Archive for November 2009
Working Harbor September Sunset tour 3
Today’s fun is a chunk of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, with photos I shot at the Working Harbor Committee September 15th Sunset tour. For the whole story, at wikisource.org– click here.
All text, of course, is by Lovecraft-
– photo by Mitch Waxman
…I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great lintel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced.
Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Tales of Calvary 5- Shade and Stillness
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the past, the desolating loneliness and isolation which define my internal dialogue have been described to you simply – I’m all ‘effed up.
Shunned by those considered normal, my human– all too human- nature forces visceral desires for companionship. Lacking fellowship amongst the the living, one instinctively reaches out for those things which are no longer- or have never been- alive. That odd man in the filthy black raincoat that you might glimpse as you drive past the graveyard, scuttling along taking pictures of sewers and odd boxes in the Cemetery Belt- might very well be your humble narrator.
I was at Calvary Cemetery, intent on investigating the puzzling knots I had observed, beneath a hilltop tree- fed by some morbid nutrition, when I came across the Sweeney monument.
The Association for Gravestone Studies makes available this pdf file of a 19th century monumental bronze catalog, incidentally, as well as this discussion of “White Bronze“.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Unlike the celebrated O’Brien clan, whose final destination is found closer to the apex of Calvary’s hills, the Sweeneys are shadowed by time. Social standing and class status drove the generations buried up here to seek a favorable and expensive bit of real estate, away from the common rabble and poor being laid into marshy trenches at the shallow of the hill in their thousands, and to lie for eternity with “their own kind”.
The princes of the City, and their courts, lie in Calvary Cemetery– not far from worm scarred timbers whose titan bulk restricts an elixir of extinction known as the fabled Newtown Creek from mingling with the blessed soils of Calvary. Unguessable springs of subterrene putrefaction percolating with horrors beyond the grave’s holding flow still beneath the streets of Newtown- vestigial streams and waterways that are imprisoned in masonry and brick tunnels. Directly mixing, in hideous congress, the liquefied effluvia of the long dead found in the hydrologic column of Calvary with the exotic chemistries of Newtown Creek? Who can guess would result?
Whoever the Sweeneys were, their family plot is located in a fairly exclusive area of the 19th century’s ex-population, and pretty close to the top of a hill. What’s odd here, and remarkable, is the enigmatic knots of this token affixed to the Sweeney monument- a trinket which had obviously weathered more than one change of season.
Unknowable implications are suggested by the urgency of this arcane reference found in the New York State Cemetery Law.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Symbolic gifts to the dead and the placement of totemic representations at graves are expected behaviors, when confronted with the brutal truth of mortality, from individuals who experience the death of a family or peer group member. Every cemetery in the area, the sheer acreage of which -in this case- can be observed from space, has posted regulations on appropriate and allowed markers and monuments. Certain obtuse expressions of grief are disallowed due to the necessary maintenance and landscaping of the grounds, and good taste is enforced.
Another odd set of provisions is found in the Penal Law section of the aforementioned codification of New York’s cemeteries.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Noticing that that the oddly complex knotting of the cord implied commonality with the nearby red and blue knotted cords, I decided to have a closer look. There was a second color of cordage in the knots, a dirty and weathered yellow which was only present in one spot. The pendulum which the arrangement supported was either cheap electroplated metal or some sort of ruggose plastic. It was a sort of cartouche, an amulet shaped in a manner commonly recognized as a heart, suspended by a twisted tendon of oddly knotted string.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Suspicious that this might be something other than innocent, and knowing the predilection of certain groups for the usage of bodily liquids in their rites, your humble narrator used a trusty all in one Leatherman brand tool to examine it further. It is important, when walking in the hallowed grounds of Calvary, to try not to touch anything lest something touch you back. Things found there, if they can catch the smell of you, might follow you home and demand to be fed.
