Archive for February 2010
Crows of Queens
Red Crow van spotted – photo by Mitch Waxman
Returning from a trip to Third Calvary Cemetery the other day (searching for Gilman) to my Astoria, I came across this red van with a disturbingly heterogeneous collection of mattresses affixed to it. This red van is a familiar sight around the neighborhood, personal conveyance of a Crow. For clarity and codification lords and ladies, this gentleman shall be referred to as “Red Crow”, here at your Newtown Pentacle.
Red Crow appears – photo by Mitch Waxman
Crows is a nickname given to the refuse and metal collectors who harvest valuable metals from everyday garbage, as assigned to them here in the old village of Astoria. Some are individuals, others are multi man operations, and a variety of vehicles are purposed to the task. If its not nailed down, and copper-steel-iron or gold can be harvested, a Crow will fly in and scoop it up. Furniture and bicycles are highly prized.
Red Crow goes back for more – photo by Mitch Waxman
Usually an hour or two ahead of the Sanitation trucks, the Crows may be observed on DSNY “bulk pickup days”, cruising the streets with the wary aspect of a Police Detective hunting a criminal. Most are specialists, collecting a specific kind of refuse. Almost all of them are metal collectors, no doubt selling the found materials by the pound down at the Newtown Creek.
This is a surmise, incidentally, filling in the dots as it were- as I cannot prove what I’m asserting- i.e. I can’t show you a photo of some lump of metal in Astoria, grabbed by a Crow, and then the same lump transacted for in Greenpoint. I have observed the beginning (this post) and the product of such scavenging at metal dealers in Brooklyn, however.
Red Crow reappears – photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the rules of dumpster diving in the City of Greater New York dictates that mattresses are not a desirable item and are in fact avoided like lepers. If its on the street, there’s either an infestation or somebody died on it, and Bedbugs can jump like Fleas. Essentially valueless as a manufactured good, the general custom is for the merchant that sold and delivered your bedding is to remove and dispose of the old mattress- often at no cost. Nobody really wants a used mattress. What, then, would motivate this incongruously well dressed Crow into such an odd pursuit?
Red Crow hitches – photo by Mitch Waxman
Steel springs, the coil structure within the bedding, are highly prized items for recycling. The reason that its not economical for a commercial enterprise to do so is the cost of removing the deeply embedded metal from its surrounding padding and removal of the metals using electromagnetics. Mattress merchants factor the cost of this process into every new bed sold, by statute in some places.
Red Crow adjusts – photo by Mitch Waxman
Not conforming to OSHA or environmental guidelines, the Crows have a developed a far simpler system to separate the wheat from the chaff. They call it fire.
Red Crow ties – photo by Mitch Waxman
Somewhere, whether it be in the backyard of an isolated house in Flushing or an empty lot along the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint or East Williamsburg, the steel springs will be freed and the charred padding discarded. Elsewhere, plastic insulation will be melted off copper wire and tires will be melted open to reveal their internal steel belting. The Crows will clean up after themselves and no one will be the wiser for the extra tax free bucks that they pick up off the streets.
Red Crow done – photo by Mitch Waxman
This is recycling, manifest, incidentally. A crude layman version of it, but the way that things actually work, one of those “Green Jobs of the Future” the politicians keep going on about.
Red Crow drivers side door doesn’t want to open, uses passenger door – photo by Mitch Waxman
I bring this Crow to your attention simply because the history of our times will be culled from sources that promote an oligarchal viewpoint, and the story that will be told is that of the princes and potentates who stare down at the world from skyscraper windows. Phenomena like these “Crows of Queens” will escape the notice and mention of the future, leaving behind virtually no documentation that they ever existed, like the omnipresent “shmata” men of Manhattan’s Lower East Side a mere 100 years ago.
Red Crow resumes hunt – photo by Mitch Waxman
Revisionist by nature, the urge to focus a historical lens on the machinations of the rich and powerful is strong, and desire to know and emulate the successful is a strong desire. The story of the bosses is not all that’s going on these days.
