pershing Square — and 2 1/2 years after officials began installing public toilets in the city — only one of seven facilities actually works. In downtown, where they were supposed to help tourists and homeless alike, there is only one working automatic lavatory.

Though the luxury public toilet has become a status symbol in cities around the world, in L.A. it’s a slightly complicated tale — one of the city’s efforts to create a more pedestrian-oriented life, but also a story about its bureaucratic struggles to achieve that goal.

The city plans to install the APTs, as they are known, around the Westside, the Miracle Mile, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, and by doing so, it joins more than 600 cities around the globe that have installed the toilets.

In Los Angeles, the facilities are part of a 20-year contract between the city and a joint venture of two companies: CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux. The latter, a French firm, has installed thousands of the sleek units worldwide, mostly in exchange for the right to sell the ads that adorn them. It’s a common model that is used by the majority of American cities looking to install the loos. L.A. is guaranteed $150 million in revenue over the course of the contract.

Backers say the toilets are needed to instill a more pedestrian culture in places such as downtown, Hollywood, Westwood and Ventura Boulevard. They note that they are a big step up from the Porta Pottis used in some parts of downtown.

But skeptics wonder whether the toilets are needed, and whether they are less about serving a public need than selling ad space.

“There is a price for it,” said Kevin Fry of Scenic America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to scenic conservation. “The city streets become increasingly commercialized…. You are surrendering the visual quality of the public realm to marketers, and we don’t think that’s a way for cities to be built.”

Even some supporters are becoming frustrated with all the delays, which include getting the power turned on — and to stay on — at the toilets. One downtown blogger has posted regular “Toilet Watch” updates on his website in frustration.

“If we want to clean up the smells and sights of our streets, we have to be able to offer these facilities,” said Eric Richardson, the blogger, who is a member of the area’s neighborhood council.

CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux are installing transit shelters, public kiosks and toilets as part of a massive “coordinated street furniture” deal with the city. The companies foot the bill for installing all the structures, including the toilets, and for the maintenance on each.

Separate city departments have been responsible for overseeing installation of the APTs, the running of sewer, power, water and phone lines to the sites, and inspection and permitting of the toilets.

The departments blame each other for the delay. Various people interviewed attributed the delay to a lack of cooperation among the agencies responsible for getting the toilets operational.

François Nion, a co-managing director of the CBS-JCDecaux venture, blamed the slow installation process on a lack of power and water hookups.

“It’s a big city,” he said. “There are so many departments you have to go through.”

Lance Oishi of the city’s Bureau of Street Services was blunt: “The utilities are holding up the opening,” he said — a nod to the city’s Department of Water and Power.

Joe Ramallo, a spokesman for that agency, said officials were looking into the cause of the delay. He said work on the Pershing Square unit would be completed in a month.

The one downtown toilet that is operational sits just outside San Julian Park, at San Julian and 5th streets.

Its location — in the heart of skid row — and its price — free — guarantee that it gets a lot of use. Nion said estimates put daily usage at about 120 to 130 flushes.

A toilet at the Red Line station in North Hollywood gets a similar number of flushes. An APT in Northridge, near the Metrolink station, gets about 20 to 30 users a day.

As a group, the toilets are sleek, modular units with doors that whoosh open like an elevator’s, with plenty of space for ads on the outside.

JCDecaux offers three stand-alone models: the Hydra, a gray, boxy structure that resembles a plastic storage bin; the Cox, a more streamlined version with a levered awning over the entrance that makes it look more like a bus shelter; and the premium, $300,000 Pillar, the oval, green version chosen for Los Angeles that has much in common with phone booths of yore.

Still, L.A. is a little late in embracing luxury toilets.

Singapore, London and Athens have more than 500 of the APTs each — most installed in their city centers.

In some cities, the facilities have been tailored to the needs of the toilet-going public. Those that adorn Bukit Bintang, for example, a shopping district in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, give users the choice of using a squatting bowl or a sitting pan. A deputy prime minister attended the opening of one of the public toilets there.

But even with those features, some problems have plagued the APTs. In Seattle, which pays about $700,000 a year to maintain five downtown toilets, business leaders said the facilities had become a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes.

L.A. officials say that the risks of such use are far outstripped by the public benefits of self-cleaning, self-monitoring toilets — and that the time limit on each person’s use of the toilet, usually 15 to 20 minutes, also limits such behavior.

After Kevin Scott left the APT outside San Julian Park, it whirred a little as it cleaned. Scott, who is homeless, said he prefers the APT to a bank of nearby Porta Pottis and the missions, which make their toilets available to the public.

“These are a lot cleaner” than the Porta Pottis, he said. “They’re being used.”

