Archive for February 2018
faery goldenness
Astoria style Currier and Ives, by request, for George The Atheist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week, frequent commenter George the Atheist opined that he’d like to see some wintertime landscape shots offered at this – your Newtown Pentacle – so when the snow began to fall last Saturday, a humble narrator got busy here in Astoria. The bodega/grocery store pictured above is across the street from HQ, owned by a lovely Lebanese family, and is open nineteen hours every day. They’ve recently began a lunch counter in the back of the shop, and I can recommend the Kofta Hero with everything. That is indeed a tripod shot above, but with increased ISO sensitivity and shutter speed designed to capture the individual snowflakes falling. I did a few smoother shots at lower ISO and longer shutter speeds, but the airborne snow tended to smear and disappear in a long exposure – and just illustrated the conical path which the street lamp’s light was following down to the road.
The Indian place next door to the bodega is pretty good, if you happen to be in the neighborhood. Try the Salmon Tikka.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Above is an example of what happens when you slow things down during weather and accrue some time on the camera sensor, while looking northwards up my block in the direction of one of those new LED lamps which the City has been installing. It’s a whiter and colder light than yesterday’s model of NYC street lamps, which were yellow orange. If you click through on either this or the first shot to my Flickr account, you’ll see that one was experimenting with time and sensitivity in the shots immediately before and after the ones in today’s post. Always messing about, me.
The hard part about shooting in any sort of precipitatating atmosphere doesn’t really involve the camera body (plastic shopping bag cover) but the business end of the lens itself, which quickly becomes spotted with moisture requiring maintenance polishes between shots.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunday last, one suddenly found himself in Astoria Park after dark and so a quick “set up” for this shot of the arches of the New York Connecting Railroad, where it feeds rail traffic onto the Hell Gate Bridge, was accomplished. The snow from Saturday was still present, and all lit up by the yellow orange sodium based lighting which is still used by the Parks Dept. I always refer to the half melted stuff as “rotting snow” for some reason.
One seems to be obsessed with decay. It would also seem that I take requests. What do you want to see? If it’s reasonable, I’ll try and shoot it.
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scarcely be
The world is an increasingly scary place, stay home.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunday nights, and in particular the hours directly before the midnight boundary with Monday is breached, are the only time that the Newtown Creek industrial zone slows down and takes a breath. For a few hours the constant river of vehicular traffic, industrial activity, and omnipresent noise ebb. Any other day or time, and you literally would not have the thirty seconds required for some of these night shots at the Grand Street Bridge to be recorded, due to the vibrations of passing traffic shaking and cavitating the 115 old swing bridge.
The shot above looks southwards towards Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking roughly westward, you can see the glowing eidolon known as the new Kosciuszcko Bridge about a mile away, the crane district of Maspeth on the right, and the English Kills tributary of Newtown Creek’s intersection with the main waterway and the East Branch tributary at center and left. At the bottom of the shot, in the unnaturally green waters of the East Branch, a tepid current was pulsing out from under the bridge which was – from an olfactory point of view – obviously carrying sewage towards the main stem of the Creek.
As a note, the water is lit up at the bottom of the shot by the street lamps of the Grand Street Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As intoned in a previous posting, concern about just how bright the light from the new Kosciuszcko Bridge is has been a subject of conversation of late – and more than once – amongst the Newtown Creek crowd. Light pollution, as it’s known, is meant to confuse the heck out of migratory birds. There’s actually initiatives at the “big” environmental groups to get Manhattan office buildings to dim their lights during certain times of the year in response. Given that Newtown Creek is part of the Atlantic flyover migratory route… well… who the hell cares – it’s Queens.
I guess we’re just going to wait and see what sort of evidentiary observations emerge regarding its effect.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Pentacle HQ is about two miles away from where the new K bridge crosses the water, and I can see this pillar of purple light punching into the clouds from there. I’ve seen reports on social media outlets proclaiming “lights in the sky” from Bushwick and Vinegar Hill and even Manhattan. Nobody in Queens can be bothered to pick up the phone and call either 311 or 911, as somebody else will do it or they just don’t want to get involved. Admittedly, these reports were offered by people who thought they were seeing UFO’s, but…
Just saying… if I don’t know what something is and it’s flying, it’s a UFO. I’d suggest an Internet rabbit hole term for you to follow, by the way, which are “USO” or “unknown submersible objects.” Seriously, google that. Hours of fun.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally, I’ve always gravitated towards more home grown and provable horror. Like the mugger gang that used to operate at the Brooklyn side of the bridge back in the 1910’s, using black jacks and billy clubs to induce unconsciousness in their victims. After emptying the stricken of the contents of their pockets, the gang would toss them into the creek. This is the 1903 version of the Grand Street Bridge pictured above, which the gang is associated with. This bridge replaced earlier models, as discussed in this post.
In 1896, the cops found a Catholic priest name Leonard Syczek floating in the water alongside the 1890 version of the bridge, and wearing the sort of full ceremonial vestments required for conducting a Mass. There’s a story there which has never been fully revealed to me, but I suspect some sort of exorcism related tale will emerge eventually. Or, at least I hope one will.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Due to my weird imaginings and remembered tales, a growing state of panic set in and I realized that one of my spells was coming on. Drops and spikes in cerebral dopamine levels began to occur, and suddenly I had to pee really bad. My feet grew cold, my nose flushed full with snot, and a single tear formed in my left eye bitterly.
While composure was still mine, a phone app was engaged, and a driver was dispatched to shepherd me back to a place where doors can be firmly locked and vouchsafed against the outside world. I left my shoes in the hallway that night, lest I track something in which I had picked up along the banks of the Newtown Creek on a foggy and unusually warm night in February.
