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After a Boxing Giant's Departure From the Bronx, a Tiny Contender Steps Up - New York Times

Monday, April 24, 2006
The New York Times
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April 24, 2006
After a Boxing Giant's Departure From the Bronx, a Tiny Contender Steps Up
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

In a dimly lighted fourth-floor factory in the South Bronx, three women chatted in Spanish as they stitched together boxing headgear. The windows were closed, the smell of leather and glue strong. They set each piece aside after it was finished, to be inspected one last time before it was packaged.

The tiny operation represents a hope, a prayer even, on the part of John Golomb, the grandson of the man who in 1910 founded what would become the Everlast boxing equipment company in the Bronx. In 2003, the company, which was no longer in the Golomb family's hands, closed its factory there, laying off more than 100 workers and moving production to Moberly, Mo.

Mr. Golomb remained behind, determined to build a boxing empire in its place, and opened a shop of his own in early 2004 with a handful of former Everlast employees. The shop is in Port Morris, the same section of the Bronx where the Everlast factory stood.

Mr. Golomb, 52, seems to have the same sort of confidence displayed by Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson, just some of the boxers he designed equipment for. "My father used to say that Everlast is the Mercedes-Benz of boxing," he said. "If you want the best cigar, you get a Havana cigar. I'm not saying I can make a Havana cigar in the Bronx, but I can make a boxing glove."

Mr. Golomb's battle to succeed sums up the challenges facing manufacturing in an expensive city like New York, and his tactics follow what many see as the only viable approach: seek a niche market, ensure the product is of high quality, and charge a premium price. Above all, be efficient.

James Orr, a research officer with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said, "The high cost of doing business, including paying high wages, needs to be matched with high productivity."

Mr. Golomb, who named his company Legacy, pays workers what he calls a decent wage of about $10 an hour as well as benefits. At the moment, there are just five of them, all former Everlast employees. His wife, Barbara Lerman, who is a co-owner, does administrative duties.

Seth Horowitz, the chief executive officer of Everlast Worldwide, who once worked with Mr. Golomb, chose his words carefully when asked about him, saying he was "a very knowledgeable craftsman."

But can he make a go of it?

Mr. Horowitz paused, and said, "Depending on the size, the scale, I think he can be a success."

Making a top-notch pair of regulation 8-ounce fight gloves is akin to making art, Mr. Golomb said in his workshop, surrounded by gloves, headgear and photographs of three generations of Golombs posing with boxers and other athletes.

Making a boxing glove starts with a high-quality section of cowhide, a strong and supple leather, cut very thin. It is treated and cut into patterns. The strongest part of the hide will form the gloves' punching surface, while weaker portions — from the cow's stomach area, for instance — will be used for the palm and thumb.

The interior lining is a synthetic, absorbent material, while the padding is a combination of four types of foam molded together with an adhesive. Each glove is first sewn inside out and then turned right-side out. Then the foam padding is inserted and the remaining hole covered with leather. An experienced operator can make 25 pairs of gloves a day.

Martin Snow, owner of the Trinity Boxing Club in Lower Manhattan, praised the work done in the Legacy shop.

"It's good, quality stuff," he said, adding that the prices were competitive. "It's all handmade. It's not something that gets run off by machine in Pakistan and India."

Mr. Golomb's grandfather, Jacob Golomb, was a 17-year-old Russian immigrant and a frequent swimmer who was dissatisfied with how quickly swimsuits wore out.

He decided to make more durable suits, and guaranteed that they would last at least one year, thus the name "Everlast."

A few years later, a little-known boxer named Jack Dempsey asked Mr. Golomb to make him a headgear that would protect his cauliflower ear during training. Mr. Golomb did so, and later designed the gloves Dempsey used to pummel Jess Willard and win the heavyweight title in 1919.

By the time Jacob's son, Dan Golomb, took over the business in the 1950's, many people were following boxing on television. Exploiting the new medium, Dan Golomb increased the size of the Everlast logo on the back of the gloves to make it easier for fans to see on the small screen.

Jacob's grandson, the Golomb trying to build the Legacy brand today, made gloves for Sugar Ray Leonard fights that allowed him to make a comeback from an eye injury suffered in a previous fight. Leonard did not want to fight against someone wearing standard gloves, because the extended thumbs on them could be used to gouge out an opponent's eyes, so Mr. Golomb came up with a thumbless model.

Mr. Golomb left Everlast in the mid-1990's and spent time making and repairing baseball gloves, including an overnight repair job for Wade Boggs, the Hall of Famer.

John Golomb returned to Everlast in 2001, a few years after his father died and not long after the company had been sold to George Horowitz, the father of Everlast's current chief executive. His last job at Everlast was overseeing production on the factory floor.

Seth Horowitz said that Everlast was forced to move because of the quadrupling of the rent on its factory and that it was unable to get government help to stay.

"There was no way our margins could have absorbed that increase," Mr. Horowitz said.

When the South Bronx factory closed in December 2003, Everlast said it would save $2.8 million annually.

Mr. Golomb said that the laid-off workers persuaded him to start again.

"The only thing that left the Bronx is Everlast," he said. "The brand is not the important thing — it's who made it."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Red Hook: On Cruise Control?

Red Hook: On Cruise Control?
Ships Bring New Life to Brooklyn Neighborhood

By Gary Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 23, 2006; P01

Inside Pier Glass, a studio and workshop way off Brooklyn's beaten path, an artisan was working magic on a shapeless blob. In a few deft strokes, with the help of a blowpipe, a jack and a red-hot oven, Mary Ellen Buxton created an elegant long-necked vase. But the scene outside the window upstaged her: From across the still blue water of the Erie Basin, the Statue of Liberty stared straight into the room.

Red Hook, the long-neglected Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood where Pier Glass is located, is all about the views. The Beard Street Pier promenade, a walkway at the end of the neighborhood's main drag, offers a head-on glimpse of Lady Liberty. Behind it is the Beard Pier Warehouse, a massive brick Civil War-era structure. The remains of the once vibrant Revere Sugar Refinery, now covered with gulls, are reflected in the water.

Now is the moment to catch those views and dig deeper into this scene, because Red Hook is changing. Last weekend, the 23-story luxury ocean liner Queen Mary 2 berthed just around the corner from the Beard Pier at the spanking-new, $52 million Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, inaugurating the scruffy neighborhood as New York's latest cruise port. In the coming months, dozens of ships, including the Queen Elizabeth 2 and four Princess Cruise ships, are scheduled to dock here, setting thousands of passengers into these brick-covered streets. Squint a bit and it's not hard to picture Van Brunt Street, Red Hook's main boulevard, lined with souvenir shops and wine bars.

