Archive for 2016
some passages
Kosciuszko Bridge project, Brooklyn side, Q2 2016, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The invitation went out to all the concerned parties – inclusively referred to as the Stakeholders Advisory Group – from the NYS DOT that an opportunity to observe the progress of the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement project was once again at hand.
Accordingly, a humble narrator collected together the camera and lenses, and set off for Greenpoint’s DUKBO – Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp.
Several progress reports have been offered on the NYS DOT’s Kosciuszko Bridge replacement project. I seem to be the only person In New York paying any attention to the project, and there’s been a series of prior posts on the bridge presented at this – your Newtown Pentacle – chronicling the project.
To start – this 2012 post tells you everything you could want to know about Robert Moses, Fiorella LaGuardia, and the origins of the 1939 model Kosciuszko Bridge. Just before construction started, I swept through both the Brooklyn and Queens sides of Newtown Creek in the area I call “DUKBO” – Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp. Here’s a 2014 post, and another, showing what things used to look like on the Brooklyn side, and one dating back to 2010, and from 2012 discussing the Queens side – this. Construction started, and this 2014 post offers a look at things. There’s shots from the water of Newtown Creek, in this June 2015 post, and in this September 2015 post, which shows the bridge support towers rising. Additionally, this post from March of 2016 detailed the action on the Queens side.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Leading the tour was NYS DOT’s project leader, engineer Robert Adams, who is the fellow pictured above in the stylish (and highly visible) yellow jacket.
Mr. Adams allows me to call him Bob, for which I’m grateful. One such as myself dislikes the usage of extraneous syllables in the spoken form. For the purposes of today’s post, however, I’ll refer to him as Mr. Adams – as the job his team is overseeing has done such an impressive job of staying on or ahead of schedule, he deserves the honorific.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Part of the job, as it were, includes the rerouting of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway section which travels north/south along Meeker Avenue. The new roadway is supported by masonry and steel, and its outer facing is covered in sculptural tiles (which I think are concrete). I asked Mr. Adams if the sculptural motif on the tiles had a particular purpose – diffusing sound, or guiding rain runoff, for instance – but he said that it was purely esthetic, and part of the architectural design.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The old overpass abutments on Meeker Avenue are in the process of being dismantled. It’s a fairly chaotic scene down around here – this is the intersection of Vandervoort and Meeker if you’re curious.
Mr. Adams told us that one of the ways in which his team alleviated the impact of construction on traffic flow to the highway above was to build the new abutments “behind” the old ones. When the project is done, this will allow the DOT to add wider pedestrian sidewalks, and to also create an increased amount of space for the required turning radius of trucks as they move under the overpass.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the actual job site, in a spot which I refer to as “used to be Cherry Street,” is pictured above. Old school Cherry street is found beneath the masonry structure occupying the left side of the shot above, I would mention, and the unpaved access road at bottom right represents the right of way for “New Cherry Street.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Getting down to the action, and there’s a lot of it going on down here in DUKBO. This spot is one of the areas where some of that worksite safety training I’ve mentioned before comes into play. The contractors on the job – Skanska, Kiewit, and ECO3 – all subscribe to “safety culture” which is designed to keep laborers from suffering needless injuries. We – as in the civilian visitors Mr. Adams was escorting around the site – were all dressed up in orange vests, safety glasses, hard hats, and work gloves.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The roadway leading to the new bridge is on the right, with the 1939 vintage Kosciuszko Bridge on the left. We were told that the area down here will actually be available for use as a public space in the post construction era. At a luncheon meeting after the tour, Mr. Adams was petitioning the group for ideas as to what the community might want to happen down here. There will be space available on the Queens side as well.
Speaking of Queens, we were also told that in the early summer, a similar walk-through of the Queens side will be happening. Can’t wait for that one, mainly so I don’t have to walk all the way to Greenpoint from Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Having crossed Gardiner Avenue, heading south towards the languid waters of Newtown Creek, it was pretty exciting to notice that steel has begun to be affixed to the concrete tower columns of the new bridge – a major milestone. The new Kosciuszko Bridge is going to be of the cable stay variety, and the first of its type in NYC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of steel, there were gigantic chunks of the stuff ready for deployment. These pieces are actually the outward facing sides of the highway. Mr. Adams made it a point of informing us that this was an entirely American produced bridge, with steel coming in from Pennsylvania and concrete sourced from a Queens company that’s called Tek Crete.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A bit closer to the columns, and rapidly emerging roadway, which will become the easterly half of the new bridge.
