In the Prettified City, Urban Grime Gives Rise to Green

At one point, he considered calling the condo X-On West. And he toyed with naming the building's restaurant High Octane, allowing Exxon's amber-hued gasoline to loop through transparent tubes above the bar.

"I come up with these things every day," he says.

But his sales team nixed the idea. "People told me I was crazy."

Greening the unsightly is not new for Lanier. Another condo he built, at 3303 Water St. NW, had the misfortune of overlooking a Pepco substation. Ouch!

Now the substation's roof is home to a 6,500-square-foot meadow. Birds, bees and squirrels have been spotted, although no deer, says Lanier -- "not yet."

"In real estate you're always faced with, let's call it, 'issues,' " he says. "Your job is to make the issues go away. A nice thing is to have something grow over it."

Eco-chic is all the rage in real estate circles. Every other day, it seems, developers across the country tout their glass designs and vegetated rooftops as vital in the fight against global warming. Yet the wave also stirs a bit of murmuring among urban aficionados, who see beauty in tar, steel and concrete, and prefer their cities a tad unruly.

"The view of those trying to greenify everything seems to be that unless you have X amount of green, then your soul is going to be destroyed," says Francis Morrone, a New York-based architectural historian.

"When you see a city's infrastructure, the jumble of buildings and crowded sidewalks, to a real urbanite those things are beautiful," he says. "Just in the same way that the Sierra Club guy finds trails in the Adirondacks beautiful."

Joel Kotkin, an urban historian based in Los Angeles, ponders the notion of a gas station garden and he detects a broader, less-appealing narrative: the revival of cities as suburban-style playpens for the wealthy.

"It's almost like you have the emergence of the designer city," he grouses over the phone. "What made cities different was that they weren't places that were controlled. This desire to control everything is overwhelming. Now cities are like Disneyland for adults."

The greenery above the Exxon station, a $1 million mix of ornamental grass, perennials and shrubs, is growing tall enough so that tufts are visible from the sidewalk. The garden has become something of a conversation piece. Max Hirshfeld, a photographer, stood across the street the other morning and wondered if someone -- not him, of course -- could grow marijuana up there. (Answer: no roof access.)

Remus, a real estate broker, can see the garden from her sixth-floor apartment, for which she paid nearly $1.5 million. Her friends, she says, were a bit baffled by her choice, given that her profession abides by the credo "Location! Location! Location!"

Whatever. She's living downtown, has a rooftop pool and can walk to a gazillion restaurants. A gas station isn't going to rain on her parade, she says, not even when she's paying "$1,000 a square foot to live next door."

"It's better than looking at a heat pump," she says.

Anne Williams and her husband spent nearly $2 million for their apartment, but it's on the other side of the building, so the gas station is conveniently out of sight. Still, she can see it from the building's roof, where she eats dinner or cools off in the pool. She's not pleased with the view of the garden these days.

Brown. Far too brown.

"You're not supposed to be living in a prairie," she says.