Great Day to Be Outside, If It Weren’t for Allergies

 

A 65-year-old?law professor?who lives on the Upper East Side tentatively follows suit, baring his chest, figuring he knows no one in the area anyway.

Eying them both, Mark Cilla, 55, a budget manager from Commack, N.Y., tapping on a laptop, feels emboldened and spontaneously shrugs out of his button-down.

“This is heaven,” Mr. Cilla says to himself as his belly reddens in the sun.

Steps behind him, in the leaf-tattooed shade, Larry Ferruzzi is in hell. His head swims, his eyes water and his nose itches and runs. “This is really rough, the worst ever,” says Mr. Ferruzzi, 67, who sells industrial lighting, as he presses a white linen handkerchief to his nose. “I can’t stop sneezing,” he says, then sneezes again.

After a punishing winter and a cruel, rainy April, the weather this past week in New York has indeed seemed heaven-sent — or at least from California: crisp, cloudless days with temperatures hovering around 70 degrees. Sun- and warmth-starved New Yorkers surfaced like worms after a rain, arraying themselves on every available bench, chair and patch of grass.

But such idyllic meteorological conditions — dry and not too hot — also provide ideal reproductive conditions for some trees. Specifically, oak, beech and maple, whose tiny flowers have been releasing copious amounts of pollen, which have been carried far and wide by gentle winds, unimpeded by rain and, for the most part, leaves, and into the noses of allergy sufferers.

Allergy sufferers, in turn, find themselves facing an ugly choice: Crack open the windows, for now is that fleeting time when neither air-conditioners nor radiators are needed, enjoy the gorgeous weather, and accept the consequences.

The city’s pollen count is officially “high.” According to Pollen.com, on Thursday it was 9.9 on a scale of zero to 12, having fallen from 11.1 a week earlier. Allergies worsen asthma attacks, and earlier this week, the city’s health department counted more asthma-related emergency room visits than at the same time last year.

Dr. Benjamin Aubey, a pediatrician at Harlem Hospital Center, has seen several children who had been sent home from school because the staff thought they had pinkeye. “But it’s just allergies flying,” Dr. Aubey said.

Drugstores are struggling to keep allergy medicines on their shelves. Jesenia Fuentes, a clerk at a Duane Reade in Midtown, said a shipment that arrived?early Thursday would very likely be gone within hours.

Jimmy Lee, 52, who lives in Hell’s Kitchen and works in the hotel business, said he prepared for heavy demand for his allergy medicine. “I get it by the case,” said Mr. Lee as he sat in the pedestrian strip along Broadway by 41st Street, sniffling. Staying inside, he said, was not an option. “For the first time ever, this winter I had cabin fever,” he said.

And so it went throughout the city, with many New Yorkers, ever conflicted, both loving and hating the weather.

Leslie Castillo, a 37-year-old allergy sufferer, said she would stay indoors but for her two children. “It’s ruined spring a little bit for me,” Ms. Castillo said as she sat in the grass at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her 2-year-old, taking in the glorious day with itchy, reddened eyes.

At Sheep Meadow in Central Park, Aziza Azim, 20, a fashion student at Parsons, stretched out on a blanket with two friends a few hours after one of them woke up and declared, “We need to tan.” Ms. Azim, who is allergic to pollen and horses, had girded for the excursion with Claritin. “If I take my medicine, I know it’s fine,” she said, and then proceeded to sneeze three times.

Compounding the woes of allergy sufferers is a high-pressure system wedged between two low-pressure systems, creating dry, stagnant air in New York City. But Ross Dickman, a meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service for the city, forecast that all would change this weekend. “It’s going to be cloudy, wet, almost miserable for May,” Mr. Dickman said. “That will help bring some of the allergens out of the air, kind of sterilize the atmosphere a little bit.”

Meanwhile, the trees’ pollination will abate, easing allergy conditions, at least until late May, when grass allergies break out, said Robert F. C. Naczi, curator of North American botany at The New York Botanical Garden. “So there’s at least two weeks of a reprieve.”

Anemona Hartocollis and Juliet Linderman contributed reporting.

