The Wind Farmers of East 11th Street
FIVE years ago this month, the lights of the city that never sleeps winked out. It was the kind of situation that would have been tailor-made for a group of young architects who, in the 70s, took over a five-story tenement that didn’t rely on the city’s electrical grid. They lived at 519 East 11th Street, and they got their power from the wind.
On top of their building, one block north of Tompkins Square Park, stood the first roof-mounted urban windmill in the United States. More than just a tower and turbines, the windmill represented a first step toward urban energy self-sufficiency, toward freedom from electricity costs, and toward a loosening of the energy monopoly.
During the energy crisis in 1976, when a radical young architect named Travis Price first came to New York, this windmill was just a vision. Known as the Solar Cowboy, Mr. Price wore a straw cowboy hat and had a passion for renewable power.
“I was going to bring solar energy to the poor,” said Mr. Price, who is now a practicing architect in Washington. “And I was going to do it in an urban environment, during a recession, and that was going to be my flame.”
Instead, he found a city ravaged by another kind of fire. “A building an hour was being burned in New York,” he said. For a host of complicated reasons, among them rising energy costs, many landlords were abandoning their buildings or worse. Eventually, the city began to repossess the apartment houses and then sell them on favorable terms to neighborhood groups.
But Mr. Price, along with David Norris, a Yale architecture student who joined him in his cause, saw a problem: If the new owners simply reoccupied the abandoned buildings, the high energy costs and other factors would drive them out, too. So, along with an M.I.T. architecture student named Chip Tabor, they bought a share in a gutted tenement on East 11th Street and persuaded the neighborhood’s working-class, largely Puerto Rican community to help turn the building into a model for energy conservation. They installed extensive insulation and the first rooftop solar panels in Manhattan.
“I mean, what was the next step?” said Mr. Norris. “Put up a windmill.”
Finding and restoring an old farm turbine for the windmill was easy enough, but erecting the windmill, even after all the pieces were carried up to the roof, was another matter. “How do you lift this 30- or 40-foot tower straight up on the top of a narrow building,” Mr. Price said, “and not have it fall down and skewer someone? We had no budget for cranes, so we just got several cases of beer and went all down the street and said, ‘Let’s have a party.’ ”
Soon they had 40 people on the roof. “Everybody’s drinking,” Mr. Price said. “It’s a timing issue. You can’t get everyone up there unless there’s drink, but you can’t wait too long or they’re too drunk to work.”
With some pushing and tugging and lifting, the rooftop crowd soon set up the windmill. “It was absolutely harebrained and hair-raising,” Mr. Norris said. “It was in contravention of every known city regulation.”
But politicians soon flocked to 519 East 11th Street. “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” filmed a show on its roof. Senator Ted Kennedy described the structure as “the little windmill that could.”
“We felt like a rock band,” Mr. Price recalled. “We were cooking.”
He would see people doing double-takes, he added. “And then they would suddenly see it spinning, and there would be this really delightful smile.”
SINCE storing energy produced by the windmill was difficult, the group wired it into the city’s power grid. Then, when the building was producing more electricity than it was using, the grid absorbed the overflow.
Wiring into the power grid was illegal by itself, but when the group demanded that the utility reimburse them for the overflow, Con Ed urged the New York State Energy Commission to force the group to disconnect from the grid.
Ramsey Clark, a former attorney general of the United States, came to the group’s aid. “There’d been practically no urban experience like it,” Mr. Clark said of the windmill hookup, adding that the utility was afraid of the precedent.
The group won the case. “The energy commission essentially said to Con Ed, ‘You’ve got to buy their power,’ ” Mr. Norris said. “That was huge.”
But the turbine never worked well enough to provide power for the entire building, which, by 1977 or so, was home to 25 or 30 people. Either wind speeds were too low to generate sufficient power or turbulence from gusts produced a deafening noise from the windmill and caused the building to shake. Moreover, during the major blackout in 1977, unable to get a charge from Con Ed, the windmill provided insufficient power.
Still, until 1985, when a blade was blown off during a hurricane, the windmill produced enough power to light communal areas and heat water. For the next two decades or so, its remnants jutted into the sky until, sometime in the last few years, the tower was dismantled.
Today, interest in urban wind is growing — plans are afoot to build a wind farm on Staten Island, for example — but if another blackout occurs this summer there will be no light glowing on East 11th Street. There will, however, probably be vendors hawking flashlights and batteries, a thought that reminds Mr. Price of the old days.
“I think of that hustle,” he said, “and think of us as the New Yorkers who hustled the wind.”
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