Archive for September 2009
Maspeth? Laurel Hill? Where am I?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The angles found between neighborhoods are perilous and enigmatic, here in the Newtown Pentacle. Denigrated and given over to commercial interests, these areas which are neither here nor there- tick nor tock- exist outside of the normal rules that govern the more wholesome and presentable villages that surround them. Just to the south and east lies storied Maspeth, due south is centuried Greenpoint and colonial East Williamsburg, north is venerable Sunnyside and luminant Astoria.
The hill one climbs- the shot above is looking up said hill, and the one below is its counterpoint– was called Laurel in those days when august titans like Neziah Bliss strode the earth with omnipotent confidence in the future. So close to the Newtown Creek’s industrial heartland and Calvary Cemetery, one gains an impression of an undefinable sickness hanging about every malformed plant and pollution streaked brick. Hints of its former glory can be detected by observing an ornate cornice of finely carved masonry, or in proud cast iron logotypes found in rusted pilasters, atavistically claiming a structure for a long bankrupt company or proud individual proprietor.
There is a colour about the place. A queer iridescence, neither black nor white, which is the same sort of colour found in the Newtown Creek. It is not a terrestrial colour, the colour… is like something from outer space.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
43rd street continues its murderous and poorly graded ascent over the sickly hill, its sidewalk and street scribed with automotive fluids and petroleum residues. At the bottom of the hill is where copper was burnt out of its ore matrix using powerful acids for over a century. In previous explorative descriptions of the larger context of this place, I described a pathway around and into Calvary Cemetery and beyond. This exploration intersects with that one, and with another describing the Maspeth Plank Road.
This colour, it pollutes, and it has a smell- something metallic- like the sensation of licking a battery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Late, too late, had I set out for my journey through this place. The barking of hungry dogs and the scurrying of small things which, for the sake of my sanity, we’ll call rats- could be heard from behind the gates and within the very walls of the shuttered properties. I realized that, immersed as I was in my historical musings, I was completely alone on this street- there was no traffic. Always nervous and possessed of a weak psychological constitution which makes me prone to paranoid fantasy and physical cowardice, I decided to seek out the safety of companions and quicken my steps.
The effusive colour of the place, stronger now as I ascended Laurel Hill, was playing on my nerves. In my mind, I felt a growing warmth which was puzzlingly dry- and somehow cold as well- a disorienting and very bad idea forming in my mind. The colour.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Seeking a guidepost, the obsequious spires of Manhattan could be seen rising over Calvary. With the BQE onramp for the Kosciuzko Bridge thrumming- in rythmic sense impacts- as vehicular traffic pulsed over the rough hewn and pitted slabs of masonry from which the road surface of that busy highway carried by the bridge is built, I had a moment of clarity and somewhat regained my senses. The odd colour, it was visibly not present over -or in- Calvary, whose plants and trees sway accordingly to the direction of the wind, not against it. A fever overtook my thoughts and I feared one of my “episodes” was beginning.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Resting for a moment by a garbage bin whose inner sounds filled me with a malevolent premonition, I noticed that people actually do live here. Lovely, well cared for, and huge houses can be witnessed on 43rd street.
A testament to the character and resiliency of Newtownicans- these holdouts of a time when hard men and ironclad women bit into life with shining teeth, live in the middle of an area reviled and shunned by most. This is at most 2-3,000 feet from either Phelps Dodge and Calvary, and within shooting distance of an industrial waterfront fallen on hard times. Only those who move into the new housing units proposed for Hunters Point will be able to boast of living closer to the bulkheads of the Newtown Creek.
Except for this guy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the summit of the hill, whose attainment by a physical specimen as poor as myself is a breathless experience, a highway cloverleaf cuts 43rd street off at 54th avenue- and the road offers a right hand turn that continues to climb higher. Especially prevalent here, the colour adorns the illegally dumped truck and automobile tires and variegated forms of construction debris that accompany all dead end streets in western Queens. Squamous little bushes adorn the curblines, and potholes mark the asphalt. In those cavities, cobble stones are illuminated by the merciless Newtown sun, revealing an earlier world which our modernity increasingly seems to be a cheaply wrought imitation of.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Following the erratic and illogically sharp curve of the 54th ave., which matches the arc of the highway that has precedent right of way- and cuts this area off from the surrounding communities- the colour persisted.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Be sure to look all around you here. Spectacular views of Manhattan are to the west, and you are standing pretty close to the top of the hill.
