Archive for December 2009
Gloomy Mansions
NY Harbor – photo by Mitch Waxman
A recent trip to the cyclopean waterfront of the Port of Newark was marred and occluded by a pervasive blanket of precipitant fog. Suffering from the cold wind and occasional bursts of rain, all around me a ghost city dithered into atmospheric perspectives. Ghosts have been everywhere, during our metropolitan hour of the wolf, in the first decade of the 21st century- here in New York City- where the Terror Wars started.
As the ship carrying the Working Harbor Committee party to its destination left the East River and entered the Upper Harbor approaching Staten Island, one ghost in particular came to mind. A spirit of spectral power is invoked and controlled by knowledge of its true name, according to the hermetic traditions, and the true name of god itself offers the key to mastery of the universe.
Names have power, and in the case of this ghost, the name is Willowbrook.
from wikipedia
The Harbor reached its peak activity in March 1943, during World War II, with 543 ships at anchor, awaiting assignment to convoy or berthing (with as many as 425 seagoing vessel already at one of the 750 piers or docks). 1100 warehouses with nearly 1.5 square miles (3.9 km2) of enclosed space served freight along with 575 tugboats and 39 active shipyards (perhaps most importantly New York Naval Shipyard founded 1801). With a staggering inventory of heavy equipment, this made New York Harbor the busiest in the world.
Verrazano Narrows Bridge – photo by Mitch Waxman
A well known film director, whose cinematic subject matter suggests familiarity with Theosophy and other bizarre occult concepts, once opined “that haunted houses are like stone tape decks playing back an endless loop of the suffering and negativity recorded within them”. If one considers such fancies as true, Willowbrook might be considered as a recording studio.
In 1942, a residential hospital facility’s construction was completed on Staten Island. It was commandeered by the Army to act as a hospital for wounded combatants from WW2. In 1947, New York State’s Dept. of Mental Hygiene took over the complex and renamed it the Willowbrook State School. The intended population of the facility was to be the “mentally retarded” (an archaic term from before the advent of modern NewSpeak which describes this group as “Developmentally Disabled“).
from wikipedia
The natural depth of New York Harbor is about 17 feet (5 m), but it has been deepened over the years, to about 24 feet (7 m) controlling depth in 1880. By 1891 the Main Ship Channel was minimally 30 feet (9 m). In 1914 Ambrose Channel became the main entrance to the Harbor, at 40 feet (12 m) deep and 2,000 feet (600 m) wide. During World War II the main channel was dredged to 45 feet (14 m) depth to accommodate larger ships up to Panamax size. Currently the Corps of Engineers is contracting out deepening to 50 feet (15 m), to accommodate Post-Panamax container vessels, which can pass through the Suez Canal. This has been a source of environmental concern along channels connecting the container facilities in Port Newark to the Atlantic. PCBs and other pollutants lay in a blanket just underneath the soil.
In June 2009, the Bloomberg administration announced plans for 200,000 cubic yards of dredged PCBs to be “cleaned” and stored en masse at the site of the former Yankee Stadium, as well as at the Brooklyn Bridge Park. In many areas the sandy bottom has been excavated down to rock and now requires blasting. Dredging equipment then picks up the rock and disposes of it. At one point in 2005 there were 70 pieces of dredging equipment in the harbor working to deepen the harbor, the largest fleet of dredging equipment anywhere in the world. The work occasionally causes noise and vibration that can be felt by residents on Staten Island. Excavators alert residents when blasting is underway.
Drydocks, Kill Van Kull – photo by Mitch Waxman
Willowbrook was notoriously overcrowded, performed experimental and grossly unethical scientific explorations, and because of it- the Federal “Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980” was instituted to guarantee the civil rights of the vulnerable souls housed in these “snakepits”. Geraldo Rivera, when he used to be a reporter, brought the case to national prominence. Long time New Yorkers still shudder at just the mention of the word.
