Time Served

From nyc.gov:

LANDLORD JAILED FOR INHUMAN CONDITIONS IN BRONX BUILDING

Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Shaun Donovan today announced that Landlord Hamid Khan has been sentenced to nine days in jail for criminal contempt for failing to repair hundreds of violations of the Housing Maintenance Code, including immediately hazardous conditions, in his tenants' apartments. The case involved 1055 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a 94-unit building in the Bronx.

There are currently 2,268 outstanding Housing Maintenance Code violations on the six story building. Conditions in the building that were referenced in court included severe water damage, collapsed floors and ceilings, construction debris throughout the building, a broken toilet, a broken intercom and a defective fire escape. In November of last year, the building was included in HPD's new Alternative Enforcement Program which targets some of the city's most troublesome buildings for comprehensive review and repairs.

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Can They All Get Along?

From The New York Times:

F. Y. I.

Duel of the Titans

Q. I was running in Central Park at dusk and noticed rats and squirrels in the same area. Do these two species get along?

A. “Yeah, they ‘get along,’ so long as you don’t push things,” Darrin Lunde, collections manager in the department of mammalogy in the American Museum of Natural History, wrote in an e-mail message. “But in a battle between a rat and a squirrel, my money is going to be on the rat.”

Different habits keep the species apart, Mr. Lunde explained. On the other hand, he wrote, the brown rat and gray squirrel are similar in size; both will eat just about anything: and both are likely to be active toward dusk.

Mr. Lunde recalled a scene a few years back, around twilight, near the north entrance to the Central Park Zoo: “Someone had strung up a duffel bag full of peanuts, and the place was just swarming with squirrels, but with only one great big brown rat sitting on top of the pile and battling off all the squirrels around him. I still remember that rat.”

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The Crap Trap

From HandymanClub.com:

What Is "Forcing the Trap?"
	Use it the next time you remove the toilet
	Let's clear the air as to what "forcing the trap" is not: It's not a technique used by interrogators to make informants "sing." It's not a strategy golfers use to play their "fried egg" ball that's buried in a bunker. It's not a t'ai chi chuan movement to remedy constipation. It is, in the end, a simple technique used when you repair or replace a toilet. The trap, of course, connects the drainpipe system to branch line. You may curse the trap, which is built into the toilet structure, when waste plugs it up and you have to use the plunger. But mostly, you should sing praises to it because the trap holds water that blocks sewer gas. Your home life would stink, literally, if not for the trap. Forcing the trap involves pouring water into the toilet in order to remove nearly all the water from the toilet. Huh? These instructions in three steps will explain. click title for more

LEEDing In Brooklyn

From Multifamily Housing:

Brooklyn’s First LEED Certified Condo Opens
By Anuradha Kher

Greenbelt, Brooklyn’s first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified condominium project is opening at 361 Manhattan Ave., with sales for the project expected to begin in February 2008.

The eight-unit building includes one- and two-bedroom condominiums ranging in price from $599,000 to 815,000.

Greenbelt was designed to save more than 40 percent on energy use and 30 percent on water usage as well as to improve the indoor air quality. 40 percent of the materials used in the construction of the building are recycled, rapidly renewable and certified.

“Greenbelt integrates every aspect of an environmentally and socially responsible building,” says Derek Denckla, the attorney for Greenbelt.

“We have pushed ourselves, as developers, to make this building as environmentally low-impact as possible, and we believe that it will be a positive addition to the community,” says Denckla.

Gregory Merryweather, designer and architect of the project says, “This used to be a one-story plumbing warehouse.” Wherever possible, the team used recycled products, such as steel beams and studs and fly ash in all concrete products. Merryweather used a contemporary, corrugated steel façade and glass curtain-wall in a horizontal arrangement, accentuated by long narrow bands of windows on each level.

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Solar Fun

From The New York Times, the saga of installing solar power in one New York City co-op:

About New York
(Solar) Power to the People Is Not So Easily Achieved
By JIM DWYER

One day nearly four years ago, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to give solar electricity a try at home — home, for me, being an apartment house in Washington Heights, alias upstate Manhattan. The price of electricity was climbing. A war was being fought, if not over oil, then certainly over the ground the oil was in. Solar technology had proven that it could generate real power.

And while the building may not have been in the eternal sunshine of Arizona, it does stand on one of the highest spots in Manhattan. The first rays of the morning come blazing into the windows on its east side, and the last tangle of daylight bounces off the west side. The roof bakes in the sun all day. As far as I could tell, our building needed only one star aligned in its favor, and we happened to be locked in at just the right spot.

Oh blissed ignorance.

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