At this elevation, we are actually looking right over Long Island CIty and the Newtown Creek which are close to or at sea level.
I have always lived in terror of some seismic event or industrial accident disturbing the vast deposits of the subaqueous Methane Clathrates in the New York Bight. This potential petrochemical replacement for oil is so plentiful in the waters surrounding New York State that many energy companies are exploring methods of economically harvesting it. The Saudi Arabia of these undersea “ice which burns”, incidentally, just happens to be the northeast coast of North America. Were there to be a sudden upwelling of these frozen gases, it would trigger a tsunami wave that would flood New York City’s lowlands in a way that would dwarf… well- it has happened in the past.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Relict building stock abounds, but remain occupied. I attempted conversation with an area resident found on a different block, a skeletal man in his early 40’s, but noticed that the colour seemed to be dancing around in his eyes and his complexion was wan and jaundiced. I asked him- Is this Maspeth, or Laurel Hill? In a nervous whisper, he informed me that he didn’t know- then glanced over his shoulder into a house- and asked me if I knew that he knew that I know that he knows that I know that he knows I was a cop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I said “yes”, and moved along. I’m not a cop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everything I saw here was eaten away at by that damned dry cold hot colour- a queerly iridescent patina so familiar to those inveterate observers of the Newtown Creek and its environs.
Who can guess what this home of former style and antiquarian taste saw- its joyous weddings and births, the tragedy of its funerals and disease. How many families welcomed their sons home from war, or sent their daughters off to college from this place? What heroic immigrant struggle played out between the clapboard walls? And when did this colour begin to manifest itself here, and why?
I cannot believe it just fell from the sky one night.
Whatever happened here, its all gone. Lost to time and dissolution and the tyranny of the silent tomb. Like so much of our Newtown history, these tales will be unremarked and forgotten.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Still looking for Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Maspeth, Astoria, LIC, Elmhurst, Newtown Ghost Stories- by the way- Halloween is coming. Send anything you’d like to share to me privately through this address. I’ll contact you back and we’ll arrange details, you’re as anonymous as you’d like to be. Developing a multi witness one right now, which folks in the 40’s along 34th avenue and Broadway in Astoria have described. Have you seen “her”?
Long Island City Zen 2 -The Empty Corridor
Know this spot?
50th avenue and 25th street – photo by Mitch Waxman
This is 50th avenue and 25th street, and here’s a google map (I suggest hitting street view and exploring an area via the google service, it’s really helpful to get an idea of what’s “there”). Which, in this case is a whole lot of infrastructure. The elevated LIE allows vehicular traffic to hurtle along on a sloping ascent, reaching as high as 106 feet in some places. The fuligin shadow cast by the steel aqueduct falls on an area of Long Island City I like to call “the empty corridor”.
from wikipedia:
The expressway begins at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. Upon emerging from the tunnel in Queens, it is formally subdivided by name into three sections: the Queens-Midtown Expressway from the tunnel toll plaza to Queens Boulevard, the Horace Harding Expressway from said intersection to the Nassau County line, and the Long Island Expressway in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, though almost all locals and most signage use “the Long Island Expressway” or “the L.I.E.” to refer the entire length of I-495.[3] A mile after entering Queens, the LIE meets Interstate 278 (The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) at interchange 16. Not long after Queens Boulevard, the LIE meets the Grand Central Parkway, then immediately after, the Van Wyck Expressway (I-678).
stitch panorama, looking southeast – photo by Mitch Waxman
Its an inaccurate pun, of course, as there are gargantuan municipal (New York City Housing Authority – although their front door is on 49th ave.) warehouses, truck yards, and active masonry mills operating all along the pocket street of 50th avenue. Enclosed on one side by 27th street, which follows the course of the nearby Dutch Kills, 50th is also abruptly severed by first the rear entrance, trackbeds, and associated workhouses of the Long Island City station of the 800 pound gorilla, then by the highway complex that feeds traffic to Manhattan via the Midtown Tunnel. It resumes its course to the river near 11th place, but is aborted in its aim by the Gantry Plaza Queenswest development at Center Blvd.
