Times Up: Once a Burgeoning Green Neighborhood, the Times Square Submarket is Struggling
As part of gbNYC's rolling transformation from one platform to another -- WordPress to Drupal, for all you curious nerdz -- we've been having to do a lot of re-tagging of old posts. The reasons for this are both complicated and uninteresting, but it's working: our Google rating is back, for one thing, and things are starting to make sense more generally. There has been an unexpectedly poignant side benefit to all this re-tagging, though, as your author (and super-intern Vik Gupta) have worked our way back to 2007-vintage posts about burgeoning new green developments that were supposedly thisclose to becoming the next big green thing. Vornado's LEED-CS Gold building a 2

Green Ice: NHL's New Jersey Devils Make Nod In Green Direction with Compact Fluorescent Giveaway
I really should handle this one. The good news is that Stephen is back from his Far East honeymoon, safe and sound, but while he'd usually be our hockey correspondent -- given the fact that he cares about the sport, and I only write about it when my other job requires it -- he's 1) currently saddled with a body clock that is telling him it's 13:72 a.m., Bermuda Triangle time and 2) such a devout New York Rangers fan that it'd be hard for him to write a post about the New Jersey Devils without inserting all-caps "Let's Go Rangers" interjections throughout. And anyway, as New Jersey relatives, we both share a t

Buffalo Sun City, Part Two: Hydro-Powered Solar Silicon Factory Re-Opens in Niagara Falls
The tentative greening of Greater Buffalo was a favorite subject of mine in my early days at gbNYC, mostly because I'm a sucker for underdogs and any good news -- be it about the ultra-moribund Buffalo Bills or an attempt to remake the city as a solar manufacturing hub -- about Greater Buffalo always kind of counts as a man-bites-dog story. The just-reopened Globe Specialty Metals plant in Niagara Falls

Harlem Block Party: Entire Block of 135th Street Slated for Green Retrofits
Some blocks get all the history. West 135th Street in Harlem, between 7th Avenue and Lenox, was one of the proudest blocks in the neighborhood during Harlem's glory years. In 1910, the St. Philip's Episcopal Church -- the wealthiest of uptown's black churches during that period -- bought the block of homes on 135th Street, with the intention of renting them to parishioners. At the time, the row of stately townhomes were the first buildings that far uptown to belong to an African American landlord. The block was later the home (and one of the main subjects) of the famed photographer James Van Der Zee. These days,

Hitting the Wall: Upper East Side Yoga Studio's Green Wall Losing Battle With Scaffolding
What's not to like about a living wall? Where regular walls are (perhaps inevitably) drab and wall-like, a living wall is leafy and generally green-colored and alive. I barely remember what it was like to walk past The Colorado -- a condo building on the Upper East Side a couple blocks from my apartment -- before Pure Yoga moved into the space formerly known as The Space Behind The Gap back in 2008. But I remember vividly the experience of walking past the leafy, verdant facade provided by the living wall Pure Yoga installed. It was lik