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so shunned
Like sand through the hour glass, so too are the sewers of Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finishing up the presentation of several long exposure shots gathered around a foggy Newtown Creek, on an uncharacteristically warm February night following a soaking two day rain event, today’s post finds a humble narrator at the currently undefended border of Brooklyn and Queens at the Newtown Creek tributary known as the “East Branch.” For two thirds of the walk, my colleague Will Elkins from Newtown Creek Alliance was hanging out with me, but he had to split and a humble narrator found himself in a familiar territory known as “alone.”
Sort of like that tree in the shot above, looking north down Metropolitan Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The East Branch is, to say the least, environmentally compromised. The sidewalk I was standing on is actually a walkway, slung atop a seven vaulted open sewer, the twentieth largest in terms of materials vomited into the water in the entire City of New York, called “CSO NC-083.” This pipe allows somewhere’s in the neighborhood of 586 million gallons of untreated sewage egress into this shallow industrial canal annually. You should see it during the day at low tide, I tell ya.
Across the yard is a large lumber yard whose street address is along East Williamsburgh’s Grand Street, and I literally had one foot in Brooklyn and another in Queens while recording its presence.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The streets were deserted of all but occasional vehicle traffic. Because of the fog and the absence of people in what is normally a bustling and fairly dangerous to move through traffic corridor, a real sense of “spooky” permeated the air. An occasional passerby would stumble past me, offer a nod or some throaty greeting sound, and move along shaking their heads.
What? It’s not normal to be standing on a giant sewer in an industrial zone, along a Federal Superfund site in the middle of the night, taking pictures in the dark? Sheesh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above was set to a higher sensitivity in terms of aperture and sensor ISO than the others in this post, as a note. I’m sort of interested in the light gathering power offered by allowing the camera to stare for long periods of time into darkness. Unlike the high ISO shots, however, there could a Bigfoot walking through the shot and the camera wouldn’t record it unless said Sasquatch was to stand stick still for around 35-40 seconds.
I’d recommend using a flash for Bigfoot photos, anyway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I got creeped out by a carload of teenagers at one point and hid behind a mailbox before cutting through a parking lot to get to the other side of the East Branch without having to walk back into Brooklyn where they were headed. Welcome to Queens, by the way. If you head up the hill to the right, you’re going to Ridgewood, stay on Metropolitan to the left and you’re heading towards Maspeth.
Those kids were scary. Teenagers… brrr…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After cutting through my little shortcut over to Grand Avenue (it’s Grand Street in Brooklyn, Grand Avenue in Queens). The final spot I wanted to shoot from was arrived at, the 115 year old Grand Street Bridge.
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present quarters
No dumping allowed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in 1919, Brooklyn Union Gas moved from the Gowanus Canal to Newtown Creek, creating a 115 square acre Manufactured Gas Plant called the Vandervoort Street Facility, with a farm of cylindrical gas holders. BUG would eventually be purchased by Keyspan Energy, which would itself later be acquired by National Grid. This is where the so called “Maspeth Holders” were imploded in 2001, and the property is generally referred to – in modernity – as the “National Grid Site.” They don’t manufacture gas here anymore, instead they store and process “LNG” or Liquified Natural Gas, which is brought out of its cryogenic status through some arcane technological wizardry for pipeline delivery to the ovens and furnaces of Brooklyn.
At least a third of their property is relict, and seemingly abandoned. Along the chain link fences of Vandervoort Street, you’ll notice that they’ve allowed a small lake to form in the footprint of some long ago industrial structure.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While out the other night on my “night shot” walk, mounds of dumped garbage were noticed around the edges of the small lake on the southern or Vandervoort Street side of the National Grid Site. I guess it’s their property, they can do what they want with it, but personally speaking I try not to poop on my living room carpet.
I also try not to poop where a passing photography enthusiast might notice it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There were a couple of these mounds, which looked to be commensurate with what you expect to be able to pack into a medium sized truck. Not sure how long this has been here, as I haven’t wandered past this particular spot in a couple of months.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ll be sending this post over to the National Grid people and asking what’s going on here. If I get an answer from them which I can share, then you Lords and Ladies will certainly be the first to know it.
As a note, the preceding shots were handheld, breaking with the tripod ones for a hot minute,
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Once I turned onto Metropolitan Avenue, however, I got busy with the cable release and tripod action again.
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last message
Night shots from the Penny Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the brand new Kosciuszcko Bridge in the shot above, which has recently replaced a 1939 model that was originally christened as the “New Penny Bridge.” The shot was gathered at the surviving masonry of the 1894 model Penny Bridge, aka the Meeker Avenue Street End. I’m increasingly concerned, incidentally, at how bright the decorative lighting of the new bridge is. Light pollution is a “thing,” after all.
On cloudy nights, you can spot the column of light rising from it miles away, back in Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The LED lighting the NYS DOT installed for the new bridge is weird and unnatural, which spews out artificial looking wavelengths of unbelievably saturated purples and blues bouncing all over the place. The good news about this odd ambience is that I’m able to focus in on that unmarked sewer which drains Calvary Cemetery over on the Queens side, but I wonder what the long term effects will be on critters living in the water column and on migratory birds.
When the second bridge opens and doubles the illumination, it’s going to look like a comic book around here at night.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A longer shot, both in terms of exposure and camera sensitivity, again looking towards the Queens side of the former Penny Bridge. The mirror like quality of the water isn’t due solely to the long exposure, it was positively still out. Unseasonably warm, there was virtually zero wind or breeze.
You could actually discern changes in air pressure just by paying attention to the behavior of your ear drums.
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The Newtown Pentacle 