But for at least another season or two, this former stronghold of longshoremen will probably be able to hang on to its semi-industrial, offbeat character. While not quite the side of New York that cruise passengers are looking for, it is a place adventurous urban explorers should see. Its raw, Bohemian edge is reminiscent of Manhattan's Meatpacking District or Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood, before white-tablecloth restaurants and trendy clubs arrived.

Locals still pack into Sunny's, a tavern dating to the late 1800s, for Peroni beer, bluegrass jams and weekly book-and-author readings. For the latest update on the battle for more public access to New York waterfronts, Red Hookers pile into the Hudson Waterfront Museum, a rough-and-tumble barge moored along Conover Street. "It's a funky, real and pretty unique scene," said Bill Carney, a member of the faux French band Les Sans Culottes and a regular at Sunny's. "But you can feel the spirit of SoHo coming on."

Indeed. A few seeds from the posher side of New York have already been planted. At 360, a tony French bistro on Van Brunt, chef-owner Arnaud Erhart dishes out three-course gourmet meals -- roasted scallops and "biodynamic" wines are regular menu items -- for the irresistible price of $25 a head. LeNell's, a stylish wine and spirits shop a block away, offers an impressive stock of bourbons, bitters and other beverages in a parlorlike setting.

But these changes have not taken the working-class heart out of Red Hook. Founded by Dutch immigrants in the mid-1600s, it is like an island apart from the 72.8-square-mile borough of Brooklyn. It's actually a peninsula, separated from Carroll Gardens, the nearest neighborhood, by the labyrinthine Gowanus Expressway. About 20 minutes by foot from the closest subway station (at Smith and Ninth streets), Red Hook is most easily reached by taxi or bus. It's about a 15-minute drive from Brooklyn's better-known enclaves -- Prospect Park, Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg.

In some ways, the isolation adds to the appeal. Along Van Brunt, a mile-long commercial strip, the sight of locals leaning on fences and chatting on front stoops is common. In a neighborhood with an estimated 11,000 residents, faces soon become familiar, even to newcomers just visiting for a day. With its sizable African American and Latino contingents, as well as white inhabitants, Red Hook has a refreshingly multicultural character.

On a recent Sunday, a couple of neighbors gobbled fresh cupcakes and sipped coffee outside Baked, a popular coffee shop. Inside the Hope & Anchor, a diner and gathering spot, regulars swapped neighborhood gossip. A rousing spiritual wafted over from the Red Hook Tabernacle on Van Dyke, a side street.

In the end, isolation has been Red Hook's scourge. In the post-World War II era, when the shipping ports shifted to New Jersey, unemployment rose sharply and the houses and streets fell into disrepair. In some ways, the place has never recovered. Plywood covers windows on many of the buildings along Van Brunt and side streets. A brick factory building on Imlay Street, next to the cruise terminal, is locked up and covered with black construction netting. And along the Erie Basin, a massive shipyard being demolished to make way for an Ikea store looks like a hurricane zone.

But the new cruise terminal is supposed to change all that. The building, sprawling more than 180,000 square feet, was conceived in 2004, when Royal Caribbean and several other major cruise lines transferred from the old, outdated port on the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, to a facility in Bayonne, N.J. Even though the West Side terminal was outdated, it gave arriving passengers easy access to New York attractions. The Red Hook port is the city's bid to recapture the cruise ship market on its side of the river.

Aside from Lady Liberty, cruisers arriving in Red Hook will see a less glamorous New York. But for those who don't rush onto taxis and buses and head up to the Empire State Building and Times Square, there are a few sights worth seeing.

The Beard Street Pier, stretching along the Erie Basin, makes for an inviting place to stroll or bike and take in the views of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. The biggest architectural attraction is the Beard Pier Warehouse, a sprawling brick complex with magnificent arched iron shutters. The interior, an expanse of wooden beams and massive supporting timbers, houses a mix of studios (glassmaking, woodworking) and a few retail stores. The aroma coming from Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies, a couple of blocks away, is enough to lure any visitor inside. The house special, at once creamy and tart, is a dessert lover's dream.

And then there is Pier Glass. When a couple of visitors stepped inside, Buxton, the co-owner, greeted them warmly. "It's open-house day," she said. "If you want to know about glassmaking, you're in the right place." Soon she launched into a demonstration, explaining every step she took. Then she turned around to take in the stunning waterfront view behind her and smiled. "Now you've discovered the neighborhood's secret," she said.

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Finding Space for a Million More New Yorkers (Gotham Gazette. April 17, 2006)

Monday, April 17, 2006
Finding Space for a Million More New Yorkers

by Robert Yaro
April 17, 2006

Which city in the United States added the largest number of people over the last 15 years? The answer is not Las Vegas. It's not Phoenix. It's not Dallas. It's New York City. New York City added more than 800,000 additional residents since 1990.

And, according to forecasts, this will continue. We expect that probably a million, and perhaps as many as a million and a half, additional residents will come to New York City in the next 25 years.

By then, the whole tri-state region, the already-crowded 31 counties in and around New York City, is expected to grow to 26 million people.

All these people will arrive in an area that is built to capacity in many ways under existing land use plans and regulations. We are already feeling ill effects of dramatic growth. Residents of parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island see every sliver of space in their neighborhoods being developed as pressure builds for taller buildings to house new residents. Our area now has by far the longest commutes in the country. And as some suburban areas pull up the drawbridge, making it very hard to construct multifamily or affordable housing, people who might choose to be in the suburbs are forced to live in the city.

Finding ways to accommodate even more residents will require public education and support. People have to understand that the city and region are going to grow, and it is either going to happen in a thoughtful way or it is in an unthoughtful way, an unplanned way.

Across the country, cities have come to realize they must join in a regional growth strategy that emphasizes public transportation, improving existing urban centers and creating new ones. Many have enlisted political, business and civic leaders as well as ordinary citizens in a dialogue about how to accommodate growth and at the same time respect the needs and fabric of existing communities. It is time for the New York region to embark upon this kind of effort.
WHAT OTHER CITIES HAVE DONE

Chicago provides a good example of how regional planning might work here. Mayor Richard Daley reached out to suburban mayors and built an alliance of elected officials from across the region to work on growth and transportation issues.

