••• “The First-Ever Hermès Parfumerie Can Turn You Into a Horse.” Promises, promises…. —Racked

••• The New York Times visits the Spring Street Salt Shed and recounts its back story. And there’s a photo of the inside, which looks about how you’d expect it to. Also of note:

—”The formwork was then stripped away, revealing a lustrous concrete surface that was glacially blue. That color comes from slag in the mix […] and will fade over time as the concrete grows whiter.”
—”Road salt imported from Chile arrives through a terminal on Staten Island [….] At Spring Street, it will be piled about 40 feet high and will naturally assume an ‘angle of repose’ of 32 degrees. The pile will be replenished constantly during the winter as needed.”
—”The walls of the shed are up to six feet thick.”

••• Update on converting two unappealing Lower Manhattan public spaces into a pretty park: “This month, two years after the city began working on the idea of transforming the two spaces, Parks Department landscape architect George Vellonakis presented a design that is meant to turn the plazas into a 2/3-acre landscaped oasis, better isolated from surrounding traffic and a safer, easier place to get to. The entire space would be named Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza, for the former president of the Downtown Alliance who died in 2013 and who had advocated for the transformation of the two plazas.” —Tribeca Trib