Archive for 2016
natural history
Happy 50th Brithday, Riverkeeper.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I finally got to shoot a Kennedy.
In this case, it was Robert Kennedy Jr., while onboard a NY Water Taxi celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Riverkeeper organization. Mr. Kennedy, who in addition to being an environmental attorney and President of Riverkeeper, has a degree in history – offered the assembled group an absolutely fantastic encapsulation of the history of the Hudson River and spoke about the role and history of Riverkeeper in NY Harbor.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Before I continue, my continuing practice of listing my conflicts of interest and personal prejudices must be enacted – Newtown Creek Alliance has had a LONG and deep connection with Riverkeeper. Current DEC Commisioner and former Riverkeeper official Basil Seggos, and Riverkeeper Attorney Philip Musegaas are both former board members of NCA.
Additionally, I have enjoyed the company and tutelage of Riverkeeper’s patrol boat Captain, John Lipscomb, on more than one occasion, and Riverkeeper’s current representative in my part of the world – Sean Dixon – is both a friend and ally of Newtown Creek Alliance and our goal to “reveal, restore, and revitalize” Newtown Creek.
Riverkeeper, as an organization, are the “good guys” in my opinion and I consider being in the company of the organization on this important milestone for them both an honor and a privilege.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Robert Kennedy Jr. – suffice that whatever you want to say about the storied political dynasty from which he descends, when this fellow starts speaking – you pay attention. Kennedy described the formation of Riverkeeper from the Hudson Fisherman’s Association, and its role in cleaning up the notoriously polluted Hudson River over the last half of the 20th century and its expansion into other domestic waterways and now international efforts.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally, as someone who has always identified with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, a humble narrator was absolutely stoked just to be in the same room (or cabin) with him. That’s an actual leader you’re looking at above, and a bit of rock star at that. I’m not alone in this view, of course, and several of my colleagues from Newtown Creek and activists from the larger Harbor of New York and New Jersey were also invited onboard to celebrate the anniversary.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another “actual leader” is Paul Gallay of Riverkeeper. Mr. Gallay assessed Riverkeeper’s current efforts and made a cogent case against the continuing operation of the shoddily constructed and badly managed Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant which is just 45 miles from Manhattan.
He also discussed the so called petroleum “bomb trains” which have begun populating the rail system in upstate New York, and Riverkeeper’s ongoing battle to ensure a swimmable and fishable state for all of New York’s waterways – big or small.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Unfortunately, it was quite rainy and cold when we were out on the NY Water Taxi. I managed to crack out one shot of the surrounding scenery, as evinced above.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Walking Tour – Saturday, April 23rd, 2016 –
First Calvary Cemetery Walk.
Join Newtown Creek Alliance historian Mitch Waxman at First Calvary Cemetery, found in LIC’s Blissville neighborhood along Newtown Creek. Attendance limited to 15 people.
Click here for more info and ticketing.
loaded tolerance
Old things! In today’s post, with a tour announcement at the end!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So… Our Lady of the Pentacle announced that an inspection of a storage room we maintain would be enacted one rainy and quite recent Saturday. We entered the warehouse facility where our storage room is, which is a void mainly filled with the remnants of my career as a comic artist, and rummaged about. She was after a few garments of a certain vintage which were kept therein, and while she was searching for the items, I poked around in a cardboard box full of my Dad’s “things” which I kept after he passed on.
I brought home some of his vintage camera gear, which was fairly well preserved and which I thought some of you Lords and Ladies of the Pentacle might enjoy checking out for their retro design goodness.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The gizmo above is a light meter. The thing sticking out of the top right is a spring load button, and pushing it flips up a lid revealing a glass photo cell or sensor. It’s make is a Sekonic Type L – VI “Leader.”
There’s a fellow named M. Butkus over in New Jersey who has actually made the original instruction manual for the Sekonic available as a PDF, click here for the link. According to the various sources I checked, this little gizmo dates back to about 1954. Amazingly, the thing still works. Sekonic is a Japanese company, one which is still around today, and they’re still making light meters.
Before you ask – I checked and the thing would be worth eight bucks on eBay, were it still housed in its original packaging and in pristine condition.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The old man always inferred that his “Revere 8 Model 40” 8mm movie camera was purchased at the same time as the Sekonic light meter, both transactions having occurred when he was “in da soyviss” during the late 1950’s. Given the proclivity towards games of chance that Dad and his Brothers all displayed well into the 1980’s, I always presumed he rooked somebody in a card game and received the movie kit in lieu of cash. This unit would have cost about a hundred smackers when it first went on sale in 1955.
