Walkabout: Up on a roof, it's getting greener: the YWCA project
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A crew installs pallets of sedum on the roof of the Downtown YWCA.
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The first four floors of the YWCA Downtown ended up being the only ones, but the Y was built in 1964 to support 10 additional stories. Two years ago, when administrators decided it was time to replace the leaky flat black roof, they went after a much bigger solution.
Today and tomorrow, workers from the Allegheny Construction Group are laying the last pallets in a 4,900 square-foot patchwork quilt of sedum to complete a 64-ton green roof on the building at Wood Street and Fourth Avenue.
It is part of a $1.1 million roof and exterior restoration project. Roughly half the money came from the federal stimulus, the rest from five local foundations and the YWCA.
The new roof materials include a Firestone rubber membrane over 4 inches of insulation. It feels as if you're walking on an air mattress as you maneuver the pathways through these fields of sedum. They come in 2-foot-by-2-foot pallets that connect to each other roughly the way you close a cereal box by fitting the tab into the slit. The effect looks almost seamless if you're standing several yards away.
It's a nubby green carpet, a gift to the people looking down from upper stories in the Carlyle or the Arrott Building.
As the crew lifted pallets from a wheelbarrow and fit them into their spaces the other day, green slowly began to fill the foreground. I studied the Arrott, one of the city's most beautiful buildings. From where I stood, it was right up against the Y, whose parapet was the only thing between the Arrott and the green carpet. The Arrott looked even more beautiful.
The difference between the emotional impact of a flat black roof and a carpet of green sedum is the difference between feeling forlorn and feeling comforted.
This city is awash in flat black roofs. If every one of them that could support the weight were covered in pallets of sedum, the storm sewer system would be relieved of a lot of run-off.
"This is more than a solution to a roof problem," said Dan Lipinski, the project superintendent for the Allegheny Construction Group, the general contractor. "It will slow the rate of drainage and release Co2 back into the atmosphere.
First Published October 11, 2011 12:00 am