You have to appreciate this fellow, he looks mid-50’s to me, and here he is in 25 degree weather scavenging the streets and struggling to tie down his load. The rest of us just walked by and saw a pile of junk, he saw opportunity, and was willing to go that extra step and do the job. Know what I see, when I look at these Crows of Queens?
Red Crow, notice PBA stickers and window washer duct tape repair – photo by Mitch Waxman
I see that which made America great, and will do so again.
A walk around Hallet’s Cove
Feel like taking a walk? Bring your camera, and ID…
the grill on the dome light says “the lordship”- photo by Mitch Waxman
Hallet’s Cove is the area surrounding the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Garden at the border of Astoria and Ravenswood, although it was once the name for the entire village that became Astoria.
Well known to the residents of modern Queens due to the presence of a warehouse operation called Costco, and to its ancient citizens for the ferries to Blackwells Island and Manhattan- Hallet’s Cove is less well known for its industrial history, and the machinations of real estate interests in the locale are obvious to the knowing eye. The times are a-changing, indeed.
from wikipedia
Beginning in the early 19th century, affluent New Yorkers constructed large residences around 12th and 14th streets, an area that later became known as Astoria Village (now Old Astoria). Hallet’s Cove, founded in 1839 by fur merchant Steven Halsey, was a noted recreational destination and resort for Manhattan’s wealthy.
During the second half of the 1800s, economic and commercial growth brought about increased immigration from German settlers, mostly furniture and cabinet makers. One such settler was Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, patriarch of the Steinway family who founded the piano company Steinway & Sons in 1853, which today is a worldwide piano company. Afterwards, the Steinways built a sawmill and foundry, as well as a streetcar line. The family eventually established Steinway Village for their workers, a community that provided school instruction in German as well as English.
In 1870, Astoria and several other surrounding villages, including Steinway, were incorporated into Long Island City. Long Island City remained an independent municipality until it was incorporated into New York City in 1898. The area’s farms were turned into housing tracts and street grids to accommodate the growing number of residents.
Socrates Sculpture Park – photo by Mitch Waxman
Socrates Sculpture Park presents the picture that the modern City wants you to believe about these “up and coming” corners of river front property. Middle and upper class citizens improving their minds and bodies in a clean and safe environment of esthetic esteem- the epitome of the physical culture movement’s dreams for the urban environment. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and for sporting pursuits and cookouts- the nearby Rainey Park is available to their coarser neighbors from the Ravenswood or Astoria Houses who might not be interested in Yoga- but the neighborhood is becoming a little too “Ayn Rand” for my tastes. There is another side to this place, of course, off the beaten path.
from wikipedia
Socrates Sculpture Park is an outdoor exhibition space for sculpture. It is located at the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard in the neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, New York City, United States, North America. In addition to exhibition space, the park offers an arts education program and job training.
A block away from Socrates Sculpture Park – photo by Mitch Waxman
Aboriginal swamplands were conquered in the late 19th century, as the floods of the Sunswick Creek and the East River were tamed by the enterprise of engineers. The industrial mills and combines of Long Island City and Ravenswood extended all the way to Astoria Point, exploiting the valuable river front. In modernity, this is another corridor of dirty industry being swept aside to make room for an urban population bursting at the seams, with little regard for the past or present. Deemed underutilized, experts have named the area as an industrial relict, better demolished than preserved.
If one leaves the carefully mapped walking paths suggested by city planners, another picture emerges. Generations have quietly made lives here, in noble homes whose architectural influences suggest hints of the nautical culture of eastern Long Island and New England.
from socratessculpturepark.org
Socrates Sculpture Park was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members, under the leadership of artist Mark di Suvero, transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that also serves as a vital New York City park offering a wide variety of public services.
This is what the Queens waterfront used to look like, notice the small stature of the buildings, except for the Piano factory, since converted over to Condos.