Of course, I mean the hundreds of feral cats which stalk Calvary’s hills, and it is best that they stay here where it is always safe for them. Neighborhood gossips- their odd comment phrased with a raised eyebrow and knowing squint- hoarsely whisper the opine: In Calvary Cemetery, no man may kill a cat…
Also from New York State, a manual for the new treasurer, a business plan and model to follow for the mortuary industry’s promise of “Perpetual Care”.
misty water colored memories… but with blood
Long Island City, mouth of Newtown Creek, Greenpoint stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
Note- I’ve got a turmoil in me right now.
Your humble narrator is pissed off, and this ape is standing at the edge of his personal forest, hurling invective at an unfamiliar thing hanging in the sky called Moon. Rambling ahead, with a few reminisces of New York in “the good old days”.
The disturbing incongruity of modern skyscrapers in the Newtown Pentacle’s panoramic skies, whether commercial spire or residential tower, is horrifying to the residents of victorian relicts such as Long Island City and Greenpoint. All along the rotting infrastructure of the malodorous Newtown Creek, nearly the geographic center of the City of Greater New York, the arrival of a pregnant moment is apparent.
“A river of federal money will wash out the Newtown Creek, and all the poisons in the mud will be hatched out, or so say the G-Men” is my take on the EPA superfund listing of the Creek for now.
I still haven’t parsed everything, that was said in the November 5, 2009 Newtown Creek Alliance meeting at St. Cecilia’s. I made an audio recording of the presentation, and will be listening to it again. Its just that the EPA… the feds… gaining absolute control over a 4 long by half mile wide chunk of New York City for as long as 50 years… that’s 12.5 presidential administrations. 12.5 administrations ago was FDR’s first term.
Speaking of FDR, did you know that his second term Vice President- Henry A. Wallace (responsible for the very successful transformation of dustbowl era agri-businesses from rural homestead into their somewhat modern form) was a well known and public occultist?
Looking east from Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant catwalk stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
The New York that my father knew, the one built up in the late 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, is the one that began crumbling in the 70’s and came crashing down during the 1980’s. Contrary to what you may have read, the Reagan years were not a very nice time, and a soggy malaise hung over both the great city and the nation that exists because of it. Disillusioned by the failures of utopian city planners and those shambolic ideologies which were popularized by academic and journalist alike, the population of New York turned on each other in those days.
Here’s a few of my “new york stories”- I was there, I saw them.
Looking southwest from Queensboro Bridge stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
A tragedy of Russian scale and tone, “good old days” New York saw violent encounters between strangers became commonplace in a city always on the edge. Back then (late 80’s, early 90’s)- Williamsburg was a blasted out brick lot, blighted, and an island of extreme poverty.
West from Pulaski Bridge facing Manhattan, stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
Naked hookers plied their trade in Williamsburg on Bedford and Grand, while just beyond- a Motorcycle Club’s shanty was lit by oil drums filled with castaway lumber and litter. The Lower East Side (then known as Alphabet city) was where you spent your time, then, or way uptown above 96th street on the west side- and both neighborhoods had borderlines and “DMZ” areas.
The City belonged to the rats, and you either fought them or ran away. Cowardice was considered an intelligent option back then, just run away- don’t try to fight “them”.
East on Newtown Creek, Kosciuszko Bridge stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
Once, I saw a businessman 2 blocks north of Grand Central Station on Park Avenue, wearing an expensive vested suit which was the fashion at the time. He walked between two cars, dropped his suit pants, and defecated in the street. You used to pee wherever you wanted to, as well, “back in the day”.
You could smoke tobacco, in designated areas, within New York City hospital wards. There was a magical danish called the Bearclaw, which has since gone extinct in New York City, best quaffed with bitter black coffee. The last Bearclaw I had was in the “New York New York” casino in Las Vegas.
Skillman Avenue, Sunnyside Railyard fence line – photo by Mitch Waxman
Once, I saw a homeless guy junkie- during the early AIDS years- get hit by a cab. His head shot forward toward the asphalt in a parabolic arc with his knees acting as a fulcrum, shattering his face and killing him. This happened on 21st street and 3rd, down the block from the Police Academy. They left him there for 2-3 hours waiting for the morgue to show up because nobody wanted to get AIDS blood on themselves. The bulls set up traffic cones around him.