A new group, Chicago Metropolis 2020, initiated a regional visioning process. This basically involves harnessing new technologies such as computer mapping and computer generated visual simulations so people in an area can see what the alternative futures for their communities and regions really look like. It also employs electronic town meeting techniques like we used at Listening to the City in 2003 to help shape plans for lower Manhattan.

The first step is engaging public officials and citizens to define tangible goals for their region and to set benchmarks to measure their progress. In the second step, residents develop growth scenarios. People are divided into small groups of eight or ten and sit at small tables working with maps. It is a little like playing Sim City. Each group gets chips that represent the number of people and the amount of new development that needs to be accommodated.

Usually, participants start by spreading the people and projects out in very low densities. Half an hour later, they have run out of land. That is when they come back and stack up the chips. It is kind of magical: Citizens reach the conclusion that the only way to grow is by creating a new mix of density in their region and by developing existing and new centers. When they add up the number of cars that would be generated by spread-out development, they conclude that they must have alternatives to single occupancy vehicles.

Every place that has done this has ended up focusing development in new and existing urban centers. Many have concluded that if communities with just 2 percent of the region’s land area welcome development and accept growth, they can accommodate about 80 percent of the projected growth for the entire region.

And so, in Chicago, this exercise produced a set of recommendations about transportation investments and land use changes. The usual wars about where the third airport is going to be and so forth remain – it’s still Chicago after all -- but the participants have reached real consensus about patterns of growth and the investment needed to support major growth in the region.

An even more relevant example is the Los Angeles region. Los Angeles is, if anything, larger and more complex than the New York metropolitan area. The whole area is in one state but, politically, it is thoroughly balkanized.

People from throughout the region spent about two and a half years on the visioning process, and then they spent the last two and a half years working out a way to implement it. They reached consensus on a new regional transportation plan with a network of truck-only toll lanes on major freeways and of high occupancy toll lanes in key corridors. And they have agreed on a set of transportation investments across the region.

They also adopted some land use changes. The city of Ontario, California, which is an older industrial city with an eroding manufacturing base, decided it could accommodate a substantial amount of growth. They agreed to adopt zoning changes to allow for more residents, and the region agreed to make investments around Ontario’s airport and in a new regional downtown that will double the city’s population. When this is done, Ontario will have almost half a million people, a major new employment center and new housing.

Other cities in the region said they could not accept 30 or 40 housing units per acre, but they were willing to see what 20 would look like. And so they ended up with former industrial areas and strips being rezoned for mixed use, mixed income development.

Los Angeles is expected to grow from 18 million to 22 million people over the next 25 years. The New York region is going from 22 million to 26 million, so we need to think about following Los Angeles’ example.
SPACES IN THE CITY



Bensonhurst, Brooklyn

Finding space for all the additional people arriving in New York City will be hard because we have built on the easily developed vacant sites.

Throughout the city, people do not want additional development or additional density.

But there are still plenty of places to develop. The city has begun the process of rezoning in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, the Far West Side and so forth to prepare for additional population and employment growth. We have got a network of what the Regional Plan Association calls regional centers, places like Jamaica, Flushing, downtown Brooklyn and the Bronx Center. All of these have the potential to accommodate some additional development. And in the suburbs, areas such as the Nassau hub and Hicksville could be developed to house more people and jobs.

Queens, which is projected to add about a half million additional residents over the next 25 years, will have to accommodate more growth than any other place in the region. It has a lot of areas along the avenues currently dotted with one-story commercial buildings. Those plots could be recycled and more intensively developed. And we have the potential to expand Long Island Rail Road service in large areas of Queens that do not have subway service. Doing that would create some new development opportunities without adding to congestion.

If we can harness population growth and reinvest in existing and new urban centers we can improve mobility, create better development patterns in the region and heighten the economic prospects for our citizens.

For an example of why we should do this, we can look to Orange County, California. Twenty-five years ago, it was a very conservative place. It said, “We really don’t want a lot of immigrants and ‘those people’ coming here.” They adopted a number of “pull up the drawbridge” zoning and housing regulations to prevent multifamily housing. They did not accommodate growth. But growth came anyway. People doubled and tripled and quadrupled up in single-family houses. This caused serious housing safety problems and other dilemma.

So planning for growth is essential. But the city cannot go it alone. Both New York City and its suburbs are in the same boat, and it will take collaborative action to keep as all afloat.
REGIONAL PLANNING IN NEW YORK

We have a number of assets to work with.

Demographic Changes: The baby boomers are aging, their kids are out of the house, and many are deciding to chuck the keys to those suburban houses and move into New York City and or another of the region’s older urban centers. At the same time, crime rates in the city have dropped, making the city a more attractive place to live.

Transportation: Over the last 25 years, we have invested more than $50 billion in the transit system. That has created a safer and more reliable transportation system in the core of the region.

We also have the largest regional rail system in the world. And in many ways the commuter rail system is not as intensively used as its counterparts in London, Tokyo, Paris and other world cities. There are many places where the density of development within walking distance of a station is relatively low. And so we have enormous potential to fill in development around this system.

To promote that, we have several very large transportation projects that are now partially funded, have full funding agreements with the federal government or are expected to get them. These include the East Side access project and the Second Avenue subway. The ARC project, including a new Hudson River tunnel, is coming along just behind them, and the rail link between lower Manhattan and Kennedy airport has partial commitment of state and federal funds and Port Authority funds. None of these projects, however, can fulfill its potential unless we coordinate land use and transportation around them.

Planning: Our area has strong public agencies, as well as regional organization such as the Regional Plan Association and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. This tri-state area also has a track record of successful visioning exercises, such as Listening to New York, at the sub-regional and local level

But there are obstacles as well.

We have one region as far as the business community and commuters are concerned. But unfortunately, King Charles II decided it would be convenient to make the Hudson River the boundary between the province of New York and the province of New Jersey. The province of Connecticut was just 30 miles away. Like plate tectonics, these three places that don’t really like each other rub up closely against each other. To make matters worse, we have 31 counties, and things get really messy when you drop in the political subdivisions: towns, villages, small cities, boroughs, unincorporated areas and so on. We are the most politically balkanized metropolitan region in the country. This makes reaching consensus on the major land use and transportation investment policies and investments a lot more difficult than it would otherwise be.

Flushing, Queens

And then there is history. Robert Wagner was probably the last mayor of New York City to reach out beyond the city’s borders. Through much of the last 25 or 30 years, New York City felt like the region is a zero sum game: If Nassau or the Jersey waterfront grew, city officials thought, it was at the city’s expense.