 

Corner Office: Lars Bjork: Order Is Great. It’s Bureaucracy That’s Stifling

?This interview with Lars Bjork, C.E.O. of QlikTech, a data software company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss or manager?

A. It was in 1984.? I had the opportunity to work in construction in New York, coming right out of undergrad.? I was sick and tired of school at the time. I didn’t want to study anymore.? My uncle had built one of the largest construction companies in the world, so he got me a job on the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York as an assistant supervisor on site.?

I was 22, and the men were double my age and tough.? And I think the only way I could go about it was just walk up and try to speak to them and try to earn their respect, which I did.? It took some time.? It was rough at the beginning, but I learned a lot from that.? It was hard, tough, but a very fair environment.

Q. How did you handle it?

A. They looked at me skeptically.? Who is this kid just out of school?? He doesn’t know anything about what you really do on a construction site like this.? But I was a foreigner, and they were curious, so they said, let’s hear him out, see who he is.?

Then it just comes down to proving yourself — things you give them advice on or things that you tell them that are solid and sound, and weren’t just pulled out of the air.? I’ve always been very open toward people.? I never kept anything to myself, and I just explained to people what was on the agenda for the day, and why we were doing this.

Q. What has been your approach to leadership?

A. I have never seen myself as a leader, someone who says I’m going to become a C.E.O.? I never did that.? And that goes even for where I am now.? I didn’t start as C.E.O. at this company. It was never something that I put on a map, where I said, I’m going to get there.? It’s more the result of me very much earning the respect of the people I work for, and they said, this is a guy we’re going to promote. ?Q. What else?

A. I’ve always been competitive, and I’m also curious.? I want to learn things, and that’s why, early in life, I put myself in challenging situations, like coming to the United States from Sweden to work here. I’m also more humble today than I was 20 years ago.? I am by no means the expert.? I’m not the smart guy in the room.? I might have an ability to bring people together and get the best team or have a sense of what’s needed. Being the coach — that’s sort of what it’s been for me.

Q. What were some other big lessons?

A. I once worked for somebody who managed in such a terrible way that I decided to never work with people who treat people badly.? Life is too short for that.? Let’s work with people who appreciate you and you appreciate them. It was such a terrible experience, so I left the company because I didn’t want to be associated with that.?

For me, it’s super-important — if I love my job, why wouldn’t I want the same thing for my co-workers? They will feel good and they will enjoy working and they will stay, and I know it will show up in the results as well.? There is no other way to do it.? Motivated people will go way further than anyone else.?

Q. Tell me about the culture at your company.

A. We developed five core values that we live by.? The first one is “challenge,” because we are a disruptive software company. Always challenge the conventional, because if you follow others, you can at best be No. 2.? And if you want to win, you’ve got to find your own way to the top. And we challenge each other at QlikTech, because if you’re complacent, you’re not going to survive.?

The second one is move fast — because we are building a hypergrowth company. It’s O.K. to make mistakes, just don’t make the same mistakes.? Learn from them. The third one is, be open and straightforward.? What that means is just be open if you think something is wrong.? We hear everyone out.? It’s important that everything is on the table, because somebody might have something brilliant to say.? But when we leave the room and we’ve decided on one thing and your view might not be incorporated in that, you still have to respect the decision.? ?

The fourth one is teamwork for results.? This is not about the individual.? This is about the team, the power of the team.? In our company today, we have 28 offices in 23 countries, so our team is a virtual one. You reach out and you speak to people everywhere, and you learn a lot from people that way, because there are a lot more similarities between cultures than you might think.?

The fifth one is take responsibility. You’re given authority to be part of a lot more than just your position, but some responsibility also comes with it.? And if you want to grow fast, you have to put into people’s DNA the idea of being cost-conscious. That’s why we all still travel coach.

 

Poor Season for Sunshine Is Great One for Spores

Psychology: “You just have to carry on,” said Molly Corrigan, soaked citizen of this so often sunless city.

Utility: “Abundant Snowpack Assures Healthy Electricity Supplies,” trumpeted Seattle City Light, which generates most of its power through hydroelectric dams.

Danger: “Washington family survives avalanche in vehicle,” read a recent headline.

