Archive for November 2018
intervening hours
Friday has come at last, whew.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As I mentioned yesterday, my stated desire to get high in LIC received a few answers, and one of them presented an opportunity to access the roof decks at one of the titanic new residential towers in the Queens Plaza area. One was offered a fairly limited period of time in which to get busy with the clicking and whirring, as my friend’s generosity was limited by him having preexisting plans for later in the evening.
Pictured above is the zone found around and about the Court Square section, with the Sapphire Megalith at center.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking southeast towards Brooklyn, that’s the Kosciuszcko Bridge and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway at the top of the shot, and the dark mound just in front of it is Calvary Cemetery in the Blissville section. The bright line is the Long Island Expressway, and in the foreground is the Degnon Terminal nearby the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek.
This is how City Planners see things, I suspect. Neat little blocks and distanced “zones” devoid of the complications or existential realities of humanity. Personally, I spend so much time scratching around in the filthy substrate and granular truths of these places, this point of view is like an alien reality to me. Saying that, even all the way up here, there are construction cranes visible.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking west and slightly northwards towards Manhattan and the Queensboro Bridge, the Queensbridge NYCHA houses are filling the right hand side of the image and looking for all the world like charcoal briquettes on a BBQ.
Have a nice holiday weekend, lords and ladies, and I’ll be back Monday with something completely different at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
momentus talk
Thanks…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happy Thanksgiving to all, and to all an indigestion free night.
Shocking news arrived last night, when news of the death of State Senator Jose Peralta at age 47 arrived in my inbox. Sen. Peralta was a really nice guy, and 47 is way too young for anyone to check out. Condolences are offered to his family.
Pictured above is the view that the Amazon folks will be enjoying as they work late into the night in LIC. More on that next week.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My clarion cry to “get high in LIC” was answered by my pal Joe, who lives in one of the tower buildings that have recently risen in the Queens Plaza area. Pictured above is a birds eye view of the same Queensboro Bridge pictured in the first shot, and the intertwining arterial roadways that feed into the span. Unfortunately, the Newtown Creek aerial POV I’m hungry for wasn’t available from this vantage point, but there you are.
A couple of others who live a bit further to the south have responded to my request, and I’m hoping to get the shots I want this weekend. Cross your fingers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Same point of view, which is close to sixty stories above Queens, but is a bit more zoomed in. Tomorrow, I’ll show you some more of what I saw from up on high.
Happy Thanksgiving, lords and ladies.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
professional duty
Friggin Wednesdays…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One suspects that this will be a seldom read post, given that the vast majority of New Yorkers will be going somewhere else today. I plan on staying in Astoria, just to defend the neighborhood against burglars and sneak thiefs.
I also plan on walking out into the concrete devastations of Newtown Creek a few times, in pursuance of more nocturnal shots like the ones in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The City has been replacing its street light heads with cold colored LED luminaires in recent years, which are meant to provide brighter and more directed light onto roadways. The State is still using the old school sodium lights which produce a warm yellow-orange light.
A humble narrator is often fascinated by the spots where these two different colors of artificial light mix, as in the case of the shots above which is in DULIE – Down Under the Long Island Expressway – here in LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As it happened, when I surmounted the Pulaski Bridge in pursuance of gathering a shot from the span (a photo which was unfortunately blurry due to the transmitted vibrations of passing traffic), workers from the NYC DOT Bridges unit shooed me back along the walkway so that they could safely open the draw bridge for a passing tugboat.
Wasn’t that nice of them?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
no triumph
Freaking Tuesdays…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s part of the Degnon Terminal industrial park in LIC seen in the shot above, a complex which is a smidge over a century old. It originally had companies like Ever Ready Battery, American Chicle Gum, Loose Wiles Bakery, and warehouse operations for Manhattan department stores like Bloomingdales and Sterns (my mom called the latter Stoynes). The Real Estate Industrial Complex has done a fantastic job of repopulating the area with smaller corporate entities in recent years, rebranding several of these behemoth structures as “The Factory LIC” or “The Falchi Building” and attracting startups and smaller companies to the cavernous spaces within. LaGuardia Community College occupies one or two of the historic buildings, and a third rate modern one as well. As you move west towards Skillman Avenue along 47th avenue (known 100 years ago as Nelson Avenue, and as Nott Avenue before that, and as the salt meadows or “boueries” of the Payntar Family prior to that), the artisinal and fancy pants face of modernity drops away and you encounter the remains of the real LIC.
