Archive for October 2011
the First Big Announcement
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Your humble narrator will be conducting a walking tour in Long Island City as part of the Open House NY Weekend on October 15 and 16. The tour will be approximately two hours in length, starts at 11 am, and will visit several of the amazing industrial landmarks which distinguish the Queens side of the Newtown Creek Watershed. Much of the walk will follow the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek. Reservations are required, which can be had by visiting the following link:
http://www.ohny.org/site-programs/weekend/programs/walk-down-newtown-creek
Oh, did I neglect to mention that this walking tour is free, as in gratis, as in no cost to you- Lords and Ladies?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the first of two big announcements, the second is still under wraps and I’m not able to discuss it at this point. Hopefully, within the next couple of days, I’ll be able to say more. Open House NY weekend is a citywide event, and there are multiple opportunities to do cool and unique things. Please check out the rest of their offerings, but you definitely want to come on this exploration of a hidden and neglected waterway which is found less than one mile from midtown Manhattan.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Bring a camera, of course, but I would be remiss if I didn’t advise you that broken pavement and largish puddles might be encountered- so proper (closed toe) footwear is advised. Additionally, this is as close to an urban desert as you are ever likely to find, so if you are one of the folks who likes to “stay hydrated”, bring a beverage along. Sparks deli on Borden Avenue will most likely be open, but one never can tell. Looking forward to seeing you along the Dutch Kills, and as always-
Want to see something cool?
Bring a camera, and ID…
Follow me…
cheering illusion
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Long island City, as we know it, was all about trains. Everywhere you go, tracks are. Despite this, the entire modern place is defined by it’s relationship to the automobile, which seems to have been the guiding principle behind much of its development in the middle 20th century- pull up the tracks and lay asphalt down for trucks. For those of you who might have seen me tagging along on one of Kevin Walsh’s audacious 2nd Saturday tours this summer, this will be a familiar refrain, but one of the things I’ve been going on about for the last several months is the “Locomotive City” versus the “Automotive City”.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What I mean is that during the 19th and early 20th century, the place was set up and designed around access to rail based transportation rather than automotive needs. It’s why it’s so hard to park in LIC, except if you’re driving a train. 50 years ago, it was still not an uncommon or remarkable thing to see a Locomotive engine making its rounds at grade level around these parts, before everything switched over to truck and car based transport and the spars were cut.
This “locomotive city” had its own set of problems, of course, noise and pollution and accidents and all that- but the “automotive city” of the latter 20th century which we are all so familiar with is no picnic either. At least the earlier incarnation of the place was a lot more efficient.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As regular readers of this, your Newtown Pentacle, know- I’m kind of an infrastructure geek. One of my favorite topics are the sewers after all, and anyone who has accompanied me on a walk through LIC has had to endure me running over to a construction site and waxing rhapsodically about the layer cake of street systems which are revealed whenever workmen have dug their way down to perform maintenance or repairs on some buried subsystem.
In a single vertical yard, you will see asphalt, cement, belgian block cobblestones, macadamized or creosote treated wood blocks, oil saturated compacted earth- all the way down to the loose fill which was appropriate for horse carts. The industrial history of New York City, in cross section.
Today’s post is a bit of a placeholder, by the way, big announcements are imminent…
The Newtown Pentacle 