But, there’s another Willowbrook story- another ghost.
from wikipedia
Geologically, Staten Island was formed in the wake of the last ice age. In the late Pleistocene between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, the ice sheet that covered northeastern North America reached as far south as present day New York City, to a depth of approximately the same height as the Empire State Building. At one point, during its maximum reach, the ice sheet precisely ended at the center of present day Staten Island, forming a terminal moraine on the existing diabase sill. The central moraine of the island is sometimes called the Serpentine ridge because it contains large amounts of serpentine group minerals.
At the retreat of the ice sheet, Staten Island was connected by land to Long Island because The Narrows had not yet formed. Geologists’ reckonings of the course of the Hudson River have placed it alternatively through the present course of the Raritan River, south of the island, or through present-day Flushing Bay and Jamaica Bay.
As in much of North America, human habitation appeared in the island fairly rapidly after the retreat of the ice sheet. Archaeologists have recovered tool evidence of Clovis culture activity dating from approximately 14,000 years ago. The island was probably abandoned later, possibly because of the extinction of large mammals on the island. Evidence of the first permanent American Indian settlements and agriculture are thought to date from about 5,000 years ago (Jackson, 1995), although early archaic habitation evidence has been found in multiple locations on the island (Ritchie 1963).
Salt Barge, Kill Van Kull – photo by Mitch Waxman
A homeless man who called himself Andre Rand, a one time employee of Willowbrook, set up a squatters residence for himself in the tunnels below and on the grounds of the abandoned hospital (which was finally closed in 1987, although parts of its grounds are used by CUNY in modernity).
Andre Rand at his arrest, from slantmagazine.com
Mr. Rand was convicted for the death of a 12 year old girl who was went missing on Staten Island in 1987. He has since become implicated in a string of area child disappearances stretching back to the 1960’s and refers to himself as “the Ted Bundy of child killers”. Rand is profiled in a recent film I’m anxious to watch, called “Cropsey“.
from wikipedia
The boroughs of New York City straddle the border between two geologic provinces of eastern North America. Brooklyn and Queens, located on Long Island, are part of the eastern coastal plain. Long Island is a massive moraine which formed at the southern fringe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last Ice Age. The Bronx and Manhattan lie on the eastern edge of the Newark Basin, a block of the Earth’s crust which sank downward during the disintegration of the supercontinent Pangaea during the Triassic period. The Palisades Sill on the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River exposes ancient, once-molten rock that filled the basin. Tough metamorphic rocks underlie much of Manhattan, providing solid support for its many skyscrapers.
Salt Barge, Kill Van Kull – photo by Mitch Waxman
I find it disturbing, that a serial killer was loose on Staten Island and I had no idea about it. Even more unsettling, from the “urban explorer point” of view, is that Rand had set up camp in exactly the sort of place that the intrepid photographer is looking for when searching for “locations”. I’ve often mentioned that I don’t cross fences, admonished those who do trespass (while admiring their work), and offered advice on the cultural temperatures and urban hazards encountered when entering certain extant locales. Part of the reason for doing this is that you never know who you’re going to meet back there, alone and cut off from help.
There are weird things that happen, in the City of Greater New York.
a recent clipping from a wire service, for instance, makes me wonder- and more than wonder…
3 Bags Containing Body Parts Are Found in Brooklyn. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS- Published: August 30, 2009- The police said three plastic bags containing the skeletal remains of various body parts were found in Brooklyn. The bags, two of which enclosed suitcases containing the remains, were found Sunday on a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The medical examiner was working to identify the parts, as well as the sex, race and cause of death. There have been no arrests.
from sedona.biz
According to the National Research Council, we Americans dump between 8 million to 12 million tons of salt on our roads per year. Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York report the highest level of salt use, with New York weighing in at 500,000 tons per year. The New York State Department of Transportation requires a road-salt application rate of 225 pounds per lane-mile for light snow and 270 pounds per lane-mile for each application during a heavy snow storm.
When you consider that there are approximately 6,000 miles of paved roadways near New York watersheds, you begin to see how all that road salt adds up. Some roads may get up to 300 tons of road salt per lane-mile each year. Recently, many scientists have begun to study the effects of so much road salt on ecosystems, water quality, public health and road quality. Here are a few things you should know before your break out that sodium chloride, the most commonly used de-icer.