Crummy, crumbling, crusty. Hey, unlike in North Brooklyn, at least the Real Estate people didn’t just burn everything down and endanger the lives of the Fire Department people to get to the future.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I checked in on that widening bulkhead collapse on 29th street, at the turning basin of Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary. Nothing has been done, whatsoever, to ameliorate it or the inevitable collapse of 29th street into the poison mud. It’s all kind of depressing, and presuming the thing doesn’t collapse over Thanksgiving weekend, I’m going to have to start annoying the Deputy Commissioners at the city DOT here in Queens about it as soon as the holiday is over. #Carnage gets you a bike lane? How about #MitchinvitesNY1toLIC really soon after the Amazon announcement to talk about literally crumbling road infrastructure and multiple bulkhead collapses along Newtown Creek’s LIC coastline?
Godalmighty, I hate everyone so much because of this kind of stuff. Why am I the only one…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has a strange feeling that 2019 is the year when the bottom will break on this particular bucket of trouble called Long Island City. There’s so many individual problems and issues here – enviromental, municipal infrastructure, transit, the Sunnyside Yards Deck, ludicrous levels of traffic, hospital beds, police capability, FDNY resources… A strong wind blows through these parts and the whole house of cards will come falling down, I tell’s ya.
The Chinese Zodiac informs that 2019 is the year of the pig, but I’m feeling entirely like a different kind of critter will typify the action hereabouts in the coming year.
“Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”
“No, no, by the hair on my chiny chin chin.”
“Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.”
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
disclosures which
Happy Monday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So, this weekend’s nocturnal walk occurred on Saturday night, which was a bit windy for my taste but I’m trying to be out and about as much as possible before proper winter sets in so there you are. Pictured above is Steinway Street, here in Astoria, where i considered getting on the subway in pursuance of getting to LIC but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of daring fate by entering the system. Instead, I scuttled along one of my usual routes, and whilst walking pondered a few things.
Amazon, Queens, life. One of the things I decided to do was put out an open request to you, lords and ladies, in the hope of attaining a point of view for the camera which I’m desirous of.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Terrestrial is how I’d describe the images I usually capture. The point of view is generally somewhere between ground level and roughly 64 inches from it (that’s how tall my tripod is). That “big project” I’ve been working on is nearly finished, but I’m still missing something, and that’s a nocturnal aerial shot of Newtown Creek. Ideally, I’d love to set up and capture the image from the Empire State Building over in the City, but they don’t exactly encourage that sort of thing on the observation deck unless you’ve got TV Network money to convince them into letting you do so. The last time I was up there, I got a bunch of daytime shots like this one, just so you understand what I need to tie a bow around this project of mine and put it to bed.
If you’re reading this in Manhattan, and live or work between 18th and 34th streets, with visual access to the East River and Newtown Creek… I’d love to try and talk you into letting me set up the gear and record your POV. I’d only need around thirty minutes, on a clear night, well after dark which is about six p.m. or later this time of year. Contact me here (link is to my email address “newtownpentacle@yahoo.com” if it sets off any security alerts, there’s nothing “unkosher” in it) if this sounds like fun. I’ll pay you back with some sort of cool thing or other.
The “full view” of the Creek from on high is what I’m looking for, but if you’re living on an upper floor in one of the new buildings in LIC or Greenpoint and can see Newtown Creek from your windows or roof, that would work as well. Pictured above, as a note, is Skillman Avenue alongside the Sunnyside Yards. Those new bike lanes are barely being used for their intended purpose, but they do make a nice safe spot to take pictures from.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the meantime, I’m scratching along in the grit and grime on the streets of Western Queens.
The shot above was captured at the intersection where Queensboro Bridge traffic from Queens Plaza emerges from under the steel of the elevated IRT Flushing line #7 tracks, and travels on one of the five vehicle bridges spanning the trackage of the Sunnyside Yards. Just to the south is Thomson Avenue, which provides another connection for LIC traffic across the Sunnyside Yards via another viaduct, and westwards towards the Court Square section of Hunters Point, and Jackson Avenue. A busy and complicated intersection, this is also where Van Dam Street begins, carrying automotive traffic south towards the Blissville section of LIC and the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge (which overflies the tracks of the Long Island Railroad) after crossing under the Long Island Expressway at Borden Avenue.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 