The plan from the beginning has been to produce the new span in three distinct stages. First – build the lanes of the eastern side. Second – demolish the 1939 bridge. Third – build the westerly side which will sit in the footprint of the 1939 model. Chatter on the tour indicated that the demolition part of the project will begin in 2017, and that the engineers are still debating as to how best remove the concrete piers which support the steel truss.
The truss itself is actually the easiest part of the job to figure, and the center section is going to be removed in one piece. It will be lowered, by cranes, onto barges which will be towed by tugboats out of Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you can see in the shot above, the first set of cable stays has already been affixed to the new road section. For a sense of scale on how absolutely colossal this project is, take notice the itty bitty construction workers who are on the lift between the two towers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A bit of a better angle showing the cable stays and their anchors on the roadway section. This will be be built out both south – towards Greenpoint and Meeker Avenue – and north, over the water and into Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mr. Adams and his team indicated that we were going to be heading back towards Greenpoint, and climbing a temporary stairway up to the still under construction roadway which will be the north bound lanes of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Couldn’t resist one last shot from ground level showing the two structures.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the temporary stairway, which was around 4-5 stories worth of climbing, and looking north towards Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The roadway itself is still under construction. The views from up here were fairly epic, but I’ll share those in a future post. Suffice to say that were I to attempt the same shots post construction, I’d be thoroughly squished by traffic moving at highway speeds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not sure which Union these fellows were members of, but they were too busy for me to ask. The Union guys were tying off the structural rebar, in preperation of pouring the concrete which would become the underpinning of the BQE’s roadway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rebar that these Union guys are installing is actually stainless steel rather than galvanized iron. The extra expense for the stainless is justified in the name of avoiding corrosion, due to the massive amount of salt which is typically applied to the BQE during the winter months.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One last shot looking north along the 1939 version of the Kosciuszko Bridge. What’s truly interesting to me about this project which Robert Adams is supervising is the fact that at no point can traffic along this Robert Moses built highway be impeded or stopped. It’s analogized best as doing a full rebuild of your car’s transmission, while driving at 90 mph in heavy traffic.
Progress on the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement will continue to be documented, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
into which
I been everywhere, man.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is fully “back in action” after a long hermitage. In the last seven days – I’ve conducted three walking tours of the Newtown Creek watershed, visited the Kosciuszko Bridge construction project, attended and partcipated in a Working Harbor Committee tour, and have also found myself cathechizing elected officialdom about the dangers of CSO’s (Combined Sewer Outfalls). I also shot and developed a few hundred photos, and you’ll be seeing some of them over the next few days.
I also got to take the most photogenic of NYC’s subway lines the other day, which is the IRT Flushing or 7 line, as evinced by the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Two of my walking tours last week were private affairs, and involved exposing groups of students to LIC. I brought the kids down the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, then along the main stem of the Creek itself, and we eventually ended up along the East River waterfront in Hunters Point.
The counterpoints between “America’s Workshop” and the “Modern Corridor” are jarring, and seeing the post industrial section contrasted with the gentrified residential sections really seemed to hit home with them. I love taking out groups of students, incidentally, as ultimately our world will be theirs someday, and they have to start thinking up the solutions to the colossal mess we’re going to be leaving behind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, what with all the running around, I ended up walking close to forty miles last week as I scuttled around from place to place. This weekend, I’ve got another private group tour on Saturday, but on Sunday there’s a free event I’m helping to conduct with my colleague Will Elkins from Newtown Creek Alliance. Details are found below for attending the “North Henry Street Project,” which will meet up at 11 a.m on the corner of Kingsland and Norman Avenues in Greenpoint.
This one is part of the citywide MAS Janeswalk event, and I’m hoping you can come along and check out the plans NCA has been concocting for the “Unnamed Canal,” a minor tributary of Newtown Creek.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
unlimited demand
Me? I like a good arch.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In glorious Astoria, Queens, you’ll notice that the neighborhood hosts a rail viaduct which carries the New York Connecting Railroad tracks to the Hell Gate Bridge, and that the cyclopean concrete structure uses a series of arches to carry the load. Whenever I’m out shooting, a point is made to photograph arches whenever they’re encountered, strictly in the name of “framing” for the composition. These tracks have been here since 1917, and opened in March, or possibly July of that year.
The arch is actually a relatively modern “thing” as far as human history goes, and began turning up in the built environment roughly 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Romans are famous for their usage of the arch and created several twists on the structural element. They would line up a series of arches to create an arcade, or twist them around a focal point to build domes. They also came up with the idea for triumphal arches, like the one you’ll find on the Canal Street side of the Manhattan Bridge, which also has a colonnade.