A Shortening of Days
5 days after NYC Election Day, Long Island City – photo by Mitch Waxman
The various potions that my Doctors orders procure from the Apothecary are a double edged sword.
On the one hand- I am proofed against the excesses of my basal nature and underlying health issues, on the other- I am rendered virtually helpless by plunging temperatures. Blood drains from my extremities at the slightest hint of cold, as the aforementioned drugs thin my blood from its natural Port Wine consistency down to a nearly clear Sherry. Induced hemophilia is also a side effect of these potions, and I must avoid sharp edges, or I might pop the balloon of my skinvelope. Normal clotting is suppressed by these medications, and a relatively minor injury could cause me to “bleed out”. I’m all ‘effed up.
As you read this whining confessional screed, the naked steel of winter has been unsheathed at last, here in the Newtown Pentacle.
Northern Blvd., Queens- photo by Mitch Waxman
The dramatic and life threatening health issues that I experienced 1,086 days ago resulted in an interesting psychological symptom. Since then, I tend to perceive time in terms of days, not years.
For instance, I am 15,451 days old, started this blog 188 days ago, and it is 13 days till christmas. I find this solar perspective an interesting vantage on the earth, although such compulsive fragmentation of time into manageable units surely signals some malign psychiatric process at work. This is a weird time of year for me, lords and ladies of newtown, harshly shadowed with reflections of- what life used to be.
Working Harbor September Sunset tour 5
Today’s fun is a chunk of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, with photos I shot at the Working Harbor Committee September 15th Sunset tour. For the whole story, at wikisource.org– click here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in language both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley’s quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet—this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the mass lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius’ Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta’s De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere’s Traite des Chiffres, Falconer’s Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys’ and Thicknesse’s eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and Kluber’s script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in English.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and Dr Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley’s annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written,he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins’s collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won’t. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can’t break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man’s existence that he had uncovered.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday—the next day—he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary and promising an explanation in due course of time. That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, ‘But what, in God’s name, can we do?’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.
‘Stop them, stop theml’ he would shout. ‘Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something—it’s a blind business, but I know how to make the powder… It hasn’t been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate…’
Back amongst the living
Wasn’t it nice of this movie production (an Angelina Jolie flick no less) to be setting up for a shoot at the end of the Queenboro Centennial Parade? – photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Pentacle Cemetery Month went a little long, by about an extra month and a half, sorry. We’ll be out and amongst the living city for a awhile. I promise.
Although I’ve got a few Calvary Cemetery posts “in my pocket”, I’m going to hold off the graveyard stuff for a bit, and need to go do some shooting and research at Mount Olivet anyway.
Here’s a few interesting links, including a “things to do” happening in the Subway.
- A page on Review Avenue’s Pennybridge Station came to my attentions- although I seem to be the last person to have found this site:
Check out Arthur John Huenke’s Flushing Railroad Company and Penny Bridge Station. - Occult Crime: A law enforcement Primer, from the State of California
- A special event will be happening down in the Subway on the V line in December, Vintage Cars. Click here for more.
- Check out this reportage of the Tammany Club carving up Queens into a recognizably modern shape in a 1901 NYTimes.com article
- Although this was a “summer thing”, I still bust a gut when I see this.