Horror at Hallet’s Cove- Nelson’s Galvanizing site 2010- photo by Mitch Waxman
Across the Newtown Pentacle, where a speculative real estate bubble has recently burst, empty lots are fenced off from their environs. Unlike the abandoned lots of ground that peppered the landscape of New York in the 1970’s and 80’s before the bubble, these patches of shattered masonry are not abandoned- instead they are being held in reserve for future usage. Rapid demolition of these properties follows the quiet acquisition of said lots, to hasten the building process when economic times are better and to head off environmental or historical concerns about erasing possibly significant structures. In the case of this property, Newtown Pentacle readers may remember an examination of the “Nelson Galvanizing” site- titled “The Horrors of Hallet’s Cove“- and the multiple links to various environmental violations assigned to it by the City and State of New York. This is going to be the home of a future apartment house, incidentally.
photo from the “The Horrors at Hallet’s Cove posting”
Horror at Hallet’s Cove- Nelson’s Galvanizing site 2008 – photo by Mitch Waxman
Vernon Blvd. and Broadway – photo by Mitch Waxman
On the corner of Vernon Blvd. and Broadway, with the aforementioned Sculpture Park at my back, the comical Greenstreets sign on a traffic island- surrounded on all sides by “warehoused” former industrial building sites. Large tracts have been demolished to make way for future construction of multiple story, Manhattan style, apartment houses. Underserved by mass transit as it is, with a sewer system designed in the 1920’s, this is the Hallet’s Cove of 2010.
For the Hallet’s Cove of 1840, click here to check out a map and street necrology from pefagan.com
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Formerly one of the tallest residential buildings in the area, this enigmatic survivor of “the good old days” is dwarfed by the newly built tower rising menacingly some 2 blocks away. Just to make myself clear, I’m not anti anything, and regard such development work as inevitable and completely out of my hands. This angers and frustrates colleagues and friends in the antiquarian community, who view this pragmatism as acknowledging defeat, a tacit surrender to the princes of the city and their claims of oligarchal inevitability. In reality, I’m just trying to see all sides of the story.
Always, I must remain an Outsider.
from nydailynews.com
Undaunted by the floundering housing market, a New Jersey real estate firm is looking to build 2,400 residential units on the Astoria Peninsula, the Daily News has learned.
Lincoln Equities of East Rutherford has a contract to buy five parcels of land once used for manufacturing on First Ave., along the portion of the East River waterfront known as Hallets Cove.
Lincoln plans to bulldoze several warehouses on the land and build five residential buildings, one of which would rise 40 stories, company officials said.
“We don’t know what the market will indicate, but it is our intent to have a blend of rentals and condos,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a prominent Democratic political strategist who has been hired as a spokesman for the project.
The project, known as Hallets Point Development, would require the zoning be changed from manufacturing to residential.
Formal plans, which also could include ground-floor retail space, are expected to be submitted by the end of the year.
The proposal would join a growing list of high-density residential developments under construction or planned for the Long Island City waterfront – a list led by the state’s Queens West megadevelopment in Hunters Point and the city’s proposed Hunters Point South community.
Sheinkopf said 20% of the 2,400 units will be affordable housing, but it was unclear how the prices for the project, which is privately funded, would be determined.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Ultimately, the shocking scale of these new structures dwarf the surrounding neighborhoods- blocking the panoramic views and open skies of a formerly 2 and 3 story cityscape, where a large structure was 5 stories. Philosophically, I tend to regard LeCorbusier style tower parks (and gated communities on the whole) as anti-democratic and very bad for the future of the Republic, as it tends to isolate political centers away from each other and foists an unsustainable population onto local streets and sewers. Like many of these new towers, parking amenities are planned into the structure, but that too brings more traffic onto the local streets which were not designed to handle the increased load. Quality of life in the City of New York is more than just law and order, lords and ladies of Newtown, it’s streets and sewers and electrical infrastructure.
The Hallets, from the Annals of Newtown
William Hallett, their ancestor, was b. in Dorsetshire, Eng., in 1616, and emigrating to New-England, joined in the settlement of Greenwich, Ct., whence he removed to Long Island, and acquired a large estate at Hellgate. (See pp. 29, 63.) In the fall of 1655 the Indians destroyed his house and plantation at Hallett’s Cove, which induced him to take up his residence at Flushing. Here he was appointed sheriff in 1656, but the same year was deposed by Stuyvesant, fined and imprisoned, for entertaining the Rev. Wm. “VVickenden from Rhode Island, allowing him to preach at his house and receiving the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper from his hands. Disgusted at this treatment, Mr. Hallett, on the revolt of Long Island from the Dutch, warmly advocated the claims of Connecticut ; and, being sent as a delegate to the general court of that colony/he was appointed a commissioner or justice of the peace for Flushing. Afterwards he again located at Hellgate, where he lived to the age of about 90 yrs. He had two sons, William- and Samuel,6 between whom, in 1688, he divided his property in Hellgate Neck.
