'Green' Roofs - NY Times - Asbury Park's back yard on roof

Published in the New York Times, Sunday, July 29, 2007

In New Jersey, the ‘Backyard’ Up on the Roof

By ANTOINETTE MARTIN

EVEN in a thoroughly urban setting — maybe especially there — people want a patch of the outdoors to call their own, according to Dean Geibel, a New Jersey developer whose company, Metro Homes, is based in thoroughly urban Hoboken.

“Everybody wants a place to have a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said. “They need a spot where they can see the sky, and breathe the air.

“Or maybe,” he added, with a less embracing fervor, “somebody wants to be able to smoke a cigar from time to time.”

Increasingly, New Jersey developers are going above, if not beyond, to satisfy that buyer demand. They’re looking to rooftops — above a building’s parking garage or its penthouses — to create shared, or even private, garden spots, in locales as diverse as the Hudson riverfront and the East Orange inner city.

A short list of rooftop projects now under construction includes the seventh-floor space with pool and “great lawn” at the 55-story Trump Plaza in Jersey City, a landscaped deck at One Hudson Park in Edgewater (where most units have balconies as well), elevated terraces at two different condo developments on the beach in Asbury Park — one a huge open garden and the other offering individual penthouse rooftop spaces — and five small condo structures in East Orange that will have overhead lawns and patios.

“Rooftops are hot in Jersey,” crowed Tom Bauer, a landscape architect with Melillo & Bauer in Manasquan. “Finally.”

Mr. Bauer was a pioneer in rooftop development in 1979, when he had black pines helicoptered to the top of the Caesars Boardwalk Regency Hotel Casino in Atlantic City to meet a local “green space” requirement.

More than a quarter century after that Atlantic City job — when high winds and inexperience literally blew an electrician off the rooftop and down two floors, resulting in a broken arm and leg — Mr. Bauer says he is constantly busy putting green icing atop the cake, as it were.

“It is the right thing to do, for so many reasons,” he said. He cited “aesthetic improvement,” meaning that people living and working up high get to look down on garden greenery as opposed to black tar and gravel, and “environmental improvement” — the natural cooling effect of “green” roofs and their efficient use of rainwater.

In Asbury Park, where several new beachfront complexes are under construction, Mr. Bauer’s firm recently hoisted loads of soil up to the roof of Paramount North Beach and then planted ornamental grasses and ground cover around the pool deck and private garden patios.

At the other end of the beach, town homes at the Wesley Grove development are being given individual rooftop terraces.

On the central beach, the two-tower Esperanza is rising. The project, being developed by Metro Homes, will have a lavish — and lush — plaza on the roof of the parking garage between its towers, similar to the planned configuration at Trump Plaza, where a second tower is in the works, Mr. Geibel said.

The Esperanza’s fourth-floor plaza will feature a pool, a children’s water park and jungle gym, a lawn large enough for soccer and pet walking, and a “tiki hut” offering food and beverages.

“People love to eat outside,” Mr. Geibel said, “and a lot of them have jobs where they don’t even get outside for lunch. I worked on Wall Street for 16 years and could never leave my desk.

“So we make that a provision in our buildings,” he said. “Outdoor eating is allowed, and even encouraged.”

Of course, that brings up the related subject of seagulls, or pigeons, depending on the local habitat. “You just have to make sure to clean up after people eat,” Mr. Geibel said. “It’s worth the effort to have that amenity.”

Besides, Mr. Bauer pointed out, one pleasure of urban rooftop gardens is that it is possible to experience “wildlife” in the city. Mr. Bauer said he had done some “beautiful bird-watching” from that vantage point, although he conceded he had never spotted a rabbit or deer on a rooftop.

Michael Barry, a principal of Applied Properties, which has installed rooftop gardens and two pools and a children’s playground atop various roofs in its Shipyard complex of condo and rental towers in Hoboken, spoke of such space as being “neighborhood parkland.”

“We put green anywhere we can physically put green,” Mr. Barry said. “It’s simply good urban planning.” Also, he said, it is a way to help keep tenants from leaving cities for suburbs once they have children.

“During the summer, the pool area is a great place for moms and young children to gather during the day," Mr. Barry said. In wintertime, some parents take their children up to the roof to build snowmen, he said.

Snow removal from rooftops can be very challenging, developers say. Mr. Barry spoke of having to scare up a fleet of snow blowers and send out a team of maintenance workers for several days after one big storm last year.

Mr. Bauer said the reason he can’t sell every developer on the idea of a roof garden is that it costs about 10 to 20 percent more to engineer a green rooftop that is structurally sound, completely waterproof and can handle a load of snow.

In East Orange, where the start-up developers Keith Miles and Marlon Haniff are putting up 12 units in 5 buildings on neighborhood lots, Mr. Miles said he has been dragging a hand mower up and down two flights of stairs to maintain the green oasis he created atop a two-family structure on Tremont Avenue. “I think I’m going to have to build a little shed up here to hold that thing — and the snow blower,” he said.

Mr. Miles and his partner, whose company, South Atlantic Assets Holdings, is among a small group of entrepreneurs aiming to lure middle-class home buyers back to old neighborhoods in Orange and East Orange, said providing green space was crucial to that cause — but extremely difficult on small urban lots.

“So we decided to put the backyard up top,” he said. The third-floor “backyard” at 555 Tremont Avenue, which has a velvety carpet of grass, a small paver-stone patio and a gas barbecue, is only 35 by 55 feet. On the other hand, the entire lot is only 50 by 125 feet.

“Size is not the important part,” Mr. Miles said emphatically, and then he started to sound like Mr. Geibel, the builder of the 862-unit Trump Plaza in Jersey City. “You just need a little place to drink your beverage in the morning or at night, and to take a breath outside, and get a feel for the day.”

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