Little League: “Field closed,” say the sad signs on the diamonds.

And then there is the evidence procreating beneath your feet, through your yard, up on your roof, down your gutters and into your dreams: the march of the moss.

“The spores were really active this year,” said Robert Braid, caretaker of the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle.

Inara McEwen, sitting on a bench by a reflecting pool at the reserve, noted the diversity: “There’s the moss that grows on trees, and there’s the moss that grows in your car.”

When Mr. Braid speaks about spores being active, what he is really saying is that after a particularly rainy winter (thank you, La Ni?a) and now amid a particularly rainy early spring (thanks again), the atmosphere has been ideal for moss to multiply. And so it has been doing just that.

That means this wet region is once again confronting its moss divide.

“So many of the calls we get are from people who actually want to get rid of moss,” said Sue Hartman, who helps answer the gardening hot line run by Seattle Tilth, which promotes organic and sustainable gardening. “But this being the Pacific Northwest, moss is really kind of a native plant. I personally love moss, and my pals here at Tilth also love moss.”

Noting that this has been “an extraordinary year for moss,” Ms. Hartman said Seattle Tilth tried to provide “a little therapy” for people whose image of a lawn or garden bed does not necessarily include moss.

“When we see something that doesn’t look right to us, our first instinct is we need to correct it,” Ms. Hartman said. “But if moss is growing somewhere, it’s growing there for a reason. Perhaps you’re trying to grow grass in a place where grass doesn’t want to grow.”

Of course, moss and grass are not always at odds. Sometimes moss grows on roofs, then grass grows in the moss and an ecosystem is born.

“We’ve just gotten more and more into moss because it’s been so much wetter,” said Mitch Jacobsen, co-owner of Better Window Cleaning Seattle. “There’s money in moss.”

Mr. Jacobsen and an employee, Tai Koenig, were about to scale the roof of Ms. Corrigan’s two-story home on another drizzly morning in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. For about $400, the men would rake and clear the roof, clean the gutters and then treat the roof with chemicals to slow the inevitable regeneration of moss.

Ms. Corrigan said that she and her husband were having the roof cleaned mostly for maintenance, but that they also hoped removing its soft mossy habitat would discourage a pair of raccoons known for their own procreative endeavors — “rooftop romance,” she called it. Neighbors had taken notice. Photographs were well-circulated.

“I don’t think they will like the rough asphalt,” Ms. Corrigan said of the roof tiles.

This push and pull between people and the elements here is constant but not always predictable. Mr. Jacobsen said his company often wrestled with what chemicals to use on roofs. While some residents have no problem with powerful phosphates, others who want moss removed worry about the runoff — particularly the increasing number of people who capture roof runoff in cisterns to water their vegetable beds. Then again, some of the newest “green” houses have roofs with moss deliberately planted on them.

At Bloedel Reserve, which claims to have the largest moss garden on the continent, growing moss — and keeping it from growing — takes work. Mr. Braid said he had noticed in recent years that the winter frost window had narrowed, and that the moss on rocks in the Japanese garden area had expanded in response. The problem is that the rocks are not supposed to be completely covered.

“You have to find that balance of just the right amount moss on there,” he said.

Mr. Braid, who has been at the reserve for 26 years, has cared for the Japanese garden for 15. Last year the moss garden was added to his duties. He spends his days weeding wetlands, pulling overgrown huckleberry bushes, planting an alder or hemlock tree, always seeking a balance of light and moisture, for the moss.

“It’s peaking right now,” Mr. Braid said.

Seattle has a longtime opinion columnist, Knute Berger, whose nickname is Mossback. He often writes about preserving the built environment, of finding a balance between making way for the future and respecting decay.

Asked about moss, Mr. Berger said, “I’m all for letting it grow.”

Mr. Berger, who does most of his work here for Crosscut, an online journal, pointed out how wealthy the city had become over the past few decades, how new people with new money sometimes tore down little old houses — sometimes houses that are covered with moss — and built big new ones in their places.

“There’s something about the moss image to me that is kind of the democratizing aspect of nature,” Mr. Berger said. “You might have a lot of money and you can fend most of it off, but you’re still going to have some moss on your roof.”