Sunnyside, Barnett Avenue looking west stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
That New York City- the one that was a national disaster long before it became the scene of a national disaster, a lamentable metropolis of blood, hate, and too much damn noise- is being built over and carted away. But this is the way of things, here.
Those farms and mills obliterated by rapacious rail barons and their quest to build Sunnyside Yards, do you know who the Payntars were, or their story?
Queensbridge Park, looking west toward Manhattan stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
The mansions of Ravenswood, gothic palaces built for the ultra rich who made their fortunes on Newtown Creek and in Long Island City, were casually eradicated to make way for mill and dock, and later bridge and housing project. Do you know the story of the Terracotta House?
From George Washington Bridge looking south on upper Manhattan and New Jersey stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
Once, back in ’93, on 99th and Broadway- some guy was talking on a pay phone in the middle of the night, during an ice storm. You know the kind- the sort of weather that coats every surface in a half inch of clear, slick ice. Urban misery, but quite beautiful.
Astoria 31st Avenue stormy sky stitched panorama- photo by Mitch Waxman
Unfortunately for this fellow on the phone, someone shot him a few times and he must have slumped forward with the phone in his hand. I walked by on my way to the 2 train the next morning and the wind had pushed him backwards, his frozen hand around the receiver and his corpse was swaying stiffly in the february wind. There were bloodcicles.
Long Island City, Hunters Point, mouth of Newtown Creek, Greenpoint stitched panorama – photo by Mitch Waxman
For more on this lost and forgotten civilization, buy an early Ramones album and play it very loud.
Why I love NYC Marathon day
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I make it a point of walking the borderlines between contestant and spectator when the NYC Marathon comes hurtling through Long Island City. The big show always delivers easy photos of runners and acolyte crowd, but for me, the NYC Marathon offers something else. An untrammeled and traffic free opportunity to explore Queens Plaza without the suspicious attentions of the NYPD focusing upon me as a potential anarchist or possible adherent to some fifth columnist group’s philosophies.
for 2008 marathon coverage- and discussion of the physical culture movement, click here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Normally impossible angles and vantage points- forbidden by either those security regulations so rigorously enforced by the NYPD or that unyielding flow of traffic entering Queens from Manhattan via the Queensboro Bridge- are available during the Marathon due to the wholesale diversion of traffic away from the event.
for 2009 ING NYC marathon coverage, click here. If you’re looking for photos of the runners as they hurtled through LIC, click here for the entire set of photos at flickr.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Incongruously empty of their reason for existence, the utilitarian patience of Queens Plaza’s cement clad steel roadways is tried only by the sound of thousands of runners, a cheering crowd, and a complex of actively running elevated subway tracks. The comparative silence offered to your harried narrator during such moments is nepenthe.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve been lucky in the last few months. The occasion of the Queensboro Bridge Centennial, with its associated parade and historical community events, allowed unprecedented access to the structure- associated onramps– and approaches, and the rich historical vistas normally rendered unreachable by the dangers of oncoming and uncountable waves of vehicular traffic.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Work has already begun on the renovation of Queens Plaza into a form more to the liking of the oligarch masters of New York, hidden in their Manhattan towers, but what fate will befall the past?
Look to ancient Millstones for prognostications about the future, and commentary on the regard shown the past by those self same urban masters. Forgotten-NY‘s Kevin Walsh, in the syndication feed of his Huffington Post column, has written a great history of the Queens Plaza Millstones- click here.
Queenscrap has been all over the controversy. So has the NY Daily News. Your humble narrator was allowed to video a community meeting on the subject, and it can be viewed here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Accompanying the municipal re-rendering of the Plaza will be the construction of multiple tower buildings- condominium apartments and hotel complexes, as well as the opening of a Long Island Railroad and MTA Subway crossover station at Skillman Avenue. Progress has been girdled by the recent financial crisis, but this is hardly the first cycle of boom and hopeless bust that Queens Plaza has weathered.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wonder what it might look like in another 100 years, when the archaic elevated subway tracks are rusted away and replaced, in a time when vehicular traffic as we know it will be considered quaint. Wonder if you’ll still be able to see the sky in Long Island City in just 10 years, and whether or not America’s great cities will be anything other than amusement parks and tourist attractions in 50.
