Cuyler,

What I see in NYC is that higher value materials may be salvaged... an 
ornate wrought iron gate, nice doors (easy to remove), carved detail 
(aesthetic value), stone cladding in lobbies (marble), intricate 
detailed terra cotta elements,  but a really fine large timber is cut up 
and thrown in the dumpster. Most of these folks that I know doing this 
salvage, and that have been doing it for some time, don't seem to think 
of themselves in the romantic vision as logging the urban forest. They 
grab what they can sell or that they can get for dirt cheap and hope to 
sell. From the outside they look like we imagine them as pirates. If 
they can't sell it they don't want it and they are as smart to throw it 
away, or never go near it as anyone. The developer that has the project 
with the large timber usually does not have time to wait around for 
someone to come salvage and their economy favors them getting rid of the 
materials cut up into movable chunks as quick as possible. It hardly 
does them poorly in anyone's estimation of environmental consciousness 
as nobody knows what they threw away. Brick: it is a whole lot easier 
and cheaper to knock it over and use a front-end loader to put it in a 
truck and haul it away than it is to deconstruct a brick wall, clean the 
brick of mortar, and in that process to handle it by hand labor. And 
there is all the insurance crap and safety exposure that has to go with 
labor. (Yesterday in NY Times I read about a property owner brought up 
on manslaughter charges in relation to the death of a day laborer who 
was buried in a trench up to his neck and suffocated as a result. 
Reminded me of a Jimmy Breslin book.) We don't even need to go near 
salvage of hazardous materials to get a headache. Besides that, 
demolition does not require an intelligent highly-skilled and therefore 
better paid workforce (and the architectural salvage guys tend to try to 
get their labor at the lower end of the pay scale as well). Now, if dump 
fees were beyond astronomical their could be an incentive to recycle as 
it would be the less expensive path. But to go in that direction with 
dump fees could put a real hurt on the construction industry -- that 
seems to be doing well right now in NYC despite the national economic 
climate and despite the cost of oil -- that would bring a whole lot of 
protest, let alone slow down a mainstay of the NYC economy. There is not 
that much agriculture to fall back on in NYC, but there is a whole lot 
of real estate to recycle.

][<
-- 
Orgrease-Crankbait <http://orgrease-crankbait.blogspot.com/> Video, 
audio, writings, words, spoken word, dialogs, graphic collage and the 
art of fiction in language and literature.



--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>