Background

Dreaming of green

About the Brick

How it looks

The Graham is a key piece in the revitalization of an industrial neighborhood in the South Bronx. In addition to increasing density and retail space for the neighborhood, it was also built in accordance with the New York City Zoning Ordinance for Quality Housing and qualified for Inclusion Housing bonuses.

James Young, Kingston Block & Masonry’s Director of National Sales Development, said that while LEED certification was not specifically considered in the selection of a brick product, the owners of the building “chose this green concrete product because they wanted to be a part of a growing movement to use Kingston bricks to build a healthy living environment.”

MHG Architecture’s Herb Mandel is right to the point.

“The product looks good on the building,” he says. “When we saw it for the first time, it looked substantial, and it met the criteria we felt we needed.”

Young said that the feature band in the building was the Central Park Cream color used between large portions of Rhinebeck Bronze.

“The two colors are the focal point of this new building,” Young said. “The scale of the brick gives strength to the overall size of the building, and it’s resilient against severe weather thus adding some long-time endurance to the structure.”

Between the two colors combined, there were over 200,000 Pozzotive® Conserve bricks used in this project.

Mandel said the quality of Kingston Block & Masonry’s products were as advertised.

“They’ve been very helpful, starting from where we first selected the material,” Mandel said. “We’ve asked them to make some changes in terms of color and so on, and they’ve been very responsive. The material turned out to be very much what we thought it was going to be, and we’re happy with it.”

…they wanted to be a part of a growing movement to use Kingston bricks to build a healthy living environment.