Flushing Creek 3
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Despite the inclement weather we encountered, and my inherent vulnerability to temperature extremes, the upper deck of the watercraft was the ideal spot for me as its experienced Captain negotiated a course along Flushing Creek. Weather- especially the drenching rain and gray sky variety- had dogged my ambitions throughout summer and fall, and seemed to pop up whenever I found myself on or near a boat. Frustrating occlusions of mist obscure and darken the landscape, challenging exposure and focus.
from nytimes.com
FLUSHING, L.I., Feb. 12 — While the Highly Commissioners of Newtown and Flushing were holding a joint meeting yesterday afternoon to investigate the condition of Strong’s Bridge, which spans Flushing Creek, and which connects the southerly portion of this village with the town of Newtown, the bridge suddenly collapsed, making further inquiry unnecessary.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All along Flushing Creek, at what seemed to be every turn and twist, heavy industries were at work. This barge and crane, I believe, are part of an asphalt operation. Other large industrial mills observed along the shoreline were clearly concrete and cement factories, but like the auto shops at Willets Point, their days are numbered down here.
from nytimes.com
With work begun on thirty dwellings, to cost from $5,000 to $8,000 each, with the starting of a factory for the manufacture of concrete building material, with the sale of twenty-nine acres of high-class land for development, and with work started upon the reclaiming between 500 and 600 acres of meadow land — all in the vicinity of Flushing — one of the most important seasons in the history of that locality has opened.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Every history blog alludes to Gatsby when mentioning Corona or Flushing- here’s the much discussed couplet:
from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby”
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Odd stories about Flushing Creek are bandied about in the neighborhood, and in olden times, it was absolutely magnetic for suicides.
from ufoquery.com
More recently, a number of reports came in about white and green lights in a triangular formation seen moving back and forth over Flushing Meadows Park during July 2-5, 2008. Some of the witnesses said that the lights suddenly appeared, disappeared and reappeared again between 10pm and 3am on those dates. However, strange lights are not the only bizarre phenomena associated with UFOs that has occurred in the park.
In 1968, the Flushing Meadows Zoo opened in Flushing Meadows Park on the grounds of the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. Although small in scale, the zoo had a number of exhibits and plenty of animals including sea lions, black bears, sheep, bison, mountain lions, coyotes, bald eagles, birds and wolves. Since its opening, the Zoo has been associated with several disturbing UFO events. The first may have occurred in 1977.
After several nights of UFO sightings above the park, wolves managed to escape from the zoo on November 30, 1977. Official reports said that twelve wolves clawed their way through a chain link fence surrounding their pen and killed several other animals until they were recaptured by parks department personnel and police. However, a caretaker working there at the time said that while making his rounds he found several animals missing, not just the wolves, and others dead. The dead animals did not look like they had been killed by predators. He also said that none of the animal pens or enclosures had been unlocked, damaged or tampered with.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
from forgotten-ny.com
In 1907, Michael Degnon, builder of the Williamsburgh Bridge, the Cape Cod Canal, part of the IRT subway and the Steinway Tunnels, and owner of the Degnon Terminal in Sunnyside, began buying up every tract of salt meadow along Flushing Creek. He thought that he would be able to build a port facing Flushing Bay, and that the federal government would pay for his plan to dig out the Creek from the Bay down to its headwaters at Kew Gardens to make it passable for large ships. He began buying ashes and refuse and dumping these onto the salt meadows to lay a foundation. Unfortunately all this did for Corona was to make the town stink like garbage. When residents looked east, all they saw were ugly gray mounds on the horizon.
The Newtown Pentacle 