2.. William Hallett, eldest son of William,1 received that portion of his father’s lands which lay south of the road now forming Greenoak, Welling, and Main streets, and Newtown avenue; which road divided his possessions from those of his brother Samuel on the north
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Shot from the Queensboro Bridge, with mighty Triborough and Hells Gate in the background, that’s Big Allis on the left- just for scale. Hallets Cove, where the Sunswick Creek once drained into the East River, is located roughly across the street from the large new building on the right.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The strip of bare shoreline, a rarity along the East River, is the actual sandy beach of Hallets Cove. During the summer, kayaks are launched from here- I believe courtesy of the LIC Boathouse– but I may be incorrect. Looking south, one sees Blackwells- oops- I mean Roosevelt Island, and Manhattan commands the horizon. Interesting to some may be the observation that in New York, up until recent times, when an entrepreneur was building a new venture in an existing community, it was expected that other improvements would follow- whether roads, streets, or schools.
from the Greater Astoria Historical Society
HALSEY, Stephen Alling.
He donated a tract of land, 100 by 200 feet, extending from Academy street to First Avenue, for school purposes. A commodious school house was shortly afterwards erected on this site, which is to-day used by the Fourth Ward school. He invested in other property, in almost every instance showing his progressive spirit by laying out streets, grading them, &c. The ferry (then running to 86th street) was owned by him up to 1860, and he it was who placed the first modern ferryboat on the line.
He was a great lover of horticulture, and in the garden in front of Capt. Monson’s house on Fulton street may be seen some of the largest Magnolia trees on Long Island, 75 feet in height, planted by him. He had a particular admiration for shade trees which he gratuitously gave to parties desirous of planting shade trees in front of their property. The fine Elms on Washington street and Perrot Avenue still stand as specimens of his planting.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now, I go to a lot of places that most people would consider insane, but the folks at undercity.org have actually been down in the sewers beneath Astoria. Check out their gallery and adventures which truly do answer the question- who can guess what it is, that may be buried down there? – Click here.
The folks from watercourses have been through here as well- check out their Sunswick Creek page, with maps.
also, from the Greater Astoria Historical Society
Sunswick Creek. A drained marsh near the foot of Broadway. Scholars believe it may come from an Indian word “Sunkisq” meaning perhaps “Woman Chief” or “Sachem’s Wife.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finally- check out this nytimes.com 1914 article, which describes following a “forgotten-ny” style mapping and exploration of the city along a path forged by by Sarah Comstock in 1849. The map she followed was called “12 miles around New York” (map at new york public library, of course- and check out Comstock’s “Old roads from the heart of New York” at archive.org). She starts with a journey on the Astoria Ferry from 86th street in Manhattan to Hallet’s point and continues through the Newtown Pentacle all the way to the ancient town of Flushing, as well as other destinations.
as it turns out, treadsoftly, a blog I like, rolled through here at the beginning of the week. Check it out.
affordable housing development on Borden Avenue
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let me state outright, and at the very start of this post- that the individual discussed here surely must be the toughest person in Queens. The indomitable “life will not beat me, no matter what” spirit of setting up housekeeping in this particular locale signals an iron resolve. This is the Borden Avenue Bridge, entering its second year of emergency construction, spanning the malefic waters of the Dutch Kills– a tributary of the Newtown Creek.
