The Newtown Pentacle

feel like taking  a walk? I’ll show you something cool… Bring your camera- and ID

Here’s a google map.

For a larger contextual view of Calvary Cemetery- check out our previous posts- 

The Cemetery Belt

Walking Widdershins to Calvary

This post also intersects with 

Dead Ends, A short walk from Maspeth to Calvary

-photo by Mitch Waxman

Just across the street from the site of the former LIRR Penny Bridge station. Easily accessed via the street, upon crossing the gates of Calvary, one will find a staircase carven into the hill by whose ascent the Newtown acropolis may be obtained. Cresting over the surrounding neighborhoods, and soaring over the Newtown Creek’s former wetlands, Calvary Cemetery keeps its secrets buried in centuried silence. Looking south toward Brooklyn, the Kosciuszko bridge approach of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway looms over its passage, carrying millions of vehicles over and across the necropolis of New York City. 

-photo by Mitch Waxman

Phantoms of what could have been haunt Calvary, roaming in soliloquy amongst the avenues of nitre dripping marble. The 1918 superflu and an earlier cholera epidemic staffed the ranks here with both the sacred and the profane. St. Patrick’s in Manhattan used this place for the interment of New York’s best and brightest. This is where the ossified remnants of the men who died battling the traitorous slavers of the Confederate South can be found in the Newtown mud. In subterranean vaults of marble and basalt, and within leaden coffins, these gentlemen– the ultimate product of an age of victorian aspirations- lie in putrid splendor, alongside the occasional merchant and immigrant whose life savings were traded to purchase their final resting place.

-photo by Mitch Waxman

A member of our flickr group, sorabji, has written an excellent description- in some great detail on the Civil War monument and the Johnston mausoleum. Which you’ll find in concrete reality when you gaze from the summit of the great hill. I won’t attempt to better sorabji’s efforts, and will simply ask you to follow the link and check out the research.

At the apex of the hill, which is the acropolis of Calvary on the Newtown Creek side, there can be found a tree. 

-photo by Mitch Waxman

Undoubtedly centenarian at the very least, the bark and leaves of this tree are of an unnaturally dark and forbidding aspect. Its branches sway in patterns that have nothing in common with the prevailing winds. Its trunk is observed wearing a a sickly blanket of moss. Vigorous and quite healthy despite its proximity to the poisons of the Newtown Creek, the tree is obviously nourished by some sort of morbid nutrition.

-photo by Mitch Waxman

An apocryphal story passed down by Brooklyn folks is that of the door to door salesman seeking to sell you a funeral plot “on a hill, under a shady tree, near a babbling brook”. The proper Brooklyn response is- ‘yeah? and I gots a bridge to sell youse”.

This, my friends, is the very archetype of that con job. The hill is called Laurel and the babbling brook is, and was, the Newtown Creek and the grave is in Calvary.

-photo by Mitch Waxman

How deep do the roots of this tree plunge into the tumulous earth? And where can they lead? What foul corruptions do they feed upon?

-photo by Mitch Waxman

Can it be, that just like every other place in New York’s megalopolis, Calvary’s “holy ground” is actually the roof of some cyclopean structure?

Anything you may experience, in situ, by following these walking directions is at your OWN RISK, and is offered by the Newtown Pentacle for documentary and entertainment purposes only. Remember- the rule we follow at the Newtown Pentacle is to NEVER trespass. Like Vampires, Newtownicans should wait to be invited into a house before they can do their work.  Also, Please note — if something you read here is inaccurate, DO NOT BE SHY- contact me– additions and corrections are always welcome at the Newtown Pentacle.