New Views Greenway Party on June 18

My friends over at the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI) sent me the following press release about their upcoming Greenway benefit:

BGI will hold New Views 2009, its fourth annual benefit for the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, on Thursday, June 18, from 6-9 p.m., at IKEA Brooklyn’s Erie Basin Park (above). Join BGI’s Board, Host Committee and Greenway supporters for a Swedish smorgasbord, drinks and music along the first privately funded and maintained section of the planned 14-mile Greenway.

IKEA Brooklyn store manager Mike Baker will be honored as BGI’s Corporate Partner of the Year and Christopher O. Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, will be honored as BGI’s Government Partner of the Year. Biking advocacy group Transportation Alternatives will receive BGI’s Community Partner of the Year award.

BGI, along with its partners and supporters, have had a great deal to celebrate this year, most importantly the commitment by the New York City Department of Transportation to develop a master plan for the full 14-mile Greenway route, which will then qualify it as a city capital project. Both the Erie Basin Park segment and the Columbia Street segments of the Greenway opened within the past year, and in April of this year, BGI announced an additional $2.5 million in federal funding secured for capital construction.

Tickets start at $60 and are available at www.brooklyngreenway.org. For questions, contact Brian McCormick at bmccormick@brooklyngreenway.org or (718) 522-0193.

Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative

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Be an ‘Urban Explorer’ At Tour de Brooklyn

This Sunday approximately 2,000 bicyclists will participate in a one-of-a-kind ride through Green-Wood Cemetery — which doesn’t normally allow bikes — during the fifth annual Tour de Brooklyn, held by biking advocacy group Transportation Alternatives (TA).

“It’s probably the highlight of the tour,” said TA spokesperson Wiley Norvell. “It’s definitely a real treat.”

The ride will begin at KeySpan park in Coney Island at 9 a.m., traveling through such South Brooklyn neighborhoods as Gravesend, Kensington, Windsor Terrace and Victorian Flatbush. In addition to Green-Wood, the tour will ride through Prospect Park, where there will be a rest stop. The 23-mile tour will conclude at about 1 p.m. back in Coney Island.

Norvell says the ride follows a different route every year. Since many riders have seen neighborhoods like Park Slope and Williamsburg by bike, the south Brooklyn loop this year is “a great stretch of Brooklyn that a lot of our riders probably aren’t familiar with,” he noted.

And after the ride ends, “everyone can stay and spend the day on Coney Island at the beach.”

The important part about the Tour de Brooklyn is that it’s not a race, said Norvell. “It’s a leisurely day biking around Brooklyn,” he said. The pace is family-friendly, with “a gentle incline up and a gentle incline down.”

All 2,000 participants ride in one big group, stopping at points to let the riders in the back catch up. Cars are cleared from the streets with a “rolling closure,” during which police escorts will drive in the front and the back of the group, closing streets as the ride goes on. It’s about five minutes from the front of the group to the back, Norvell said.

Bicyclists from all over — Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Virginia, even California — registered for the free event. In other years, online registration has sold out before the ride, but this year it sold out within 24 hours. “It’s the hottest ticket in town,” Norvell said, laughing. There will be a limited number spots for same-day registration before the tour starts, he added.

You won’t see many serious cyclists during the ride. “We tend not to get the spandex set,” Norvell said. Instead, he called the riders “urban explorers.”

“We want this to be accessible,” he continued. “What we want to inculcate is slow, civic riding. We want people to really enjoy the city around them.”

And they do. Molly Sullivan rode in her first tour in 2007 and loved it so much she volunteered for TA and is now the organization’s events coordinator.

“I had such a positive experience,” Sullivan said, describing it as a safe, family-friendly, calm ride. “It opened up bicycling in Brooklyn for me.”

She was amazed by the number of people and families that gathered for the ride. “It was a wonderful sight to see,” she said.

“The feeling I came away from the tour with was: I have to do this every day, I have to become a bike commuter,” Sullivan said. “I’ll never forget it.”

Visit www.tourdebrooklyn.org for additional information about the tour, including what to bring.

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Chamber Recognizes Green Buildings

The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and its Real Estate and Development (RED) Committee announced the winners of Building Brooklyn Awards for this year. Of the 12 recipients, two are green buildings: Galapagos Art Space and the Perry Building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Carl Hum, Chamber president and CEO, said that past winners have been environmentally friendly, but this year was the first year a specific award was given to a green building. This would be the National Grid Award for Energy Conservation, which the Perry Building received.

Opened in early April, the Perry Building (above) is the nation’s first multi-story green industrial facility. It is on track to receive LEED gold certification and features the first permanent building-mounted wind turbines to be operating anywhere in New York City.

The turbines, combined with rooftop solar panels, will provide electricity for the building’s lobby and other common areas, which will amount to about 10 percent of the overall energy. Other green features of the Perry Building are reflective roofing and pavement to reduce surface temperatures, the use of recycled rain water in toilets, recycled building materials, high-efficiency lighting fixtures, natural ventilation systems and special accommodation for bicyclists and low-emission vehicles.

