SOHO — The Crosby Street Hotel has become the first hotel in Manhattan to achieve the vaunted green building status of LEED Gold certification.
The lodging, on Crosby Street between Spring and Prince streets, achieved the grade last month for its eco-friendly use of energy, lighting, water and building materials as well as incorporating a variety of other sustainable strategies.
LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is a governmental program designed to highlight buildings that incorporate green technologies.
Buildings can be awarded four different levels of recognition — certified, silver, gold or the highest, platinum — based on points they earn for environmental initiatives.
"Gold certification for a hotel is particularly impressive, since hotels are notorious for high water usage for laundering and food preparation,” Jennifer Easton, a spokeswoman for the US Green Building Council, which accredits LEED buildings, told industry blog Lodging Hospitality.
The 11-story building, which opened in 2009, grows vegetables and herbs on its rooftop that are used in the hotel's restaurant, according to the hotel.
The green roof also incorporates native plants that assist in reducing the urban heat island effect – a phenomenon where large areas of hard surfaces, such as concrete, create hotter than average temperatures.
Other initiatives that led to the hotel's LEED certification included rehabilitating the contaminated site where it was built, recycling demolition and construction waste instead of sending it to a landfill and using materials that came from within a 500-mile radius of the site.