Posted by M at 16:01:05 | Permalink | No Comments »

On the rise in American cities: the car-free zone

Pedestrians, bicyclists, and joggers are king of the road – at least sometimes – as more US cities ban autos from parks or designated districts.
By Daniel B. Wood| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor; San Francisco
from the May 02, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0502/p01s03-ussc.html

Every Saturday starting May 26 through Sept. 30, bicyclists, joggers, and pedestrians will have free rein on almost a mile of John F. Kennedy Drive, the main drag through Golden Gate Park. The usual denizens of the road – autos – will be banned, detoured elsewhere.

Vehicles are already prohibited in parts of the park on Sundays, and the decision to “go carless” on Saturdays as well concludes a heated seven-year debate. In the end, arguments that such road closures promote family activities, more active lifestyles, and tighter-knit communities carried the day.

 

The auto’s demotion at Golden Gate Park follows dozens of similar moves in at least 20 American cities in the past three years. It’s a trend that is gaining ground rapidly in the US, say urban planners.

• New York is proposing to shut down perimeter roads of Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park all summer long.

• Atlanta plans to transform 53 acres of blighted, unused land into new bike-friendly green space.

• Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas, are planning events to promote car-free days in public parks, most in the hope that the idea will become permanent or extend for months.

“Cities across America are increasingly declaring that parks are for people, not cars, … and closing roads within parks is one result of that,” says Ben Welle with The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, in Washington.

Resistance can be fierce at first, he and others say, because of worries about traffic congestion, parking problems, and loss of visitors for businesses and museums. But studies are showing that traffic problems can be minimized, shops and museums get more visitors, and residents begin to cherish their where-the-action-is location.

Not everyone is convinced, saying the jury is still out on how no-car zones affect neighborhood vitality. In San Francisco, for instance, the de Young Museum has said its delivery schedule must be adjusted because of the new road closure, and it is concerned that patrons with physical disabilities may not be able to get to the museum as readily.

The model city for road closure is Bogotá, Colombia, which in 1983 embarked on a program called ciclovia (bike path), in which designated streets were closed to cars every Sunday but open for jogging, biking, dancing, playing ball, walking pets, strolling with babies – anything but driving. One-and-a-half million people now turn out each week for ciclovia. Other cities in Latin America followed suit, closing parts of parks or whole urban districts to cars – some intermittently, some permanently. A result: revitalized neighborhoods and an influx of people.

Smaller US cities, from Davenport, Iowa, to Huntington Beach, Calif., are also starting to create car-free zones, according to Mr. Welle’s studies.

Beginning this month, El Paso will detour cars from seven roads every Sunday from 7 to 11 a.m. so that cyclists, joggers, and pedestrians can use them instead.

“City leaders were faced with a challenge: to get a poor city of overweight, sedentary people moving when there weren’t any parks or [bicycle] lanes,” says Robin Stallings of the Texas Bicycle Coalition. A national magazine declared the city one of the four fattest in the US, he says, “and that really got everyone’s attention.”

Two years of planning and $100,000 in donations made the program possible. El Paso is the first ciclovia city in Texas – and it needs it more than most, says Beto O’Rourke, the city councilman who championed the idea. It has just 25 percent of the park space of the average US city, a smaller tax base, and few spaces for pedestrians or bicyclists, he says. “This solves a lot of problems at once.”

The trend reflects cities’ response to residents who, after streaming back to city centers, want more pedestrian amenities.

“The great thing about ciclovia is that cities can do it very inexpensively. All the infrastructure is already there; there is no added capital cost,” says Gil Penalosa, former parks and recreation director for Bogotá who helped expand its network of closed roads from 8 miles in 1997 to 70 miles today.

In some ciclovia cities, such as Guadalahara, Mexico, fears that autoless streets would cause economic hardship have dissolved. Some merchants actually had to return to their stores on Sundays because the thousands of visitors wanted everything from food and drink to curios.

“The economic boost to Guadalahara has been tremendous,” says Rob Sadowsky, a Chicago bike activist who recently visited the city for a ciclovia symposium. Mr. Sadowsky is organizing an August event in the Windy City that, if successful, would extend next year from May to October.

In the US, say observers, the clamoring for car-free park space is intensifying because of two other trends: global warming and obesity rates.

“Climate change and the obesity crisis have [rejuvenated] the movement for car-free space,” says Paul White of Transportation Alternatives, which works to reclaim roads from autos. As of last year, he notes, more of Earth’s inhabitants live in cities than in rural areas. “Now we have to figure out what urban habitat will sustain ourselves … it’s all about reducing car use.”

Posted by M at 05:30:48 | Permalink | No Comments »