Mt Zion 6- Crystal Oblivion
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Awakening from the dead faint which had ended my ruminations on those oppressions suffered by both Jew and Roma in a war torn exemplar of peasant ignorance and malign oligarchy which is the European Peninsula, your humble narrator noticed the gloaming of late afternoon settling upon the centenarian graveyard and realized that one way or another- an escape must be hazarded from the oblivion of Mount Zion cemetery if I ever desired to return to the yellow brick lanes of Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The curious singsong chant of those odd children had stopped, and echoing along the tombstones was the sound of wholesome and cheerful laughing. From my vantage, I could discern that the first group of children were fleeing from a second, whose colorful clothing and raven hair marked them as the picturesque crowd I had spotted earlier on 53rd avenue. The flabby jowled, unblinking, scaly group of youths which had been tormenting me- and whose apparent leader was a girl carrying a curiously polydactyl cat whose aspect “I did not like”- were running off in the direction of that stygian cataract called the Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Regaining my composure, I realized that I had found the highest spot in Zion, and watched as the group of dark haired and festively adorned children jeered the fleeing “others”. I turned for a moment, looking south toward Brooklyn, along the gates of a Sanitation Dept. Garbage truck depot. This is a lonely spot, tragic and shunned.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Populated by graves of children, often stillborn, this is the highest point of elevation in Mt. Zion by my estimation. I resolved to make my way for the gates, and felt an eerie tiredness take over me. Cemeteries are uncomfortable places not because of the omnipresent reminders of mortality, but because they remind us that anonymity is the ultimate fate of nearly all of us.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All they were, and had done, and built- the ultimate meaning of themselves- led to centuried silence and the anonymity of the tomb. I’ve been asking myself, lately, why I’ve been so compelled to spend my time with them, instead of amongst the living. A lot of wise old jewish grandmothers are buried here, and my own would say that this recent pursuit is “no good for you, go see a movie instead”.
She also told me, when I told her I intended to follow a career in visual arts, that “all I wanted was to be a bum in the village with a needle in my arm”.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mission Statements – 1 – Breaking character
One of my quasi mystical opinions is that by telling a story, transmitting the lore of civilization from one generation to another, you keep the subject of the story alive- in a sense. We know the story of Beowulf, and Christ, and Churchill. In my ham handed and alliterative patois of pop cultural imagery and historical allusion, this notion of “telling the hero’s story” (with the “hero” being the working class) is part of my motivation behind these explorations. In a sense, I fancy myself as C-3PO telling the story of Luke and Leia to the Ewoks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mission Statements – 2 – Horns and Dilemmas
A vast and shining monument to future archaeology is what I see the Cemetery Belt of western Queens and North Brooklyn as, awaiting the end of living memory and improved imaging technology. Vast dilemmas of conscience often plague me as I make the “selects” from the hundreds of shots I’ll gather at just one of the many locations explored at the Newtown Pentacle. That’s an identifiable face, or corporate trademark, or the ridiculous laws which require the owner of a skyscraper to approve the publication of an image of their structure. The graveyard stuff is touchy, and I attempt to only show graves of those who died well out of “living memory”, which is a flexible topic for me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mission Statements – 3 – Contradictions and Logic
Problematic, because it’s self defined, my “living memory” concept is roughly this- if the stone is older than the second world war- I consider it fair game and part of the public record. Saying that, if you’ve seen a gravestone of a relative in one of my shots that you’d really rather not have public, contact me and it’s pulled (I’m not a dick)- just know that the shot was chosen for either its odd qualities or historical significance (like the O’Brien monument in Old Calvary), or because it’s a beautiful piece of sculpture that was chosen to illustrate the esthetic or political milieu of an era I’m trying to describe. Any editorial implications of the accompanying quoted references (from abc.com, in italics) or “humble narrator” copy should be discarded as the product of a sick, cowardly, and weary man who is “all ‘effed up”. No one will visit my grave, Lords and Ladies of Newtown, except to gloat and defecate.
I also never trespass, enter onto Railroad properties uninvited, or use transportation of any kind other than my feet when I’m out on one of my little missions. Kissing the right posterior and being “nice” offers tremendous access to these places, “legally”, and brings insight and opportunity. Why make trouble?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back to the post:
When I passed out of the ancient cemetery, through the western section’s gates, I saw that group of gaily dressed children who had chased off those menacingly mutant urchins that had caused me to faint three times as I hid in the shadows of this garden of obelisks.
One of the oddest moments of the day occurred when a waste hauler’s truck sped down Maurice Avenue at top speed, occluding my view of them for a few seconds, during which they disappeared. Puzzled, I scuttled back to the waiting arms of Astoria, and the entire way I thought I heard the creaking agony of wooden carriage wheels.
The Newtown Pentacle 