---

From: Gabriel Orgrease <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
Organization: Orgrease-Crankbait
Reply-To: The listserv where the buildings do the talking <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:24:07 -0400
To: <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [BP] gettin' kinda quiet out there....

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.) “Christ in Concrete”  but not Breslin – somewhere/one in the ‘30sWe 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.

][<
jh
--
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
-- 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