from wikipedia
Dutch Kills is a sub-division of the larger neighborhood of Long Island City in the New York City borough of Queens. It was a hamlet, named for its navigable tributary of Newtown Creek, that occupied what today is centrally Queensboro Plaza. Dutch Kills was an important road hub during the American Revolutionary War, and the site of a British Army garrison from 1776 to 1783. The area supported farms during the 19th Century, and finally consolidated in 1870 with the villages of Astoria, Ravenswood, Hunters Point, Middletown, Sunnyside and Bowery Bay to form Long Island City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Observation over time, for this shack or shanty had been established in the first weeks of construction some 14 months ago, has revealed this fellow (I’ve only seen one man emerge from it, perhaps there are others- I can’t say) to be a “crow”. As explained in the past, the nascent recycling industries along the Newtown Creek purchase scrap metals by the pound, and a street level economy subsists on castaway steel, iron, and copper items scavenged from the surrounding industrial and residential trash. There is a small army of these metal collectors, whose blackened and soiled garments have garnered the nomen “Crows” to themselves. Some are driven by need or malice to steal, and lamp posts stripped of access doors and internal copper wire are a common sight around the area. Reports from area cemeteries also point to this population for the identity of vandals who remove the white bronze and copper ornamentation from their grounds.
from the DOT website on the history of the Borden Avenue Bridge, which spans Dutch Kills.
Borden Avenue is a two-lane local City street in Queens. Borden Avenue runs east-west extending from Second Street at the East River to Greenpoint Avenue. The Borden Avenue Bridge over Dutch Kills is located just south of the Long Island Expressway between 27th Street and Review Avenue in the Sunnyside section of Queens. Borden Avenue Bridge is a retractile type moveable bridge. The general appearance of the bridge remains the same as when it was first opened in 1908. The bridge structure carries a two-lane two-way vehicular roadway with sidewalks on either side. The roadway width is 10.5m and the sidewalks are 2.0 m. The west approach and east approach roadways, which are wider than the bridge roadway, are 15.3m and 13.0m respectively. The bridge provides a horizontal clearance of 14.9m and a vertical clearance in the closed position of 1.2m at MHW and 2.7m at MLW.
As part of the construction of Borden Avenue in 1868, a wooden bridge was built over Dutch Kills. This bridge was later replaced by an iron swing bridge, which was removed in 1906. The current bridge was opened on March 25, 1908 at a cost of $157,606. The deck’s original design consisted of creosote-treated wood blocks, with two trolley tracks in the roadway. Character-defining features of this bridge include the stucco-clad operator’s house, four pairs of rails, and a rock-faced stone retaining wall. The gable-on-hip roof of the operator’s house retains the original clay tile at the upper part. Although alterations have been made, the bridge is a rare survivor of its type and retains sufficient period integrity to convey its historic design significance.
The bridge will be closed for construction through July 2009. In addition, there will be parking restrictions in the vicinity of the bridge from January through July 2009 at all times from 25th Street to 30th Place between Borden Avenue and Hunter’s Point/49th Avenue and from 50th Avenue to 51st Avenue between 27th Street and 25th Street.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned, the Crow who has set up housekeeping here surely must have a strong and robust physical constitution. The Dutch Kills is one of the darkest parts of the story of the Newtown Creek, a stagnant and poison patch of murky water which exhibits open sewers. The smell of the Dutch Kills in summer, reminiscent of an aquatic reptile tank in need of a water change, is best described by using the analogy of a rotting Ham sandwich. These are nearly the head waters of the Dutch Kills- located at the end of the “empty corridor“, quite near its junction with the noisome Newtown Creek, but is hardly the worst part of it. Penetrating further back to Hunters Point Avenue and all the way to its ending at 47th avenue and 29th street, near the Degnon Terminal, one experiences the olfactory ragnarok in full (I’ll be taking us back there in a post or two, by the way).
also from the DOT website:
The New York City Department of Transportation is performing emergency repair work on the Borden Avenue Bridge. Contract work commenced in January 2009.
During the initial phase of construction, additional areas of structural deterioration in the bridge abutment were identified which required an expansion of the original contract scope of work. The expanded scope of work required excavation in areas that were previously expected to remain undisturbed.
