Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll find out what 17 big, heavy trees are doing indoors in Brooklyn. We’ll also look at a City Council bill to ban the sale of guinea pigs in pet stores, which comes up for a vote today.

What would Betty Smith, who wrote the novel “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” say about trees growing not in “boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps,” but indoors?

That is where 17 trees have just been placed, inside a former sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Saplings they are not: Each weighs more than 10,000 pounds.

Each sits atop a special reinforcing beam.

Each was lifted up and over the refinery’s old brick wall by a crane.

Each was steered down into position — “surgically,” said the developers behind the project, who are building office space into the old factory, which shut down in the early 2000s.

But Nathan Bartholomew chose a musical metaphor rather than a medical one: Coordinating the workers and the crane and the trees was “almost like a symphony,” he said.

Bartholomew would have been on the podium if there had been one. As the director of horticulture for the developers, he selected the trees and oversaw the installation.

The idea was to create a vertical garden that would give office workers an outdoorsy feeling. The developers see biophilic design — a term used when architects and designers bring the natural world indoors — as a draw for prospective tenants that is increasingly important in the post-Covid market.

“Biophilia is just exploding,” said Judith Heerwagen, an environmental psychologist who has studied workplaces and who was not involved in the Brooklyn project.

The pandemic may have contributed to biophilia’s popularity: “People are happier when they are in a natural environment,” she said. “People have gotten used to working more flexibly, working at home, which means you can go for a walk in the afternoon or take a break. In an office, there are lots of times you wish you could do that, but you can’t.”

Bartholomew echoed the idea that office workers are more productive if they have a connection with nature. “Our concept was to bring that park inside, so the office tenants will have a direct connection to nature during the workday,” he said. “Post-Covid, we want to make it appealing. We have to get people back — ‘I want to come to work today. It’s a nice environment. It’s a nice space.’”

It is a space he described as “a living, green, almost hanging garden” inside the refinery, where a building-within-a-building went up, crowned by a glass dome. The refinery building occupies an 11-acre site that was sold in 2012 to Two Trees Management, which was instrumental in redeveloping the industrial neighborhood that became Dumbo in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Williamsburg, where it has already built two of four residential apartment buildings, its plans include 700 apartments for low- and middle-income tenants.

Bartholomew said the plantings would rise from the second floor to the 10th floor. For the trees, he chose slender silhouette sweetgum trees and native pin oaks from nurseries in New York and Ohio.

Will the trees make the transition to their new indoor environment, or will they die? Bartholomew answered that question by saying the former sugar factory “is probably going to be the most challenging garden environment that I’ve dealt with.”

“I get overhead light and I get indirect light,” he said, “but I’m also installing 30-foot runs of LED-powered grow lights to increase the light inside this cavity, a state-of-the-art irrigation system and trying everything I can think of to help these plants survive.”

“I think things will grow in there,” he said. “It’s like any new process. Some things might make it. Some things might not.”

Weather

Enjoy a mostly sunny day near the low 70s, with wind gusts. The evening is mostly cloudy, with temps dropping into the high 50s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Passover) and Thursday (Passover and Orthodox Holy Thursday).

The latest Metro news

Rutgers staff strike: Three unions representing an estimated 9,000 full- and part-time faculty members at Rutgers University went on strike for the first time in the school’s 257-year history.

New nominee: Gov. Kathy Hochul will nominate Rowan Wilson, who already serves on New York’s highest court, to lead the court, bringing one of Albany’s most divisive intraparty clashes closer to a resolution.

Stabbing at a mosque: An imam was stabbed while leading early-morning prayers at a New Jersey mosque, and the assailant was subdued by worshipers, the authorities and a community member said.

A move to ban the sale of guinea pigs in pet shops

They were lovable, and people were lonely. But some loves do not last. That seems to be the story of many people’s affection for the guinea pigs they bought when they were cooped up during the pandemic.

Since then, guinea pigs have inundated the city’s animal shelter system. Last year, 825 were left at city shelters, and this year another 188 were. “We don’t have enough room,” said Katie Hansen, a spokeswoman for Animal Care Centers of New York City.

The City Council is scheduled to vote today on a bill to prohibit pet stores in the city from selling guinea pigs. This follows a state ban on pet-store sales of dogs, cats and rabbits that was passed in December and is scheduled to take effect next year. The guinea pig measure will first go before the Council’s health committee, whose chairwoman, Lynn Schulman, is one of 35 sponsors, a supermajority in the 51-member Council. The vote by the full Council is scheduled for later in the day.

A spokesman for Diana Ayala, the deputy speaker of the Council who introduced the measure, said the sheer number of abandoned guinea pigs had made it difficult to find new homes for them all. The spokesman, Malek Al-Shammary, said the ban would “give us an opportunity to focus our attention on ensuring that our furry little friends can find their forever home” — and would also reduce overcrowding at the shelters.

Guinea pigs have been found abandoned in parks and apartment building lobbies. Last week someone called the nonprofit Voters for Animal Rights about a pair of guinea pigs in a cage next to a trash can in New Lots, Brooklyn, “meaning someone was throwing them out with the trash,” said Allie Taylor, the president of the group.

“Pet stores are the largest contributor to the problem,” Taylor said. “They see them as merchandise. We see them as living, breathing, sentient animals that require very specific care.”

Only a few veterinarians in the city spay or neuter guinea pigs, according to testimony at a Council hearing last year. “There’s two surgeries that make me question my life choice,” Dr. Lyle Cleary, a veterinarian with the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine on the Upper West Side, told a Council hearing in December, “and one of them is a guinea pig spay.”

A spokesman for People United to Protect Pet Integrity, a coalition of pet store owners that opposed the state ban on selling dogs, cats and rabbits last year, did not return a call for comment.

METROPOLITAN diary

Punching bag

Dear Diary:

“Hey kid, could you show me how to do that?”

Pausing to catch my breath, I leaned against the heavy punching bag at the West Side Y.M.C.A.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

Standing in the doorway was a man with white hair who appeared to be in his 50s.

“Can you teach me to punch the bag?”

I hesitated before answering.

“C’mon, kid,” he said. “I’ll throw you a few bones.”

The apparently quizzical look on my face prompted an explanation.

“I’ll give you a few bucks.”

I agreed, but I told him that just because I could do it didn’t mean I could teach it. I then proceeded to show him a few rudimentary boxing skills.

He told me he knew some guys who had opened a gym on the Upper West Side. They were looking for a boxing fitness instructor.

“You’d be great,” he said.

“Do they pay in bones or cash?” I asked.

I had no intention of following through. After all, I was busy being an unemployed actor.

But a few weeks later, while walking up Amsterdam Avenue, I noticed a sign on a building at the corner of West 76th Street: Equinox. It was the gym this fellow had been telling me about.

Out of curiosity and with no expectations, I walked in and was hired. I went on to a successful, 25-year career in the fitness industry.

I never did go back to the West Side Y.M.C.A. to thank that fellow.

I wish I had.

— Paul Frediani

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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