The Green Building That’s Flunking New York’s Climate Law

On the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, Pete Sikora gazes up at a glass-enclosed tower that twists with unexpected grace as it rises 51 stories into the sky. Sikora is director of climate and inequality campaigns at New York Communities for Change, an activist organization. On this breezy September day, however, he’s posing as an energy specialist in the hopes of gathering intelligence about the skyscraper, One Bryant Park, also known as the Bank of America Tower in honor of its primary tenant.

Tall and bespectacled with the mischievous air of a professional agitator, Sikora says he’s examined city data showing One Bryant Park’s carbon emissions and the amount seems high to him. Could the skyscraper have a secret nuclear fusion lab inside? he asks. Or the futuristic technology of Lex Luthor’s tower in the Superman comics he read as a boy? He’s joking, but not entirely. He sees Douglas Durst, chairman of the family-run real estate company that owns One Bryant Park, as someone intent on obscuring the reasons for what Sikora describes as its unacceptable carbon count. “They’re on the verge of getting the reputation of a huge polluter,” Sikora says. “What are they thinking?”