During the excavation of one of these areas, a pocket of contaminated soil was identified. The contamination was analyzed by an accredited testing laboratory and classified as “contaminated non-hazardous”. As such, it poses no significant health risk to workers or the surrounding community. However, precautionary measures will be taken and every effort is being made to remove and dispose of the contamination quickly, yet safely, within all New York City and State guidelines. The history and nature of the industrial community surrounding the bridge revealed that one or more of the previous users of the industrial waterway is the source of the contamination.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the plus side, however, someone has already “homesteaded” this up and coming area. Urban pioneers such as this Crow were the ones who established Williamsburg and DUMBO as residential centers, with shanty villages in the 1980’s. The views in the neighborhood are fantastic, with panoramic city skylines and the noble Empire State Building looming over Borden Avenue. Also, views of area bridges, like the Queens Midtown Expressway elevated section of the LIE directly overhead are spectacular. That’s why this neighborhood, ripe for residential development, is called DULIE (Down Under the Long Island Expressway) around Newtown Pentacle HQ.
from nydailynews.com
THE REOPENING of a Long Island City bridge that was closed for emergency repairs is now being pushed back because of toxic sludge found in the soil around the structure.
The century-old Borden Ave. Bridge, which handled nearly 16,000 vehicles a day before it was shut down, was abruptly closed on Dec. 31 because of structural problems.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To the north, a spectacular fire recently erased a century old abandoned factory, and the ongoing saga of the Borden Avenue Bridge reconstruction has already cleared away the strip club on the corner- as well as several other area businesses which have somehow survived in this lonely corner of Queens for decades. Borden Avenue begins in Long Island City near Hunters Point, and is a local viaduct carrying vehicle traffic toward Greenpoint Avenue where a cloverleaf of onramps presents the option to entrance either the BQE or LIE which provide southern egress to Brooklyn, and all points east.
from nytimes.com
“Even though it’s not the prettiest bridge, people find beauty in it,” said Sam Schwartz, a transportation consultant and the president of the city’s Bridge Centennial Commission, a nonprofit group whose mission is to celebrate six New York bridges that are about a century old. He described the bridge’s retractile feature as “very elegant.”
The Borden Avenue Bridge has not displayed its elegance much lately, however. Commercial marine traffic along Dutch Kills is highly diminished; the bridge last opened for a passing vessel in 2005.
The Transportation Department estimated the cost to stabilize the abutment at $14 million, or, if the wall had to be rebuilt, at $37 million.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The vast majority of the population in this section of Queens- bordering Blissville, Tower Town at Hunters Point, and Laurel Hill- are “just passing through” on the elevated highway some 10 stories above the putrefaction of the Dutch Kills. The blighting effect of the Borden Avenue Bridge reconstruction has had no small effect on area businesses, which are dependent on trade from passing trucks and cars seeking a shortcut from the Midtown Tunnel traffic flowing out of Manhattan nearby the Pulaski Bridge. It has also created a barrier between the Hunters Point neighborhood and the vastness of Queens. Such disruptive traffic flow would have been anathema to the builder of the Bridge, Edward Byrne.
from wikipedia
Edward Byrne began his civil engineering career in 1886 with the New York City Aqueduct Commission on the construction of the Croton Water Supply System. It is of interest that on this project he met Robert Ridgway, who also was destined to become a distinguished engineer and an outstanding civil servant.
From 1889 to the close of 1897, Byrne worked on highways and bridges for the old Department of Public Works of New York City.
On January 1, 1898, he joined the Department of Bridges and began a striking and noteworthy service which ended in November, 1933, with his resignation from the position of Chief Engineer of the Department of Plant and Structures (the successor of the Bridge Department), in order to assume the duties of Chief Engineer of the Triborough Bridge. His thirty-six years of service in the Department of Bridges, and its successor, the Department of Plant and Structures, may be divided into two periods.
1898-1911
During this period, he was in charge of bridge construction and maintenance, supervizing the construction of the Willis Avenue Bridge over the Harlem River, the Vernon Avenue Bridge, the Borden Avenue and Hunters Point Bridges over Dutch Kills, and the old bridge over Flushing River.
Shoosh… Be Very Quiet… I’m hunting rabbits…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hunting for the elusive gravesite of a man called Gilman, one frigid afternoon spent within the 365 acres of First Calvary Cemetery proved the existence here of a race of burrowing things- mud caked groundlings with glowing red eyes.
