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Money & Values /
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| First Person: Point of View |
Green Standard Bearer
Douglas Durst
03/01/2005
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My cousin Jody and I are copresidents now, and since he is 13 years younger, he will be my successor. Before he came into the family business, Jody studied engineering at Tufts University and worked for Chrysler. We do not call ourselves developers. Those are the bad guys. We are owner/builder/managers; we build and manage what we own.
In the 1990s, as Jody and I became more responsible for what was going on in the office, we began a program of retrofitting our buildings. I cannot say either of us woke up one morning and had an “Aha!” experience. We just decided, when we were in the process of removing some air conditioning systems that were creating pollution problems, that we wanted to take an environmentally responsible approach to new construction.
Undoing a mistake is costly. There was a time when we saved 50 cents a foot by using asbestos as a fire retardant in the building that housed our office. Twenty-five years later it cost us $30 a foot to take it out. The major cost in building an intelligent building is the time and coordination it takes to examine what can be done, and the viability of doing it. Each building is going to be different. The actual cost of the environmental features is really very small, probably around 3 percent of the total building cost. The exception to that is the cost of photovoltaic (PV) paneling, which captures solar power. At its present cost, the payback period is 25 years, while the life expectancy of the panels is 20 years. That could change if the demand for panels was large enough that they could be manufactured with greater economies of scale. Nevertheless, we used PV panels on the facade at 4 Times Square instead of regular mirrored glass to show that they can be economical if they replace other materials.
Now in the works is our second green office tower, One Bryant Park, near the main branch of the New York Public Library. It will house Bank of America and a theater. There will be tremendous demand on the energy supply, so we are building a large cogeneration plant that uses waste heat to generate more electricity (but we can also use it to cool the building), and capturing rainwater for the plumbing system.
Between the two buildings will be a pass-through called Anita’s Way, named after my daughter. Anita runs an organization called Chashama, housed in a corner of 4 Times Square, which provides performance and studio spaces for artists. Originally we were going to build a hotel on the site of One Bryant Park. We were searching for a name and someone said, “What about Helena?” which is my younger daughter’s name. We all liked the sound of it. Just as that project fell apart, we decided we would build an environmentally friendly residential tower at 57th Street and 11th Avenue, and it seemed natural to keep the name. Helena was a little embarrassed at first, but she got over it.
At the Helena, scheduled for completion in March, the floors will be made of a manufactured wood that looks spectacular but does not destroy forests. We have insisted that the contractor replace part of the cement with fly ash, which is a waste byproduct. We had to fight to get them to do this, but in the end they said it set faster than cement, so it saved time and brought the costs down. It was only because we spent the time investigating different ways of using recycled materials that we knew this was feasible. Intelligent—by which I mean green—standards could be used in most urban settings, and certainly in New York. Manhattan could be a much more pleasant place.
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