My Dad would have become physically ill if you asked him to spend $100 on a camera in 1985, let alone 1955.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Take note of the fact that this camera was spring wound! You’d twist that big key at the bottom of the thing and then it makes a “whirrrrr” sound as the spring returns the mechanical energy to its internal mechanisms, driving both film path and shutter. The thing still works, incidentally.
Revere was a Chicago based auto outfit formed in 1920 that originally manufactured radiators for cars. In 1939 Revere started making 8mm cameras, and then 8mm cameras and lenses in the 1950’s. By the middle 50’s, they were the second largest manufacturer of consumer movie cameras in the country. They also manufactured projectors, tape recorders, and a very popular rotary shop tool. Revere was acquired by 3M in 1960 after the company’s founder grew ill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The interesting thing about the Revere 8 Model 40 is that it takes cartridge film. Kodak used to manufacture this sort of thing and kept the prices low enough on the film for the developing to be kind of expensive. Kodak made its money on the developing, don’t forget, and they had a Standard Oil type of monopoly on the photography business before digital cameras and environmental laws annihilated their business model.
One of my cousins digitized the old family 8mm home movies a few years ago, most of which were shot with this camera, which Dad would lend out occasionally. My Uncle Irving took his side of the family to the World’s Fair in 1964, and I uploaded what he shot to my flickr account – click here for a brief and somewhat blurry glimpse into the past, as captured by the Revere 8 Model 40.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the subject of my “depression era kid” Dad not wasting his money, one of the items present in his “box of things” was a sample of the aforementioned cartridge film. What cartridge means – for you youngins – is that the film was entirely contained in a plastic shell that had mechanical plug in spots which allowed the camera mechanism to smoothly drive the film past the shutter. The film was entirely contained within this plastic shell, which allowed one to safely load or unload the device sans dark room or light fast bag.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The amazing thing – well there’s two amazing things – one is that this box of film was meant to processed by February of 1966, which actually makes it older than me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The other is that it’s still unopened and factory sealed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Less remarkable, but still old timey cool, is the Waxman family Kodak Instamatic 104 camera. A still camera, the Instamatic also used cartridge film. Manufactured in England, of all places, the Instamatic is likely one of the most popular cameras ever produced and something like fifty million of them were shipped out to customers.
The Instamatic 104 hasn’t held up that well over the years – its shutter no longer pops, and there’s a lot of corrosion on the coatings of its plastic surfaces.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The scrolls of Eibon, the Dread Necronomicon, the lost ark of the Hebrews – all must be waiting for some unlucky or intrepid soul to find them within the hundreds of thousands of cubic acres utilized as the anonymous storage rooms which are spread about in New York City.
Who can guess, all there is, that might be locked up in there?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Walking Tour – Saturday, April 23rd, 2016 –
First Calvary Cemetery Walk.
Join Newtown Creek Alliance historian Mitch Waxman at First Calvary Cemetery, found in LIC’s Blissville neighborhood along Newtown Creek. Attendance limited to 15 people.
Click here for more info and ticketing.
unpleasant person
No matter where I go, there I am.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has been particularly verbose and vitriolic this week about subjects substantial, which indicates to those who know me that the proverbial process best described in “Brooklynese” as “gettin my shits togetha” has been underway for the last several weeks. The walking tours season has begun, and I’m planning a series of excursions for the year with Mai Armstrong and the various organizations we work with. Cross your fingers and thank the stars – as boat trips, walking tours, and all kinds of cool stuff are being planned. The Atlas Obscura tour listed below has already sold out, I’m afraid, but I’ve got a few pretty cool irons in the fire right now.
While we’re waiting to finalize things, Mai and I decided we might do a walk through Calvary Cemetery with a smaller than usual group, next weekend – probably Saturday. More on this one Monday, and I’ll have a link ready for those of you who might want to come along.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a few iconic Queens spots which will be hitting centennial anniversaries pretty soon, and I’m trying to figure out a few ways to commemorate that. Again, these things are on the stove’s back burners and simmering right now. A bizarre part of my thought processes, one which always befuddled and confused those unlucky enough to know me, is that I can take a project and tuck it away in my subconscious for processing while my waking mind concentrates on and handles other stuff like walking and laundry. Sometimes these simmering bits are utterly forgotten until I look through one of my notebooks and then – boom – it boils over and unfolds into something conscious and actionable.
Unfortunately, this “unfolding” often happens at 2:30 in the morning, which finds me huddled over the computer scratching away at a project as the sun is coming up. Lack of sleep is why my eyes often look and feel like they’ve been boiled.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Photography wise, there’s a few new locations and opportunities I’m interested in pursuing this summer, and many ongoing spots that I need to exert some real effort into continuing to document. Within the next two weeks, one plans to roam through the predominance of the municipality of Long Island City’s former borders, and do so with camera in hand. There’s night shots I want, places I’ve never been that I intend on visiting, and nothing – NOTHING – is going to stop me from getting to Aquarium in Coney Island this year. I’ve got boats to catch, trains to find…
It should all be a lot of fun, but it’s all still kind of depressing at the same time.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
April 16th, Obscura Day 2016 –
“Creek to Creek Industrial Greenpoint Walking Tour” with Mitch Waxman and Geoff Cobb.
