Admiral Durst Ahoy!
The green billionaire seeks to expand his fleet.
Douglas Durst is the city’s greenest real-estate mogul (the toilets in his One Bryant Park will flush recycled rainwater). But his fleet of hybrid-electric New York Water Taxi catamaran ferries may soon expand to include the Hummers of the harbor if his bid to acquire some of economically foundering NY Waterway’s ferries is accepted. Durst insists the 400-passenger vessels—whose titanic wakes have tossed his spunky little boats for years—can be made more eco-friendly by using cleaner-burning engines and docking at lower speeds. But the man who owns the state’s largest organic farm does seem to have some eco-regrets: “Obviously they’re not the boats we would build from scratch.”
—Will Doig

EDITED BY CARL SWANSON

Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Greg Sargent | Carl Swanson | Megan Miller | Jacob Bernstein | Will Doig
• Table of Contents: November 29, 2004 issue of New York | Subscribe!