Talk Bronx New York

One Bad Apple Won’t Spoil the Whole Green Bunch

To mark Earth Day on Tuesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued its second annual “Green Apples and Bad Apples” report, which identifies five promising environmental developments and five things or places that aren’t so good for the environment. One of the biggest complaints: businesses that leave the doors open while running the air-conditioning at full blast. Our colleague Clyde Haberman has complained about this phenomenon in his NYC column, in 2006 and 2007, but it was interesting to see a leading environmental advocacy group take up the banner.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said in its report:

Whatever benefits it may have as a customer lure, this practice has significant adverse energy and air pollution impacts. According to the Long Island Power Authority, retailers increase their electricity consumption by 20 percent to 25 percent when they leave their doors open. And increasing power demand on the hottest summer days also leads to increased air pollution, as the auxiliary backup power supplies are called upon to meet peak demands. Unnecessarily boosting summer peak power demands can even make occasional brownouts more likely. In short, this is a practice that places personal business considerations over societal needs.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, has proposed legislation that would forbid businesses from leaving their doors open while air-conditioners are running. It is hard to say what the bill’s prospects are.

The defense counsel listed these other “bad apples”:

* The M.T.A.’s recycling program. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority does not provide separate recycling receptacles for paper and for metals, glass and plastic, as the transit systems in Chicago, Washington, Boston, Montreal and San Francisco do. The M.T.A. does perform “post-collection separation” — picking through the trash, after collection, to cull out recyclables — but that process, in which recyclables are mixed in with food waste and other trash before being separated, “inevitably leads to higher levels of contaminated recyclables,” according to the council. (The M.T.A. has provided large paper recycling bins at Grand Central Terminal for Metro-North Railroad riders.)

* The New York Organic Fertilizer Company and Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, both in the Bronx. Under a city contract, the fertilizer plant, which opened in 1992, treats several hundred tons a day of sludge from city sewage plants, drying the sludge and turning it into “pellets” for eventual use as fertilizer. The wastewater treatment plant, a few blocks away, treats raw sewage from parts of the Bronx (and from Rikers Island and City Island) before discharging it into surrounding waters.

* The former site of the Ridgewood Reservoir in Queens. The Ridgewood Reservoir was a major source of drinking water for Brooklyn in the middle and late part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. After 1900, as city relied more on its Catskill and Delaware system, the Ridgewood Reservoir was used and less; its last use under regular repair service was in 1959. The complex was transferred in 2004 to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which wanted to turn much of the area into recreational like bike paths and artificial-turf ball fields. “But the Reservoir’s water storage basins, empty for decades, now provide a unique area for observing the process of urban reforestation,” the council said. Read more..

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City Claims Final Private Island in East River

South Brother Island, seven acres of dense forest, bittersweet vines, flocks of wild birds and little else, is a speck in the East River ? and a glimpse of what the rest of the city might have looked like thousands of years ago.

Historically overlooked and unwanted, it changed hands for $10 in 1975, despite being located in the middle of New York City.

But South Brother, the last East River island of any significant size to remain in private hands, will finally get its due today when it is formally transferred to the city as part of a complex $2 million deal brokered by the Trust for Public Land and financed with federal money secured by United States Representative Jos? E. Serrano.

?The idea of buying an island ? I mean, how many people get to buy an island?? said Mr. Serrano, whose district includes South Brother.

South Brother, situated between the Bronx and Queens and within sight of the Rikers Island guard towers, will most likely be left as it is, officials said, preserved as a nature sanctuary and administered by the city?s Department of Parks and Recreation.

The island ? the smaller sibling of the better known North Brother Island, which is 500 feet to the north and once the quarantine home of Typhoid Mary ? suddenly became a desirable property precisely because it had been unwanted for so long.

Neighboring islands, including North Brother, became sites for hospitals that treated infectious diseases like typhus and tuberculosis and for mental hospitals, power plants, jails, homeless shelters and cemeteries for the indigent. But South Brother, neglected by humans, turned into a prime nesting spot for birds and a migration stopping point for such New York City exotica as the great blue heron.

?It is a natural jewel,? said Clark Wallace, project manager for the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group.

In addition to several types of herons, the island?s bird population includes ibises, oyster catchers, cormorants and egrets. In its forest are locust, white mulberry and black cherry trees, covered by thick tangles of oriental bittersweet vines that cover trees and ground alike. Because there are no predators on the island, many birds build their nests on the ground.

K. Jacob Ruppert, whose great-great-uncle Jacob Ruppert Jr. owned the island and was a co-owner of the New York Yankees in the early 1900s, said South Brother was a bird paradise when he paid his only visit in 2004.

?There?s no beautiful lagoon,? he said. ?It?s a mound of bird poop. But there are beautiful birds. I never thought I could walk up to a swan on her nest. The ground is nothing but bird droppings and broken egg shells.?

But humans, even if few have ever set foot on the island, have had an impact.

During New York City Audubon?s annual surveys of the island, volunteers have found dead birds entangled in fishing lines and other debris. Adult birds have been found dead on or near nests that contained unhatched eggs, and Mr. Ruppert said he spotted a television set that had washed ashore.

Maria Torres, president and chief operating officer of the Point, a nonprofit group that is working to revitalize the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, and Mr. Serrano said they had been interested in buying South Brother for the public since 1997. But the owner, Hampton Scows, a Long Island sand and gravel company, had not been interested in selling until recently.

Official with Hampton Scows declined to comment, as did the company?s lawyer, Michael McMahon.

But once Hampton Scows signaled its willingness to sell, the Point and the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which had received federal money through Mr. Serrano?s efforts to buy private land along the Bronx and East Rivers for public use, agreed to pool their money to come up with the $2 million asking price.

Unlike better-known East River islands like Randalls, Roosevelt and Rikers, South Brother?s past is murky.

Both North and South Brother Islands were claimed by the Dutch West India Company in 1614, according to ?The Other Islands of New York,? a book by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, and both were originally named ?De Gesellen.? (The term was translated as ?the companions.?)

The islands soon passed into the hands of the English, but remained undeveloped for almost two centuries because of the treacherous currents surrounding them, according to the book.

South Brother may have been a base for Union soldiers during the Civil War, and in about 1894, it was purchased by Jacob Ruppert Jr., a brewing magnate who bought the Yankees with Col. Tillinghast L?Hommedieu Huston in 1915. (Mr. Ruppert?s tenure in baseball included the purchase of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox, the opening of Yankee Stadium and eight World Series titles.) Mr. Ruppert built a yacht house on South Brother, and amateur baseball games were held on an adjacent field. Legend has it that Ruth would occasionally show up to practice his swing, swatting balls far into the East River.

After Mr. Ruppert?s summer home burned down in 1909, South Brother went through another long fallow period. The island changed hands several more times until 1975, when Hampton Scows bought it for $10.

Source: NYTimes.com

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