MY GRAY CITY

What about vertical gardens on some of the giant buildings in my hometown, New York City? We've got Central Park and Washington Square Park, but our streets, except in midsummer, are shabby gray.

The only green I see in April is on skinny NYC trees struggling to live in 4 x 4 beds of dirt, surrounded by low iron fences. They keep city dogs from away from the weeds that are fighting for life in each tree's 4 x 4 garden.


In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Longwood Gardens captured the title of North America's largest living wall with a vertical garden measuring 3,590 sq. ft., which is 50% bigger than that of the our country's previous record holder, the PNC Bank in Pittsburgh.

Good news -- it gets wintry in Pittsburgh -- ergo, we can have vertical gardens in NYC too!

And now Longwood is dwarfed by the Inter-Continental Hotel in Santiago, Chile, which has a 17,000 sq. ft. vertical garden wall, (about the size of six tennis courts). In the photo, the wall looks like a giant green and brown quilted-blanket, but it sounds breathtaking. It would be thrilling if the Hilton Hotel did that right here in Manhattan.

My city is full of rich corporations occupying huge buildings. Why not have vertical gardens on 34th, 42nd, or 59th Street? Yes, it's expensive! Even though a living wall can reduce a building's heating and cooling costs, a living garden needs to be maintained. Designers say it can cost $100 per sq. ft.

A roof garden costs with $15 to $40 per sq. ft -- we had a green roof for awhile, but couldn't water it without attaching a hose to our kitchen sink. That meant we couldn't close our roof's door. It was inconvenient and not safe.

Watering a vertical garden is complicated -- rain doesn't fall sideways so irrigation is done by a drip-irrigation systems and electronic monitoring devices to make sure the plants don't dry out. And you'd want to use recycled water -- NYC water is expensive. Water in our building costs $25 to $50 month per adult, depending on how many showers a person takes. I'm guessing it could $20,000 to $50,000 per month for the wall of a hotel.

But, the creators of "green walls" say it isn't there for energy/cost savings -- it's marketing genius -- people notice it. Ultimately a vertical garden wall provides a faster return on the investment.

So, will it happen in your city or mine? I've seen pictures -- they have vertical gardens on museums, corporate headquarters, airports and highway overpasses in other cities, as well as in major cities in Europe.

Being a New Yorker, who sorely misses Mother Nature, I'm picturing what life would be like if giant corporations that are already here, installed vertical gardens.

<--------------My building could look like this and Fifth Avenue, that's on our corner, could look like this--------->

They also say, a vertical garden takes commitment -- maintaining it is like maintaining a pet, (a huge and very thirsty one). But a corporation could put "Water" in its advertising budget.

What I'm thinking is vertical gardens would work in NYC -- it could transform Manhattan into -- wow -- we could be a "Living Green" city.

WIKILEAKS

I've been avoiding the headlines, articles, chatter, about WikiLeaks.

I don't trust "hot" news. Often, what's hot has been made hot by repetition.

WikiLeaks is a Website to visit if you want to find out about behind-the-scenes political and financial doings. The boss or founder or whatever you call him, hacked into the State Department computers and files, and exposed a lot of bad and good things that important diplomats and their associates have said and done.

Approximately 250,000 documents were leaked.

In between "what a mess" comments and opinions from the media, we've been getting juicy blabs about the sexual doings of WikiLeaks main man, Julian Assange. To my eye he appears shifty-eyed -- there's a debauched, flabby, weak look about him -- I can't imagine meeting him at a cocktail party, and making conversation with him.

It's depressing, worrisome -- to hear about possible wrongdoings on the part of people heading major countries, but the nitty-gritty details about Assange and what he did or didn't do in bed, are just plain dreary.

Quite by accident, I came across "Not Dead Yet" -- an article on WikiLeaks in Newsweek. The authors, Christopher Dickey and Andrew Blast, collaborated with Owen Matthews in Moscow, John Barry in Washington, William Underhill in London, R. M. Schneiderman and Mike Giglio in New York.