Join Newtown Creek Alliance historian Mitch Waxman and Greenpoint historian and author Geoff Cobb for a three-hour exploration of the coastline of Greenpoint. Click here for more info and ticketing.
repellant mannerisms
No more meetings, supposition instead, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The last few days, you’ve been informed about my various causes and committees, and some of the “inside baseball” on the Newtown Creek story has been offered. There’s more I could tell you, and will in the fullness of time. I’ve got a whole world of weird minglings with the “powers that be” which I can relate, but a lot of these encounters are in situations where some discretion is expected from all parties and I don’t want to act like a jerk and tattle everything I’ve been told about this and that.
One thing which I’ve been annoying the powerful about is the Mayor’s proposed street car system – the BQX. When I bring it up, the powers and potentates of the permanent government exhibit a momentary flash of wild panic, and they then start assuring me that it’s an entirely reasonable proposal, all the while forcing that horrible crocodile grin of the professional politician across their mugs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve got the route of this BQX thing figured out, incidentally. It’s an Einsteinian thought experiment, this, and entirely out of my own brain – none of the officials I know will say anything other than “we’re looking at a number of options” even in informal settings. My impression is that the Mayor just dropped this on officialdom and didn’t really check with anyone to see if the BQX was feasible before announcing it, but that’s strictly an impression. The route I list below is based on my personal knowledge gained from thousands of hours walking the western shore of Long Island, coupled with literally hundreds of water born observations.
At the northern side – it’ll start at the former Politti Power Plant by Astoria Park, travel down Shore Road to the corner of Astoria Park South, and then ride on a causeway built into the water, on its way to the Astoria Point development. It’ll roll around the periphery of the peninsula which Astoria Point will share with NYCHA’s Astoria Houses and then come back to shore at Hallets Cove near Socrates Sculpture Garden. It then heads south along Vernon to LIC, turning west at 46th avenue to meet and make a left on Center Blvd. just after Anable Basin. From there, it continues down to second street and a new drawbridge over Newtown Creek, which meets up with West Street in Greenpoint. South along West to Kent and Williamsburg, then around Wallabout Creek to Kent’s intersection with Flushing Avenue. The BQX then tracks south down Flushing Avenue and around the Navy Yard.
I’ll get to Vinegar Hill and DUMBO in a minute.
Let’s just skip ahead to Brooklyn Bridge Park, where Furman Street would carry BQX south to Columbia and then it would track under the Gowanus Expressway through Red Hook and all the way to Industry City in Sunset Park. I think it would be passing over a retrofitted Hamilton Avenue Bridge spanning over the Gowanus Canal.
Hamilton carries the BQX trackway to Third Avenue and – VOILA – you’re at Industry City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fly in the BQX ointment, as I see it, is precisely that Vinegar Hill section and the area which my dad used to refer to as “Downtown Brooklyn” where the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges converge with Subway lines, highways, a complex of courts, housing projects, government buildings, the rich people in Brooklyn Heights who are easily annoyed and politically relevant, and – literally – the highest real estate valuations which can be found upon the planet along Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.
I have no idea how you’d thread the streetcar needle through that area, and most of the important people (whom you’d be surprised I even know, let alone enjoy congenial relationships with – I still can’t believe some of the folks I get to interact with) I’ve asked how no idea how to do it either. I’ve been told by engineer friends in the construction business that it would be easier to build the two new bridges over Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal for this project, simultaneously, than it will be to acquire or afford enough space in “Downtown Brooklyn” for the BQX.
It’s funny, I have no real opinion on this project. I’m neither for, nor against, as I explain to these members of the permanent government whom I condemn to this conversation. I just think it’s kind of an interesting thought experiment, and when the conversation runs its course – alternatively suggest select bus service which could use the route described above, and you wouldn’t have to build any new bridges or buy up parts of DUMBO to accomplish the goal of the thing and achieve a right of way.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
April 16th, Obscura Day 2016 –
“Creek to Creek Industrial Greenpoint Walking Tour” with Mitch Waxman and Geoff Cobb.