stitch panorama, looking southwest- photo by Mitch Waxman
The train station was destroyed a few times, especially in 1892, when a conflagration broke out at its coal dock on nearby Newtown Creek. The LIRR lost the dock itself and its stored fuel, part of the coal chute, and the locomotive repair shop. Spontaneous combustion in a cotton storage shed was blamed. Another fire in 1902 (there were lots of huge fires around the area in this time period, oddly enough) consumed the rebuilt station and an adjacent office building. It was rebuilt in 1903, electrified in 1910, and has been completely ignored since. It is the end of the (main) line.
A block to the south is Borden Avenue, to the north is 49th avenue.
east – photo by Mitch Waxman
The spire of St. Raphael’s on Greenpoint Avenue, sentinel church to Old Calvary– can be glimpsed through the steel. That is also where the highway returns to earth before beginning the ascent to the Kosciuszko Bridge spanning the Newtown Creek. That’s 27th street where the fences are. Normally, one can reach Borden Avenue and cross the Dutch Kills via this garbage strewn lane, but the Borden Avenue Bridge is still undergoing emergency repairs.
50th and 27th- photo by Mitch Waxman
I find strange things down here, in this place where cobblestones have never known asphalt. Until just a few months ago, a group of men lived in a broken down car on this corner. They had modern conveniences, electrical power generously supplied by serpentine orange extension cords that ran up and into the bushes by the railroad tracks. I observed them over a couple of years, and then found their car burnt, them missing, and this bird in their place. After a month, even the car was gone.
west – photo by Mitch Waxman
The empty corridor (or as I’ve called it in the past- Down under the LIE- DULIE) makes a sound. A constant droning pitch produced by approximately 84,000 quartets of automobile tires a day drawing across the steel and cement at controlled speeds. The sound of racing engines create doppler waves as their sounds ripple against the warehouse buildings. You are surrounded by this sound, enveloped in its chordal structure. All of New York’s bridges and elevated arteries have a distinctive sound, I have noticed. I have failed in my attempts to record these sounds due to wind, street noise, and inappropriate or amateurish equipment.
The folks who are into this sort of sonic thing are onto some revolutionary ideas, human perception wise. Check out these Hearing Perspective kids, and then stop off at wikipedia to learn the deep secrets of harmonic resonances and the hidden existence of Tuned Mass Dampers, and of the only man who ever truly mastered their manipulation mechanically- Nikola Tesla.
Dutch Kills – photo by Mitch Waxman
The elevated LIE spans over the Dutch Kills on its heading eastward, and the structure continues along Borden Avenue until it passes under Greenpoint avenue and returns to grade. As I mentioned earlier, its primary function is carrying city vehicles from the tunnel out to the Long Island highway system.
from nycroads.com, which has a must read post on the building of the tunnel and the politics surrounding it
No sooner had Moses learned that Mayor LaGuardia was considering establishing an authority to build a $58,000,000 Queens-Midtown Tunnel that he began hinting, none too subtly, that he would like to be on it, if not in charge of it.
In 1936, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia created the New York City Tunnel Authority to construct a twin-tube tunnel that had been proposed six years earlier between the East Side of Manhattan and Long Island City, Queens. The East River Tunnel, along with the Hudson River (Lincoln) Tunnel then under construction, was to form a continuous route from Long Island to New Jersey.
Citing the deep divisions between New York City Arterial Coordinator Robert Moses and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who approved the $58 million Public Works Administration loan for the tunnel), LaGuardia specifically left Moses out of the Tunnel Authority by stating in legislation that “an unsalaried state official shall not be eligible” for appointment. LaGuardia sought engineers outside of Moses’ Triborough Bridge Authority, most notably famed tunnel engineer Ole Singstad, to construct the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Meanwhile, Moses tried to influence upstate politicians to kill the Authority, but was unsuccessful when Governor Herbert Lehman sided with LaGuardia.
Borden avenue- photo by Mitch Waxman
Technically, this is the Queens Midtown Expressway, but this is a subdivision of the larger expressway.
The Newtown Pentacle 