Archive for October 2013
Project Firebox 94
An ongoing catalog of New York’s endangered Fireboxes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This soldier of the realm is found at the corner of Grand Street and Morgan Avenue in infinite Brooklyn, not too far from the darkest of those hillside thickets found along the Newtown Creek- which is its tributary English Kills. This is is Bushwick, historically, but the area has come to called East Williamsburg in modernity- a term which has zero historical precedence. Of course, ask a realtor where Williamsburg ends these days and they’ll tell you Lake Ronkonkoma.
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skillful blows
Random events witnessed and recorded.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While heading for Brooklyn one morning, I noticed these guys screwing up Queens at the Sunnyside Yards. They were part of the army of construction crews working on the East Side Access project, I’d wager.
If you’ll notice, they are literally operating a giant screw housed on that yellow piece of equipment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not too sure what they were doing, but one suspects it has to do with the complex hydrology which underlies the yard. When the place was established at the start of the 20th century, all sorts of issues were encountered in the name of conquering the land.
This was once an enormous swamp, found at the foot of a rocky outcrop known in the 19th century as “Long Island City Heights” which was rebranded in the 20th century as “Sunnyside.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of Sunnyside, I’ve been keenly watching the construction of the new school on 43rd street. This is a BIG project, and the steel for the new building is rocketing up towards the sky. Good to see that the municipality is actually reinvesting in the infrastructure of the neighborhood as the rapacious eye of the Real Estate Industrial Complex bears down on western Queens.
We get a few more hospitals, schools, fire houses, and police stations and there just might be a possibility of us surviving the 21st century in as fine a fettle as we did the 20th.
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sent forth
Lonely, ever so lonely.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Transversing the concrete devastations of Western Queens is best performed by ones own self, I belief, with my only company taking the form of an audiobook or podcast. Saying that, it can get pretty old pretty fast being by myself all the time, as I’m a horrible human being and this solitude offers me the opportunity for nothing but soliloquy and self critique. You can keep your professional therapist, I’d rather just wander around and beat myself up for habitually not rising to to the occasion.
I find that it’s the early hours on the weekends, those intervals marked by crowds of inebriates returning to Queens from a Saturday night bacchanalia in Manhattan, which are the loneliest. Even the Long Island Expressway seems to be a seldom traveled country road at this time of day, instead of the motorized river of steel and glass it normally presents itself as.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s in the early part of the day that puzzles such as this safety taped wall present their questions most clearly to me. Is there a lurking fear that some wandering stranger will not notice a scarlet brick wall rising before them? The logic of Queens demands that there is, in fact, some wickedly good reason for the caution tape to be displayed. Perhaps a runaway nuclear reactor or a hidden cache of toxic waste, but the aforementioned logic of Queens also states that once the tape is up, the problem is solved.
The tape itself will persist until nature takes it, whereupon the wind will sweep it into an area waterway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One always finds it striking, on these long explorations of both internal and external landscapes, how badly maintained the roads are here in the very navel of New York City. Concrete company trucks routinely slough off the extra or unused product contained in their trucks, creating a lahar of irregular pavement. Cannot describe how many times I or some other pedestrian have tripped over these little mounds of poured stone, or how numerous and abundant they are. Probably all we deserve, anyway, as Skillman Avenue in LIC does not connect to anywhere in Manhattan.
Its ultimately our own fault for being in Queens, I guess.
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hollow betwixt
Another day in the life of Mitch.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week, your humble narrator was engaged three days in a row doing the “Newtown Creek Tour” thing. The Saturday and Sunday ones were for Atlas Obscura and Brooklyn Brainery, and followed two of the routes which I have established that tell certain parts of the tale of Newtown Creek and its surrounding communities. The Friday one was a little less conventional, and played out around the Dutch Kills tributary of the larger watershed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A small group this time, I had a crew from LaGuardia Community College out for a general meander around their home waterway. It seems that CUNY doesn’t spend much time letting their students or faculty know exactly where it is that LaGuardia is located, or the historic significance of its location in the Degnon Terminal in Long Island City. Accordingly, one of their instructors who is deeply involved with the Creek and with Newtown Creek Alliance asked if I could inform and instruct on the subject from a historical and wayfinding POV.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This instructor, Sarah Durand (long referred to at this blog as “the radical biologist Sarah Durand” and pictured in the forefront of the image above) has an interesting study under way on the waterway. This isn’t the one where she stitches together corpses and exposes them to electrical stimulation in order to revivify and restore them to some semblance of life, rather this is the one which involves the suspension of buckets filled with various biota at different tidal levels to gauge and measure the sort of critters which might exist in the water column. She labors to answer the question of “who can guess, all there is, which might flop and flap in the waters of the infamous Newtown Creek?”.
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these conceptions
A brief visit to the forbidden north coast of Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent obligations – involving a spate of home repairs demanded by Our Lady of the Pentacle – involved Hank the elevator guy, Our Lady, and myself making a journey over to the “Build it Green” warehouse found in Astoria on the forbidden northern coast of Queens. This is my personal nomen, incidentally, for the Bowery Bay and Flushing River side of the borough, which is largely occluded from the public space by industrial and municipal fence lines.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recently, for my Brownstoner column, I detailed a trip to Luyster Creek- which can be accessed here. One generally doesn’t come this way on the long perambulations for which I am known, as my interests generally draw me in the direction of the Newtown Creek. Also, I do not enjoy walking the camera around in the more residential sections of Queens as it draws certain attentions from the locals which can be… ahem… less than salubrious.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Announced plans for the overdevelopment of this neighborhood by the Real Estate Industrial Complex, however, mean that I will be forced into spending some of my time this winter and spring recording the sights extant in this section. Wondering what I might find around the forbidden coast, or what might find me, keeps me awake at night.
Don’t tell the Creek, though, as she might think I’m cheating on her. It’s just the seven year itch, however.
The Newtown Pentacle 