Awarded in the Arts and Culture category, Galapagos Art Space (above) has shown a commitment to the environment from the get-go. A LEED-silver certified building, all of the steel is 80 percent recycled, the concrete is 30 percent recycled, the toilets are low flush and the sinks have low water flow. The 1600 square foot lake inside the venue is filled by a well, so as not to waste city drinking water.

Galapagos director Robert Elmes has said, “if the arts can’t show leadership, who can? ... We have a responsibility to lead with social issues.”

The ceremony and cocktail reception for the awards will be held on July 15 at Stage 6 at Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a green building in the yard that will apply for LEED Silver certification, in part for the adaptive reuse of a 150,000 square-foot WWII era building.

For more information and the full list of recipients, see the story here.

Photos courtesy of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

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A Bike Made of Bamboo?

This past Sunday, Washington (former J.J. Byrne) Park was the setting for Brooklyn's first annual Bike Jumble, a bicycle flea market.

Sean Murray, a staffer for Bamboo Bike Studio in Red Hook, was at the Bike Jumble, showing his bikes made out of bamboo. The bamboo comes from Long Island and is a sustainable alternative to the traditional titanium.

Click here to read the full story about Murray and the Bike Jumble by Eagle writer Caitlin McNamara.

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Fix Your Leaky Faucet

A faucet that drips slowly when turned off can waste 20 gallons of water a day. That's 140 gallons a week, and that's just a slow drip.

So don't take a leaky faucet lightly!

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Squash Seed From Thomas Jefferson Makes Its Way to Brooklyn

As it turns out, not all of Thomas Jefferson’s seeds are controversial. Saturday, one Brooklyn community gardener will take home squash seeds descended from a squash Jefferson planted in the 1800s, as part of the Vegetable Starts Seed Giveaway held by the New York Restoration Project (NYRP).

Jason Sheets, regional director of Brooklyn gardens at NYRP, had the idea for a seed giveaway and first implemented it last year. This Saturday, gardeners from the community will converge on Target Community Garden in Bed-Stuy (below) to collect some of the 2,000 heirloom vegetable seeds donated to NYRP for the giveaway.

Heirloom seeds, Sheets said, are “seeds that have been around for years and years,” handed down for generations. They’re better in many ways than hybrid seeds you see in garden centers today, because they produce vegetables that “are better tasting, have a historical context and are open pollinated,” he explained. For a vegetable to be open pollinated means that its seeds can be harvested, as opposed to hybrid vegetables, which have sterile seeds.

“More and more people over the last 10 years have been embracing hybrids because they have built-in disease resistance,” Sheets said. This has brought about the near extinction of many heirloom vegetable plants.

Fortunately, heirloom seeds have become popular in recent years, no doubt helped by the efforts of Amy Goldman, chair of the board of the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization dedicated to “preserving the world’s diverse but endangered heirloom seeds,” she said.

“I have devoted my life to the preservation of our vegetable heritage,” Goldman said. She donated the seeds for Saturday’s giveaway to NYRP, because she wants to educate “this new generation of farmers and gardeners.”

The selection of seeds that will be given out were determined by the gardeners themselves. Sheets said NYRP held a gardener’s gathering in March where community gardeners reserved the heirloom seeds they wanted in their garden.

In case some gardeners aren’t comfortable growing the vegetables from seeds, Sheets will have some seedlings, or vegetable starts, available. These were propagated by Landcraft Environment and will be given away Saturday.

Vegetable starts and seeds will be organic, untreated and not genetically engineered. Types will range from tomatoes, carrots, corn and herbs. Sheets said that an heirloom seed might yield a purple tomato. He hopes that in future years, he will be able to open seed giveaways to the public.

Sheets calls Goldman, an avid gardener who has published many books on the subject, the “queen of heirloom vegetables.”

“We want to get people out there gardening and growing their own food,” Goldman said. “We’re putting seeds in the hands of farmers and gardeners where they belong.”

Jefferson photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov, garden photo courtesy of the New York Restoration Project.

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Windsor Terrace Cohousing May Have Greenest Building in NYC

Eagle writer Linda Collins reports:

This week, Brooklyn Cohousing members decided unanimously — by consensus — to create their new home in Windsor Terrace as a low energy, environmentally friendly building.

“I think this is pretty big news. The decision was unanimous,” said spokesperson Alex Marshall, a founding member. “The consultants working on the project say it would be the most energy efficient building in New York City.”

The method of construction the group has adopted is called “Passive House” or, as it is known in Germany where it originated, “PassivHaus.”

According to Marshall, it involves a set of techniques resulting in a nearly air-tight building that simultaneously is supplied with clean, fresh air. Often heating and air conditioning is unnecessary beyond minimal levels, he said, and energy use can be a tenth of ... read more.

Rendering by Levenson McDavid Architects

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