This thoroughly researched article explained that leaking diplomatic dispatches is a "recognized diplomatic art" that's been done for years. Our ambassadors often share their cables with correspondents in other countries, because a report from a correspondent will get to the secretary of state’s desk faster than an official memo. Leaking a dispatch is also a way of saving face, or stepping back from the brink of a war.

From WikiLeaks, we've learned how Iran's nuclear weapons, and Israel's threats of war, are being handled. We've heard diplomats refer to Russia’s president and prime minister as “Batman and Robin.” We've learned that Defense Secretary, Dr. Robert Gates, formerly a CIA guy himself, has been dealing with China, Russia, Turkey, and Arabian allies privately. Turkish officials were saying that Iran's nuclear ambitions were "gossip," but in private we have been talking with Turkey about a missile shield program on Turkish soil.

A sensitive piece of information that WikiLeaks exposed was our covert CIA program targeting Al Qaeda in Yemen and the negotiations between Yemen's President and General David Petraeus. And more -- much more stuff like this -- that should NOT have been disclosed, has clearly been exposed.

Even so, the huge quantities of pilfered State Department documents show that American diplomats are doing their jobs the way diplomats should, using all the resources, and not deceiving the public.

Authorities from the National Intelligence Council, from Harvard University's Cultural Exchange Department, the Guardian in the U.K., from the New York Times, are praising the people who were writing those cables. “Let’s hear it for the men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service!” says Roger Cohen, long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

The fact is, WikiLeaks documents have shown us what good job our diplomats have been able to do in the last few years, but Assange's work as a hacker has made the job a lot harder for our guys in the future.

Anyhow, the "hot" news has cooled. I'm glad to know more about all this, but please, media guys, let Assange's fifteen minutes of fame die out.

DEBRIS

I'm looking out my window. It's the day after New Year's -- the first Sunday morning of 2011.

It looks the same -- gray street, gray, white, and red brick buildings, lamps posts, parked cars, meters like sentries that demand how much -- $14.00 for a half hour of parking on our street. It's a business street in the heart of Manhattan.

Yesterday, across the street in those buildings, I could see at least four marvelously decorated Christmas trees on four different floors -- all large, all looked as if they'd been carefully, expensively, creatively, applause-gettingly labored over.

Soon they'll be in the street.

And steel Dumpers will be in street, piled high with cartons, gift boxes -- piles of red, green, gold, silver things -- ribbons, bows, labels, cards, protective tissue, wrapping paper -- so many pretty things everyone picked out carefully, purchased, debated over how to handle, then wrapped, tied, taped and fussed with.

Like the Christmas trees. After the holiday you can keep the tree up for a week or two -- you can pretend not to notice the branches, the green beginning to be tinged with brown -- becoming brown and brittle -- then very brittle, crumbling, brittle, with browned, dead, pine needles beginning to cover the floor around the base of the tree, migrating, magically moving into other parts of the house that have to be kept clean.

Nobody wants pine needles on the kitchen floor. I don't want pine needles in the bathroom.

So, we'll move our tree into the hall -- trees are elevatored or hand, arm, and shoulder carried to the street, and laid to rest ignobly on their sides at the curb.

Sometimes the tree lies there and brown turns to gray until the garbage trucks and the garbage men arrive and the remnants of what once was your marvelous -- oh, this is IT tree! -- are disposed of.

Ours was a lovely tree -- a little crooked, but it grew and grew somewhere to be ready for us to chose it, buy it, make it into ours.

Well, it'll be Ground Hog day in a minute, then Valentines .... Happy New Year -- hello two zero one one! Hey, 2-0-1-1 will be fun to type -- to print out on a check ...

Oh my goodness, I forgot -- well, belatedly, tomorrow I'll give a holiday present to our postman!

HI FROM US