But that may finally be changing. I think Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- maybe partly because he ran a company that has operations in New York and New Jersey -- understands that we live in a region with an integrated economy. And the city has been doing really well of late, so there is a growing realization that there’s plenty of development and growth to go around. We are not managing decline here, we are managing success -- and that makes it easier to reach across the political boundaries.

As part of this whole regional planning process, we must build a broad base of political support around tough things: Finding the money to pay for the next generation of transportation investments. Making difficult land use decisions. Promoting growth.

Doing this right can produce many benefits. We can conserve the environment, create a mix of housing types and densities, and get the governance and tax reforms to make this work. It is hard to reach consensus around anything in this big messy place that we call home, but we must do it.

Robert Yaro is president of the Regional Plan Association.

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PBS NewsHour: Rising Gas Costs Increase Appeal of Biofuels -- April 13, 2006

PAUL SOLMAN: Checking out New York City's cavernous Jacob Javits Convention Center recently, and this year's edition of the International Restaurant show...

SALESMAN: Whether it's a wedding or bar mitzvah, a Fourth of July picnic...

PAUL SOLMAN: ... hawkers were peddling the usual slicers-and-dicers.

SALESMAN: How much are they? Where can you get them? And what do I get for free?

PRODUCT SALESMAN: This prevents against date-rape.

PAUL SOLMAN: The discomforting sip secure, a low-tech way to prevent any mickey-ing with your drink...

SALESMAN: It's also great for, like, if you're going golfing or on a picnic to keep the bugs out.

PAUL SOLMAN: Faux-roe fabricated from fish oil.

SALESMAN: It's been called the darling of alternative caviar.

PAUL SOLMAN: The darling of alternative caviar?

SALESMAN: Absolutely.

Paul Solman and Brent BakerPAUL SOLMAN: But just a stone's throw from Michelangelo's ever-popular heads of David, perhaps the most important pitchman on the floor, from the planet's point of view, biodiesel entrepreneur Brent Baker.

BRENT BAKER, Biodiesel Entrepreneur: There is literally billions of gallons of this waste product that could be used to make this environmentally-friendly fuel.

PAUL SOLMAN: Billions of gallons of what? Get this: Used cooking oil, the fat left in the vat, so to speak, after the food has been fried. Brent Baker is trying to siphon off and eventually refine into biodiesel as much of America's three billion gallons of secondhand frying oil as he can.

BRENT BAKER: I have a company called Tri-state Biodiesel and we have a free waste-oil collection service for free for your restaurants.

PAUL SOLMAN: Amidst come-ons that didn't quite deliver on their promise, Baker's pitch proved a striking contrast.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE: Wow, that's great!

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE: Yes, you should keep the information.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE: Because it's actually -- you know, they charge us to come and collect this stuff now, and you're picking it up for nothing.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE: It's a no-brainer, of course.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE: It sounds too good to be true.


















































Running cars on biodiesel

PAUL SOLMAN: Sure, this was just one small corner of the restaurant show, much less of the planet, but Baker is part of a movement that's modest at the moment but growing like greased lightning, because vegetable oil, what Rudolf Diesel invented his engine to run on a hundred years ago, is a cleaner, cheaper fuel that might come from a Middle Eastern falafel joint, but not the volatile Middle East itself.

Car trafficStraight vegetable oil currently fuels vehicles from the touring bus of singer Willie Nelson to the propaganda machine of Brent Baker, for years a self-styled Johnny Appleseed of biofuels. But Baker and his ilk are ahead of the curve. Most folks filling up with biodiesel at the moment are using a mix of vegetable oil and regular petroleum diesel, a mix that's still low on carbon dioxide.

BRENT BAKER: A lot of the different emissions categories are greatly reduced with biodiesel, about 70 percent overall emissions reduction, as compared to petroleum diesel.

JONATHAN PRATT, Restaurant Owner: There's our refinery.

PAUL SOLMAN: At some places, however, they're already going all the way. Jonathan Pratt owns three restaurants in New York City's northern suburbs, producing about 120 gallons of waste oil a week.

JONATHAN PRATT: We used to pay someone to take it away, and they would turn it into pet food, and soaps, and detergents, and things like that, and some of it would even end up in biodiesel manufacturing.

PAUL SOLMAN: Nowadays, the only side product is the odor.

JONATHAN PRATT: That ain't diesel fuel.

PAUL SOLMAN: No, it isn't diesel fuel. What is it?

French friesJONATHAN PRATT: That's canola oil that's fried about 400 pounds of French fries and potato chips.

PAUL SOLMAN: And this is a truck that's been fitted with a kit that heats the oil to keep it from clogging up so it can burn in a normal vehicle. Pratt's so happy with this truck -- saving $800 a month on fuel -- that he's converting another. Friends and neighbors are also converting, thanks to Pratt's pal, Wally Little, who gives a new twist to the phrase "grease monkey."

WALLY LITTLE, Biodiesel Converter: There's a cartridge filter, spin-on filter, which sits inside a heated coil.

PAUL SOLMAN: The cost: less than $2,000 bucks for parts and labor, including a free fill-up, which Wally filters himself.

What does that smell like?

WALLY LITTLE: Pu-pu platter.

PAUL SOLMAN: Pu-pu platter, is that right? Is that what you think it is?

WALLY LITTLE: Most of that oil there came from a Chinese restaurant.

PAUL SOLMAN: Let's get this clear, P-U, P-U. Well, P-U.

Cost benefits

PAUL SOLMAN: Wally Little has converted about 60 vehicles the past year, this one for a doctor. Alex O'Connor's trucks, which he uses in his roofing business, are on deck.

ALEX O'CONNER, Roofing Business Owner: We spend about $2,000 to $3,000 per week on gas in the summer time, so if we can find a way to mitigate those costs, we will be happy to try.

PAUL SOLMAN: And more than just out-of-pocket costs are mitigated; there's also the removal of guilt about global warming. This year, Americans will burn nearly 200 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel, contributing 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the world's atmosphere. That's about one-third of all U.S. carbon emissions, nearly 10 percent of the world's total.

CO-2, of course, is the primary greenhouse gas, whose concentrations in the atmosphere, after holding steady for thousands of years, are rising at what the great majority of climate scientists now warn is an ominously accelerating rate. The problem is that atmospheric CO-2 seems to act like a blanket, trapping heat, warming up the world.

WALLACE BROECKER, Columbia University: People are going to look back in 200 or 300 years and say, "Those idiots back there, they could see that, by adding all this CO-2, they were going to make some horrendous changes on the planet. And, yet, and they also realized that they could avoid it by a reasonably small cost. Why didn't they do it?"