Somewhere, nearby I would suspect, is a subterranean warren kept warm by the swarming masses of their hairless and blind progeny. Squirming, these sweaty holes dug into the frozen graveyard force the adults to brave the bright dangers of the surface world to forage.
from wikipedia:
The lagomorphs are the members of the taxonomic order Lagomorpha, of which there are two families, the Leporidae (hares and rabbits), and the Ochotonidae (pikas). The name of the order is derived from the Greek lagos (λαγος, “hare”) and morphē (μορφή, “form”).
Though these mammals can resemble rodents (order Rodentia), and were classified as a superfamily in that order until the early twentieth century, they have since been considered a separate order. For a time it was common to consider the lagomorphs only distant relatives of the rodents, to whom they merely bore a superficial resemblance.
The earliest fossil lagomorphs, such as Eurymylus, come from eastern Asia, and date to the late Paleocene or early Eocene. The leporids first appear in the late Eocene, and rapidly spread throughout the northern hemisphere; they show a trend towards increasingly long hind limbs as the modern leaping gait developed. The pikas appear somewhat later, in the Oligocene of eastern Asia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Prey by nature, the foragers are fast and smart and alert. The gods of the sky, the claws of the stealth demons, the brutal agonies of the dog- all are found on the surface. Designed to eat the ruggose fibers of grass and seed, quickly and as much as possible in one go, they are swift and nervous. Fed on the morbid nutrition offered up by the loam of Calvary Cemetery, the glowing red eyes of these burrowers scan constantly for danger.
from wikipedia:
The rabbit lives in many areas around the world. Rabbits live in groups, and the best known species, the European rabbit lives in underground burrows, or rabbit holes. A group of burrows is called a warren. Meadows, woods, forests, thickets, and grasslands are areas in which rabbits live. They also inhabit deserts and wetlands. More than half the world’s rabbit population resides in North America. They also live in Europe, India, Sumatra, Japan, and parts of Africa. The European rabbit has been introduced to many places around the world.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Merely a part of some vast ecosystem occluded by the marble and sorrow, these burrowers are prized game for the higher mammals and avian predators which frequent the bulkheaded shorelines of the Newtown Creek. It is difficult, with modern eyes, to imagine the world of the unspoiled Creek.
Once, this was part of a rich swampy marshland, and abundant game and wildlife drew sportsmen from the great cities of Brooklyn and Manhattan for hunting and fishing to the rural extants of the Newtown Creek. Nearby, aboriginal tribes of Lenape (the Maspeatche) made their camps near Mt. Zion cemetery and when the europeans came- great hunting lodges and hotels were erected along its banks to service the tourist trade from the two island cities. That was before the industries, before the Rural Cemeteries Act, and before the 800 pound gorilla came to town.
from wikipedia:
Jugged Hare (known as civet de lièvre in France), is a whole hare, cut into pieces, marinated and cooked with red wine and juniper berries in a tall jug that stands in a pan of water. It traditionally is served with the hare’s blood (or the blood is added right at the very end of the cooking process) and Port wine.
Jugged Hare is described in the influential 18th century cookbook, The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse, with a recipe titled, “A Jugged Hare,” that begins, “Cut it into little pieces, lard them here and there….” The recipe goes on to describe cooking the pieces of hare in water in a jug that it set within a bath of boiling water to cook for three hours. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Glasse has been widely credited with having started the recipe with the words “First, catch your hare,” as in this citation. This attribution is apocryphal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Your humble narrator appreciates the irony that New York City’s nature preserves are entirely accidental. The nearby Ridgewood Reservoir, an eidelon of municipal malfeasance and neglect, has transformed into a significant bird sanctuary and houses a teeming ecosystem ranging from rodent to raptor. The cemeteries of Queens similarly house a niche ecology, providing a refuge for ghoulish reprobates and rabbit alike. Some effort has been made at finding a scientific sampling of biota at these locations, but if it exists, my meager skills at the art of detection have been unable to uncover such data.
for a third person perspective on how my encounter with this manifest avatar of the Lepus specie went, please click here- its pretty much the way that the whole thing “went down”.
The Newtown Pentacle 