In case you were wondering – the Manhattan Bridge arch and colonnade were opened for inspection some five years after the bridge itself premiered. It was in 1910, a year after the bridge opened, that the architectural firm Carrère and Hastings drew the plans for the arch, and it was sculpted by Carl A. Heber. There’s also a sculptural frieze called “Buffalo Hunt” by a fellow named Charles Rumsey.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of arches and the New York Connecting Railroad, as well as Astoria, you’d be remiss not mention the treasure of treasures which is Hell Gate. Lindenthal and Horbostel designed the great rail bridge, which is actually a series of bridges when you get down to it. The main attraction is an inverted bow spring arch.
Technically speaking, it’s called the East River Arch Bridge.
The New York Connecting Railroad Bridge, aka the East River Arch Bridge- or commonly the Hell Gate Bridge- is estimated to be the most permanent of all the structures garlanding NY Harbor. According to Discover Magazine’s Feburary 2005 issue – it would take a millennium of environmental decay for Hell Gate’s steel to fail and collapse as compared to a mere 300 years for the other East River crossings. A target of no small strategic importance, Hell Gate was a mission objective for the Nazi saboteurs who were landed in Amagansett, Long Island by a Submarine (U-Boat 202– the Innsbruck) during the second World War’s Operation Pastorius. The legal consequences of Pastorius, by the way, are the precedent setting United States Supreme Court decision of Ex Parte Quinn.
Ex Parte Quinn is the legal pretext that underpins the detention of and trial, by military tribunals, of “foreign combatants” in the United States – a central tenet of our modern Terror War.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My favorite arches can be found at my favorite place, of course. The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge over Newtown Creek is featured above. There have been multiple bridges erected at this location over the years, but the first one was known as the “Blissville Bridge” and it was erected in 1850.
from the DOT website:
The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge is a double-leaf trunnion bascule, with 21.3m wide leaves. This bridge is a steel girder structure with a filled grid deck. The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 45.4m and in the closed position a vertical clearance of 7.9m at MHW and 9.4m at MLW. The bridge structure carries a four-lane two-way vehicular roadway with a 1.2m striped median and sidewalks on either side. The roadway width is 8.6m and the sidewalks are 4.0m and 3.7m for the north and south sidewalk respectively. The approach roadways are narrower than the bridge roadway. The west approach and east approach roadways are 17.1m (including 1.4m center median) and 11.9m respectively.
Greenpoint Avenue Bridge is also known as the J.J. Byrne memorial bridge. Who was Byrne? Long story, click here to learn more.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over in Staten Island, the Bayonne Bridge opened for use to the general public was 28,856 days ago, on November 15th, 1931 at 5 A.M. Bayonne is the fourth longest steel arch bridge upon the entire planet, and was designed by Othmar Amman. Click here for more on the Bayonne Bridge, and the construction project underway which is raising its roadway to accommodate a new class of cargo vessel.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
additional fact
I can’t help it if I’m “literal minded.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Given that I used be a “comics guy” who wrote and drew the things, there’s a certain presupposition which possesses me to interpret things in an extremely literal fashion. Given that my days and nights are spent here in Western Queens, which is famously the most diverse collection of humanity upon the entire earth, a humble narrator often finds himself in quite a pickle when signage is encountered. Some of the neighbors offer a charming interpretation of the American variant of English, after all.
I was confused by the signage in the shot above, encountered at the border of Woodside and Sunnyside. They sell Tacos, but not pets? Is the meat in the Taco not pet meat? If so, then what about the hot dogs?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Certainty exists that the fellow who crafted the signage above intended to signal that the sidewalk was not open for its intended purpose, but one likes to assume it’s a general warning about the pavement’s proximity. On a technical note, the kerning and tracking of the letterforms adorning the missive could really use some love and attention – lousy typography is another one of my pet peeves.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The chalk screed on the signboard pictured above wasn’t just advertising a Soccer match on Astoria’s Broadway to me, instead it was describing the last 75 years of United States foreign policy. Then again, I am literally minded as offered above, and if you put “USA vs. World” on a sign…
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neatly fitted
A short, and kind of weird, one today.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has a number of theories about the shot above, captured on Greenpoint’s Manhattan Avenue near the corner of Commercial Street – about one block from the fabulous Newtown Creek. One involves a war in Pigeon Heaven and the stripping away of a rebel eidolon’s wings. Another revolves around an undescribed form of life, or something very much like life, which might lurk in the shadowy recesses of Greenpoint.
The most likely explanation involves feral cats, of course, but what fun is there in pondering that?
Back tomorrow with something a bit more substantial, a post that’ll carry a beat more “meat on the bone.”
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 