PAUL SOLMAN: Columbia University scientist Wally Broecker isn't just talking about any idiots; he might even be talking about you and me.

Wallace BroeckerWALLACE BROECKER: Every time you drive a standard American or Japanese car one mile, you release from your tailpipe one pound of CO-2. So if you drive your car 20,000 miles in a year, you produce 20,000 pounds of CO-2.

PAUL SOLMAN: Twenty thousand pounds, ten tons per driver.

Now, to date, the main technology solution has been government-subsidized production of ethanol, made mainly in this country from corn and soy, plentiful but not especially energy-rich, by, as it happens, a company that funds this program, Archer Daniels Midland.

Ethanol's environmental selling point is that it's carbon-neutral. The modest amount of CO-2 it gives off when burned is reabsorbed by the crops used to make more of it. Critics like the Wall Street Journal editorial page argue that, without government subsidies, biofuels would cost too much; that they use too much land and water for irrigation; use more energy from fossil fuels to grow and harvest the corn or soy than it takes to extract oil from the ground; that they have emissions of their own.




















Biofuel efficiency

PAUL SOLMAN: So how much of our energy needs will they ever supply? Bio-boosters counter that the industry's in its infancy and is becoming more and more efficient; that biofuel technology is clearly cleaner; that much of our transportation needs could ultimately be provided by harvesting just the millions of acres the government's already paying farmers to set aside and not farm on.

Biodiesel truckMoreover, soy and corn aren't the only forms of ethanol. Indeed, back at the restaurant show, hawking a new foodstuff, fresh hearts of palm, was an American expat based in Brazil where sugarcane is the ethanol source, and nearly 80 percent of all new cars in Brazil run on sugar-based ethanol.

HYBRID CAR USER: My car is a hybrid car. And I get really put all gasoline, which has 25 percent ethanol, or 100 percent alcohol.

PAUL SOLMAN: With a land mass roughly the size of the U.S., plenty of sun, rain and cheap labor, Brazil hopes to grow enough sugarcane to become energy independent.

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER: What if we could lower greenhouse gas emissions...

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER: ... with a fuel that grew back every year?

PAUL SOLMAN: This is actually a business in which U.S. automakers have a jump on the Japanese, since Toyota and Honda make electric hybrids, but not yet flexible biofuel vehicles.

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER: Over 1.5 million cars and trucks that could run on this fuel.

PAUL SOLMAN: Flex-fuel cars, that's what embattled GM is pushing these days, as is the fabulously rich co-founder of Silicon Valley's Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, now a venture capitalist, who's been investing seed money in, well, seeds and the technology to grow and harvest them for biofuels.

VINOD KHOSLA, Cofounder, Sun Microsystems: I'm talking about something that will replace 50 percent, 70 percent, or 100 percent of our petroleum. And we can permanently change our infrastructure and our direction in the next five years.

PAUL SOLMAN: Five years?

VINOD KHOSLA: Next five years. If Brazil can do this, why can't we?

PAUL SOLMAN: The technology this Sun king is putting his money on: ethanol from cellulose-rich crops, like switchgrass. And where have you heard of that form of flora before?

President George BushGEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States: We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips, and stalks, or switchgrass.

PAUL SOLMAN: Yes, even President Bush, in his State of the Union Address, was pushing biofuels, if somewhat less messianically than Khosla.

VINOD KHOSLA: I'll give you your choice of reasons why you should support biofuels: if you care about geopolitics; if you care about Mideast terrorists; if you care about cheaper fuel for consumers.

PAUL SOLMAN: If you care about America's farmers; if you care about the environment.

Vinod KhoslaVINOD KHOSLA: Now, even if the climate wasn't melting down, it's still a good idea. It's still a good idea to have our future, our energy future, in our hands and not in the hands of Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela, or Russia.

PAUL SOLMAN: There is, however, at least one other major fly in this ointment, besides those already mentioned, one that mechanic Wally Little discovered when petroleum prices briefly tanked.

WALLY LITTLE: As the prices came down, so did the volume of people that wanted to do the conversion.

PAUL SOLMAN: Without high oil prices, biofuels would be, to put it bluntly, a non-starter, unless heavily subsidized, down at Wally's, everywhere in the world.

VINOD KHOSLA: I was recently at a conference where one of the senior executives of a major national oil company from Saudi Arabia, Aramco, came up to me and said, "Be careful." It was almost a warning. He said, "Be careful, because if biofuels are successful, we will drop the price of oil."

PAUL SOLMAN: As a result, Khosla's got a scheme to stabilize the price of oil through a hike in the gas tax if prices go down. He insists that predictable oil prices are crucial to the alternative fuel industry to give more faith that their investments will pay off.

BRENT BAKER: This will hopefully be the Tri-state Biodiesel headquarters.

PAUL SOLMAN: Investors, for example, like those backing Brent Baker, who intends to turn this abandoned industrial oil recycling terminal on the Brooklyn waterfront into a state-of-the-art facility, producing five million gallons of biodiesel a year.

BRENT BAKER: We've got all of this piping here. We think we can use a lot of this.

PAUL SOLMAN: Granted, when it comes to America's fuel needs, which are 200 billion gallons a year, 5 million gallons is a drop in the barrel, a molecule in the barrel once all of those Chinese and Indians you've heard about accelerate their buying of cars and trucks.

On the other hand, with an estimated 3 billion gallons a year of restaurant oil, another 6 billion gallons in grease from America's sinks, waste oil alone could conceivably supplant as much as 15 percent of all our diesel, speed up efficient ethanol development as well, and we might go a long way toward replacing the dirty fossils on which we still so slavishly depend.

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WNYC - News - Bikes Connecting Bogota and the South Bronx

Bikes Connecting Bogota and the South Bronx
by Andrea Bernstein


NEW YORK, NY April 14, 2006 —City residents are aiming to build an 11-mile network of bikeways and parks in an unexpected place – the South Bronx. And they’re taking as their inspiration another city you might not immediately think of – Bogota, Columbia. WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein has this report.

REPORTER: Right now, there’s not much at the future home of the Hunts Point Riverside Park on the Bronx River just above where it empties into the sound. There’s swirling dust, which quickly fills your shoes and gets underneath your clothes. But to Majora Carter, the Director of Sustainable South Bronx, this sliver of a park is a jewel.

CARTER: Cause its actually kind of pretty down here.