Join Newtown Creek Alliance historian Mitch Waxman and Greenpoint historian and author Geoff Cobb for a three-hour exploration of the coastline of Greenpoint. Click here for more info and ticketing.
threadbare accoutrement
Yet another bit of meeting reportage, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator seems to be on a lot of “steering committees” these days. I’ve long been associated with Newtown Creek Alliance, although we don’t have a steering committee, and contrary to what many believe – I’m not a board member. I’m the official photographer for, and steering committee member of the Working Harbor Committee. Recently, I joined the steering committee of Access Queens. I’m also a steering committee member of the Newtown Creek CAG (Community Advisory Group) for the Federal Superfund situation on Newtown Creek.
The CAG has a series of steering committee only meetings that occur somewhat frequently, where we review and comment on various bits of policy and announcements from the EPA and the Potentially Responsible Parties who are tasked with the scientific analysis and eventual cleanup of Newtown Creek. There’s business people, community activists, policy makers, and representatives from Riverkeeper on the Steering Committee. There’s also a gaggle of Newtown Creek Alliance people on there as well, but given our overwhelming familiarity with the situation that’s sort of a natural fit. A “general” CAG meeting occurs less frequently, but that’s going to change as we get closer to the next phase of the Superfund process, which will discuss the solution to 150 years of environmental degradation based on a nearly decade long scientific survey. General meetings are open to the public if you’re curious, click the link above to find out when the next one is scheduled. If you want to join the CAG, we have a technical advisor who can guide you through the process (which is mainly writing down your name and email in a legible manner).
A recent Community Advisory Group meeting, which was open to the full membership of the CAG (not just the steering committee) occurred at LaGuardia Community College last month on the 22nd of March.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Greenpoint’s Mike Schade, who has been operating as the Co Chair of the CAG, stepped down and we voted my colleague from NCA – Will Elkins – to pick up the mantle as co chair and run with it. The other CAG co chair is Ryan Kuonen, who is chair of Greenpoint’s community board’s environmental committee.
The NYC DEP, which is one of the “potentially responsible parties” along with ExxonMobil, National Grid, Phelps Dodge, and a couple of smaller corporate players like BP and Amoco, offered a presentation to the assembly explaining the concept of “ebulition” to us. Ebulition is essentially the release of droplets or blobs of contaminants from the sediment bed up to the surface of the water, and it’s commonly observed in Newtown Creek. They showed some video of coal tar bubbling up in front of the National Grid bulkheads, which was meant to be an “a ha” moment. To the initiated, however, it’s no secret that there’s 30-40 feet of coal tar and petroleum derivates in the sediments. That’s what brought EPA to Newtown Creek in the first place. Problem is that the ugly leave behinds of industry are intermingled with human waste, which is what the DEP supplies.
Long have I used the term “Black Mayonnaise.”
Prepared by their environmental contractor, Louis Berger, the logic DEP offers in their ebultion argument is that since they aren’t responsible for the presence of petroleum or coal tar in the Creek, and that since the chemical footprint of what comes out of their “combined sewer outfalls” or “CSO’s” isn’t specifically named in the Federal CERCLA – or Superfund – legislation – the community shouldn’t be overly concerned by the raw sewage they pump into the waterway every time it rains. The presentation was offered by Dr. Eileen Mahoney, who is DEP’s Superfund manager, and Dr. Ed Garvey of Louis Berger.
Dr. Mahoney and I, it should be mentioned, aren’t exactly in love with each other and she spent most of her time menacingly glaring at me while speaking, waiting for me to speak up and challenge her assertions. She didn’t realize that my colleague Laura Hoffman was in the room, and the “Mother of Greenpoint” didn’t take kindly to DEP saying that the release of raw sewage into Newtown Creek isn’t a problem.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Newtown Creek community advisory group is actually one of the best organizations to pay attention to at the moment, superfund wise. Everybody in the room is under some sort of Federal level jurisdiction, PRP wise, and therefore the fibbing is generally kept to a minimum. Even the DEP won’t out and out lie to the Feds, as there would be hell to pay. Another thing I’ve been saying for years about the Superfund is that the most interesting parts of the story will be about NYC’s vertical silos of power slamming into the Feds. Immovable object, meet the irresistible force.
I managed to convince some of my friends from LIC and Sunnyside to come to the meeting, and get the activist community of Newtown Creek’s northern shore to begin to engage in the process by joining the CAG. There’s a perception in Queens that Newtown Creek is Brooklyn’s, and particularly Greenpoint’s, problem.
I’ve long argued that this is most definitely not the case, and I’m glad to see that others are beginning to realize it too.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
April 16th, Obscura Day 2016 –
“Creek to Creek Industrial Greenpoint Walking Tour” with Mitch Waxman and Geoff Cobb.
Join Newtown Creek Alliance historian Mitch Waxman and Greenpoint historian and author Geoff Cobb for a three-hour exploration of the coastline of Greenpoint. Click here for more info and ticketing.
The Newtown Pentacle 