REPORTER: Carter got a seed grant, which she leveraged into 20 million dollars to build a park in this former junkyard, sandwiched between a recycling facility and the Hunts Point food market.

CARTER: Wow, I never noticed this before, this is new, this is really exciting, we actually have a dock, a floating dock. This was such a mess before, you cannot understand what this place used to look like.

REPORTER: The park is at the end of a spit of land that runs from the Bruckner expressway down to the food market. But it’s dense. There are 12,000 people living here. By summer, Carter hopes, some of them will be launching kayaks from this dock. For her, that’s not just a pleasant thought. Advocates of the poor used to only focus on things like housing, or schools, or jobs. And Carter thinks those things are important, too. It’s just that she sees parks as the prerequisite for all those other things to happen.

CARTER: Because you gotta make it friendlier for people to feel as though a part of a city. If you make it unfriendly for them, then no, they retreat into their homes/edit here/and you can’t build a community from inside your house, you just can’t.

REPORTER: Carter grew up here, and for her work fighting pollution she won a MacArthur “genius” grant. But reinforcement for the idea that she needed to do more came thousands of miles away – in Bogota, Columbia. She was on a tour, standing in a small plaza with a fountain running through it. And her tour guide told her a few years earlier, he would never have come to that part of town.

CARTER: Because it was so dangerous, because it was so drug infested, and now, of course, I’m coming here, and I was you know what, that is exactly what I want to hear folks in my neighborhood saying.

REPORTER: In Bogota, Carter saw dozens of miles of bikeways. Where there had been fields of mud, there were soccer fields, and playgrounds for children. Hillsides once strewn with rubble became neat stairways, with benches and flowering trees. All of this was constructed during the single three-year term of Enrique Penalosa, the former Mayor of Bogota.

PENALOSA: The only place where we really are a society, the only place where really are a society of equals, the only space that really belongs to us as a nation, is public pedestrian space.

REPORTER: In Bogota, Penalosa bucked the accepted wisdom that more highways and roads for cars would bring economic health to his city. Instead, he jettisoned a plan to build an elevated beltway around Bogota, and instead spent the money instead on paved bikeways, sports facilities, and parks. Cars drive in the mud. Since leaving office – he was term-limited out – Penalosa has been traveling the world, spreading his gospel to cities like Mexico City, Jakarta, and Dar Es Salaam. Not long ago, he met with community groups in the South Bronx.

PENALOSA: The least of the least that a democratic society should have is have is quality public pedestrian space for people at least to be able to go out and see their city. These things are not some sort of luxury, this is the beginning of compensation for the enormous inequality that there is in society.

REPORTER: Walter Hook agrees. Hook directs the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a group that helps third world cities install sustainable transit systems. He visited Penalosa when he was Mayor of Bogota

HOOK: What’s astonishing about this is not only has it brought down the crime rates in low income communities because the kids actually have a place to play. If you go through these neighborhoods you feel totally safe. The kids all coming running out in the street to you they all recognize Penalosa. They’re like hi, Mr. Penalosa!

REPORTER: In Bogota, Hook says, Penalosa took him on a helicopter ride to tour the bike highways, called alamedas.

HOOK: And he flies us up in the air. And he flies us up over the city of Bogota, and he goes: “There, there you see that bike lane, it’s 50 km, I built that!” He goes: “Look at that, you see that, that used to be a garbage dump, now look at it, it’s a beautiful park.” He goes “Look at this, look at these alamedas, they go 20 km into the countryside.”

REPORTER: Now there are housing and businesses along the alamedas. In Bogota now, neighborhoods for the poor are planned. And this is exactly the kind of transformation that south Bronx groups are hoping to emulate. Darting between trucks and past chop shops and waste treatment plants, members of the Southern Bronx River Watershed alliance invited Penalosa to come and visit. And they took Penalosa on a bike tour.

He critiqued their plan.

PENALOSA: I don’t think this is a very good design. CARTER: Okay, now tell me why. PENALOSA: I would not put these trees here in the middle of the sidewalk like this you know and here it needs a very physical protection for a cyclist.

REPORTER: As in most of New York City, there’s no barrier between the bike lane and traffic.

PENALOSA: Because you would not send your child along here.

REPORTER: The tour continued around Hunts points, and up to an overlook near the Sheridan expressway. The idea of reclaiming automobile space for pedestrians is an about face for the Bronx. But it’s being taken very seriously by people like Joan Byron, a planner from the Pratt Institute for Communtiy Development.

BYRON: The place we’re standing right now could be the best example or it could become the worst example.

Instead, Byron and others want to tear down the Sheridan Expressway, and build affordable housing and a park going right down to the Bronx River. The state Department of Transportation has been planning a bigger interchange.

BYRON: And if the interchange is placed here it will cut people off from the waterfront even more than we really are and it will compromise and undermine everything both the city and the community have been trying to achieve.

REPORTER: Byron says the mile and a quarter expressway is little used, and is a barrier between three schools and several small baseball fields on the river. Neither the state nor the city has ruled out tearing it down.

There’s a story Enrique Penalosa likes to tell when he speaks in front of audiences, about a flock of birds on a swamp in Brazil. If the young birds learning to fly accidentally drop into the swamp, they are devoured crocodiles. He compares the herons to children in most cities today.

PENALOSA: That’s exactly the predicament our children face, they grow in terror of being killed and we have come to think that this is totally normal!

REPORTER: Creating more green space is an idea that has found a receptive ear in the Bloomberg administration. Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff says in poor neighborhoods like the South Bronx, it’s the city’s obligation to pay for the upkeep of parks. Doctoroff, a bike-rider himself, says he was impressed after a recent at New York City Hall with Penalosa.

DOCTOROFF: The former Mayor of Bogota, who in a very short period of time managed to achieve something that that nobody ever would have thought possible which is a dramatic improvement in the pedestrian usage of the city and I think it’s an excellent example for us.

REPORTER: Back over across the street from the future Hunts Point Riverside Park, there’s a small bakery selling cakes and rolls to a line of truck drivers passing through. But much of the time, says manager William Bonilla, its pretty dead. He’s counting on the park to liven up his business.

BONILLA: Creo que va ser bueno.

REPORTER: He says that he thinks a lot of people are going to come in the summer, because now, on the weekends they don’t have anything to do. So they’ll come to park and have a good time…and buy his cakes and coffee. This is exactly what planners like Majora Carter – and Enrique Penalosa –expect will happen. For WNYC, I’m Andrea Bernstein.

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How Big Is Too Big? R. Scarrano

April 16, 2006
How Big Is Too Big?
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

IT is not hard to spot the buildings that Robert M. Scarano Jr., an architect, has designed in New York City: they tend to be a lot bigger than the other buildings around them.

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mr. Scarano's building at 78 Ten Eyck Street is about twice as tall as the modest three-story houses on either side of it. In the East Village, the new building at 4 East Third Street, at the Bowery, rises to 16 stories, far above the other buildings on the block, including a row of 18th-century town houses.

Mr. Scarano has played an active role in the city's current construction boom, particularly in Brooklyn, where he has numerous projects in rapidly changing neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Brighton Beach. His designs have brought him plenty of business from developers rushing to take advantage of rising real estate values.

But the sheer bulk of many of Mr. Scarano's projects has prompted some residents to complain that he ignores the zoning code and puts up buildings that are simply too big, blocking the light and views of their neighbors. And too often, they say, the city has stood by and done nothing.

Stephanie A. Thayer lives in Williamsburg and has been active in protests over a tall building designed by Mr. Scarano that is going up at 144 North Eighth Street. She was also involved in years of community debate that led to a major rezoning in Williamsburg last year, including lower bulk and density restrictions for much of the neighborhood.

In contrast, she said, Mr. Scarano, with his outsize buildings, seems to have "single-handedly rezoned his own little development plots."

Now Mr. Scarano is beginning to draw greater scrutiny.

The city's Buildings Department has accused him of knowingly ignoring building codes or zoning rules in submitting plans for 25 apartment buildings in several Brooklyn neighborhoods. Mr. Scarano was scheduled to attend a hearing on the charges on Thursday, but the hearing has now been postponed. Ilyse Fink, a spokeswoman for the Buildings Department, said the agency is continuing to look at other projects submitted by Mr. Scarano.

According to the petition outlining the charges before the city's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, at least 17 of the buildings cited in the charges were designed with more floor area than was allowed under zoning rules.

At the core of the case prepared by the Buildings Department is the contention that Mr. Scarano abused the honor system that allows architects and engineers to police themselves by approving their own building plans. Known as the professional certification program, the honor system was instituted under the Giuliani administration and was meant to trim costs by cutting the workload for the city's plan examiners. It was also intended to eliminate obstacles to building in a city where, at the time, construction projects could be delayed for months while builders waited for plans to be approved.

By participating in the professional certification program, architects guarantee to the city that their plans meet zoning and building codes. But the city has experienced a tremendous boom in new construction in the last several years, and officials have begun to worry that the honor system leaves too much room for architects and developers to run roughshod over zoning rules and safety regulations.

In response, the Buildings Department has drafted a series of changes to its disciplinary procedures that would make it easier to pursue architects and engineers who it believes are code scofflaws — one proposal would give the department's commissioner the right to pre-emptively strip them of the right to certify their own plans. The proposed changes were presented to a group of industry members last Tuesday.

If the city succeeds in its case against Mr. Scarano, he will be required to have all his plans approved by city examiners. He would be the first architect in more than a year to be barred from signing off on his own plans under the professional certification program, according to data on disciplinary actions posted online by the Buildings Department.

Ms. Fink said one reason there were few recent cases was that several staff members left the department's investigative unit last year. She said that the unit has since hired more investigators.

The complaint about many of Mr. Scarano's buildings is not that they are too tall or break height restrictions. Instead, the city contends that they are too big in another sense: they exceed limits on square footage, making them too bulky.

The building at 78 Ten Eyck Street, which has 11 condos, is typical of many of the buildings designed by Mr. Scarano. In plans submitted to the city in 2003, he described it as a four-story building. But it is at least 55 feet tall, more typically the height of a five- or six-story building, and it dwarfs its two- and three-story neighbors.

That is because Mr. Scarano included three mezzanine floors, turning the apartments into virtual duplexes, with an upstairs and a downstairs and a double-height ceiling in the living room.

But when it came time to calculate the square footage of the building to show that it qualified under the zoning code's floor-area limits, Mr. Scarano said the mezzanine floors were exempt and subtracted their 2,442 square feet from the total.

The Buildings Department reviewed the plans for 78 Ten Eyck early last year and stopped work on the condo project, informing the developer, Lipe Gross, that the building, which was nearing completion, was too big.

In response, city records show, Mr. Gross paid $200,000 to a neighbor to transfer 2,000 square feet of air rights to his property in an attempt to make the building legal. He has also agreed to make some of the mezzanines smaller, further reducing the building's square footage.

Mr. Gross said that when the issue of the floor area arose last year, Mr. Scarano told him that in his understanding of Buildings Department rules, he was not required to count the mezzanines because the low ceiling height, just over seven feet, exempted them from floor area tabulations. "He was understanding that it was kosher," Mr. Gross said.

Mr. Scarano refused requests for an interview. A lawyer for Mr. Scarano, Raymond T. Mellon, said that neither he nor Mr. Scarano would answer questions related to the disciplinary case before the hearing. Mr. Mellon has filed papers with the city denying the charges and saying that the city's interpretation of the building and zoning rules was subjective.

Gloria Sinchi literally lives in the shadow of 78 Ten Eyck, in a rented apartment in an English basement on Leonard Street. She said her three children no longer play in the small concrete yard behind their apartment. That is partly because of the construction, she said, but more because the yard is now deep in the shadow of its towering neighbor.

The building at 78 Ten Eyck, which is called Tower 78 in marketing materials, occupies an L-shaped lot, and Ms. Sinchi's yard is hemmed in by the two legs of the L, with high walls on both sides. "It's all surrounded," she said.

Mr. Gross took his condos off the market last spring after the city audit. But other condo buildings designed by Mr. Scarano have been completed and are now occupied by new apartment owners.

Mr. Scarano designed the buildings at 63 and 69 Stagg Street in Williamsburg, around the corner from 78 Ten Eyck. Here too, Mr. Scarano described the Stagg Street buildings, in documents filed with the city as 55-foot-tall buildings, each with four stories and three mezzanines. In drawings submitted to the city, Mr. Scarano estimated that the maximum allowable floor area permitted for each of the two buildings was 6,600 square feet.

Nonetheless, the drawings indicate each building has a total of more than 10,000 square feet of space. To account for the difference, Mr. Scarano deducted from his zoning calculations for each building nearly 1,800 square feet of mezzanine space and more than 2,000 square feet of basement space that made up the lower level of a ground-floor duplex. Each building contains eight units.

The Buildings Department audited Mr. Scarano's plans last spring and let the work continue, then gave the buildings certificates of occupancy in July.

But now the city contends in its disciplinary complaint that Mr. Scarano's calculations were faulty and that the mezzanine and the basement space should have been counted as part of the overall floor area of the buildings.

Ms. Fink, the Buildings Department spokeswoman, said the city's investigation of Mr. Scarano applies only to the drawings and other documents he submitted. In some cases, she said, zoning violations may have been addressed to bring the buildings into compliance before they were completed. But she said she was not permitted to discuss details of the projects, including the status of finished buildings like the ones on Stagg Street.

While several of the buildings have been completed, some are under construction and work on others has not yet begun. Ms. Fink said the city would eventually have to consider what to do with completed buildings that may have too much floor area or may contain other violations.

The mezzanine has become something of a Scarano signature and has made Mr. Scarano's services very much in demand. Developers, as a rule, are eager to maximize the square footage of their buildings, and in many cases, Mr. Scarano's mezzanines have given them a way to do just that.

Mr. Scarano has been prolific in recent years, and an analysis of Buildings Department data online suggests that the buildings cited in the city's case may be part of a broader pattern. According to the online data, Mr. Scarano has submitted plans for at least 299 new buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island since the early 1990's; 44 of those have been completed.

Among Mr. Scarano's filings are plans for about 150 buildings containing one or more mezzanines, virtually all of those coming in the last six years. Approximately two-thirds of the buildings with mezzanines are described in Mr. Scarano's filings as having four stories and being at least 54 feet tall, suggesting the designs have similarities to the Ten Eyck and Stagg Street projects already targeted in the city's investigation.

Mr. Scarano has incorporated mezzanines into plans for much larger buildings as well. One of his more ambitious projects is a 172-foot-tall condo tower with medical offices planned for 62 Brighton Second Place in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in an area of mostly one- and two-story bungalows. Each of the proposed building's 10 apartments has a mezzanine with a terrace and bathroom.

But in zoning calculations submitted with his drawings, Mr. Scarano deducted more than a third of the building's total residential square footage, including all the mezzanine space. In this way, a 14,000-square-foot building manages to squeeze into a 9,024-square-foot zoning envelope. The building is not one of those cited in the city's disciplinary case against Mr. Scarano, and the project was issued a preliminary permit in January.

Whether mezzanines should be counted for zoning purposes will most likely be a major issue when an administrative law judge decides the case involving Mr. Scarano. Zoning rules include mezzanines in a list of building features that must be counted as floor area. But there is at least one exception. The Buildings Department's guidelines for architects and engineers say that mezzanines intended as storage space can be omitted from floor-area calculations if they have ceiling heights of five feet or less and are accessible only by a ladder.

Mr. Scarano routinely labels mezzanines as storage space in his drawings and related documents. But in case after case, they contain windows and bathrooms or laundry rooms, are reached by a staircase and are clearly intended as living space.

While neighborhood residents accuse Mr. Scarano of breaking the rules, other developers ask if the rules are being applied evenly. Kris Corey is completing construction of a pair of four-story rental buildings at 264 and 268 Devoe Street in Williamsburg. In recent months he has watched as another developer put up a building designed by Mr. Scarano at 270 Devoe next door. Mr. Scarano's building — described in filings with the city as four stories with two mezzanines — is taller than Mr. Corey's buildings and appears to have substantially more square footage.

Mr. Corey said he asked his own architect about the difference. "I said to him, 'Did we shortchange ourselves?' " Mr. Corey recounted. "And he said, 'You're built to the max by the letter of the law.' "

"It's not fair," Mr. Corey said. "If he's allowed to do it, why couldn't we?"

Mr. Scarano's building on Devoe Street has not been audited by the city and is not included in the Buildings Department case.

Kevin Shea, a lawyer and expediter who helps architects and building owners negotiate the labyrinth of zoning rules and Buildings Department procedures, has been waging a campaign against Mr. Scarano's 16-story building on East Third Street at the Bowery.

Along the way, he said, he has confronted what he contends is a willingness of the Buildings Department to ignore apparent zoning violations or to find creative ways to make zoning rules fit Mr. Scarano's building, rather than the other way around.

Mr. Shea submitted a brief to the city's Board of Standards and Appeals last November detailing numerous objections to the building, which he says has many zoning violations and substantially more square footage than should be allowed. This building is also separate from the city's disciplinary case with Mr. Scarano, and largely involves different zoning issues.

To what degree it may be overbuilt depends partly on what the building is used for. That is because the zoning rules allow different amounts of square footage for apartments, for which it was originally designed, than for hotel rooms, for which it is currently being reconfigured.

Mr. Shea contends that it is too big in any case. "I think four floors should come off the top," he said.

An interest in the building was sold last year to the group of developers that created the fashionable Maritime Hotel on West 16th Street at Ninth Avenue. They hired a new architect and a zoning lawyer, and have been in discussions with Mr. Shea and city officials.

"This doesn't seem to be an egregious violation of the zoning," said Richard Born, one of the new investors in the project. "There are issues, but they seem to be resolvable."

Mr. Shea was reluctant to be quoted as saying anything critical of the Buildings Department, since he works with it on a regular basis, but he said he felt compelled to speak up about Mr. Scarano and what he sees as a willingness of officials to bend the rules.

Mr. Shea said he first notified the Buildings Department in May 2004 that he believed there were problems with the design of the East Third Street building. The department conducted an audit that raised numerous concerns, but after a brief halt, city officials let work proceed, and the building is now largely completed.

In his brief submitted to the Board of Standards and Appeals, Mr. Shea accuses the Buildings Department of coining novel interpretations of its own rules in an effort to let Mr. Scarano's building stand. "If the answer to how big a building is or what you can do in the construction industry is 'whatever you can get away with,' then I'm out of business," Mr. Shea said.

He said the Buildings Department had "lost control" of the honor system that allows architects and engineers to sign off on their own work. "The program rests on a promise and a threat," he said. "The promise is that of the professional, that his plans conform to the code and the zoning resolution. And the threat is that, if the Buildings Department finds out otherwise, they're either going to discipline the architect or order remedial measures to bring the building into compliance.

"Four East Third Street is what happens when an empty promise is met by an empty threat."

For the Record

The main front-page article in the Real Estate section today, about Robert M. Scarano Jr., an architect who has been accused by the New York City Buildings Department of ignoring building codes or zoning rules when submitting plans for his projects, misstates the number of sites named in a disciplinary action against him. It is 25, not 26.

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