Archive for March 2019
recalcitrant subject
Just like a venereal disease, the Sunnyside Yards deck keeps on coming back.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Have to hand it to the NYC EDC. Like a career boxer, despite taking a whupping in their last trip to the ring (Amazon), they have laced the gloves back up and they’re back with another project that nobody in Western Queens wants to see happen – decking over the Sunnyside Yards to facilitate the dreams of avarice enjoyed by their sponsors in the Real Estate Industrial Complex. As you may have noticed, Long Island City doesn’t exactly need “fuel” to spur economic development hereabouts, as “growth” is occurring so rapidly and uncontrollably at the moment that one might describe it as a rapidly mestastasizing cancer instead.
To this end, which would be the construction of a residential Death Star on Northern Blvd., the EDC has announced that the second of their Potemkin Village Dog and Pony Shows will occur on the 26th of March. It’s a public meeting, so come with?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the second soirée for EDC. The first one was last year at LaGuardia Comunity College. They arranged for a significant number of the trade union members to show up, which created an intimidating environment for the actual community to voice up against the idea. Also, they seemingly invited the cast of extras who have been out of work since the Sopranos went off the air. Who wasn’t in the room? The bankers and insurance brokers who will leverage the City’s debt associated with this project, which will be tens (if not hundreds) of billions of your tax dollars, nor the Real Estate Titans, or the construction mega companies who will construct the deck like AECOM, Granite, or Skanska (who will carry their profits out of state and off of American soil).
The people working for EDC aren’t bad people by any means, incidentally. I would just point out that their track record sucks. Do you see a Ferris Wheel rising over Staten Island? Spend much time at the Brookyn Army Terminal, do you? Do you think Battery Park City just rocks? If you were for Amazon or against it, you can blame EDC for that one too.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Remember, this deck of theirs will rise a minimum of five stories from the current street elevations surrounding it. The top of the deck will become “ground zero” for dozens of luxury residential towers that will host about fifty thousand apartments. No new hospitals, police, or FDNY facilities are part of this plan. Will they dangle a new park in front of you like some cheap trollop as an enticement? Will they promise you local jobs (how many people in Western Queens are qualified to build a deck over a rail yard)? Will you fall for the bait and switch? EDC anticipates that rent in the neighborhoods surrounding the project would go up, rather than down, as they bring the new inventory on board. How does that work? Economic development doesn’t obey the law of supply and demand?
Ask EDC how they plan on getting the construction materials to the job site. Ask them if they will force MTA to upgrade its transit lines. Ask them where these fifty thousand toilets will flush to. Ask them where they live, and where they’re from.
Send them back to Manhattan, and back to their drawing boards.
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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
cyclopean portent
Single shot today, from LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Running a bit behind schedule today, and you lords and ladies suffer for it as a single shot from the Thomson Avenue Viaduct greets you today. This cold snap has absolutely shut my operation down in the last week, I tell you, and I’m hurting for new shots to show you. The good news is that next week promises to be more climatologically agreeable, and my schedule is packed with things to do that take place in interesting places, so…
Back tomorrow…
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
such odours
Hiding in the dark, me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sort of places I inhabit, and any physical description of me, are best analogized by early European folkloric accounts of a wild man living in the wasteland and hiding in the shadows. That’s where I like to menace passerby and scare children from, the scrabbly edges of civilization. Sometimes I like to howl, which booms alongst the bulkheads. Hurling rocks at isolated dwellings, allowing photographers to get blurry shots of me moving through the brush, tearing up vegetable gardens in the dead of night… Maybe it’s more of a Native American legendarium that I belong to.
I’ve become a Creeksquatch.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These are all handheld shots in today’s post, not the long exposure type which I’ve been displaying for awhile. The cold patch of the last month or so has really gotten in my way, and the only reason I was on scene to capture these was because I was helping someone out. This fellow I met on one of my tours last year was desirous of doing audio recordings around the Creek using a super sensitive microphone and recording device, and he asked if I’d take him around the creek at night to do his thing. We donned our reflective vests and went for a short walk after one of the many Newtown Creek Alliance oriented community meetings which I religiously attend.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The path I chose to take this fellow on was a fairly safe one, centered in on Long Island City and Blissville.
Above is the garbage train, moving around under the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge in Blissville.
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
mere nerves
One in the chamber, safety off, that’s me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
How I love watching the humans dance. The jockeying for position, the desire to be recognized and loved by their “betters”… their sincere belief that you can reason with the unreasonable and make lemonade when life gives you lemons. Trying to make the best of a bad situation? Seeking to find common ground with somebody who wants to kill or replace you? Is the knife at your throat clean at least?
Maybe there’s still too much Brooklyn in me, but when someone tries to hurt me I hurt them first, and in a way that they will remember. Maybe there’s too much inheritance in me from the side of my family descended from the Jews of Russia, but when the Cossacks arrive you can either make them disappear and send riderless horses back to the barracks or they will make you disappear. They were sent to harm you, and no amount of talking to the Cossacks will bring them over to your side. They will cut your head off and play polo with it in the village square, then rape your mother. You mean nothing to Cossacks, employed as they are by a foreign despot, and they will make a game out of destroying you and yours for their own advantage in the eyes of their god king.
When the Cossacks come and announce they want to deck over the Sunnyside Yards, you fight them. End of parable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is continually dismayed by those who dismiss the memories of the last hundred encounters with the Cossacks, thinking that since there’s a new Tsar on the throne that this time things will go differently. Mounted Calvary soldiers sent by a despotic regime to visit distant peasant villages seldom arrive bearing either gifts or good news. Neither do real estate industrial complex employed governmental development teams have the best interests of long established communities in mind when they announce the desire to construct mega projects.
As a note, the Sunnyside Yards people have been walking this project around in Manhattan. A group of architecture students I met, who were taking a theoretical stab at the project, included a kid from China who commented to me that “this project would be so easy to do in Beijing, since you wouldn’t have to worry about community sentiment or input.”
Cossacks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Have you noticed how much the city planners seem to hate cities?
They abhor the chaos, the organic growth, the unpredictability of it all. They want to create shopping mall corridors instead of streets, lined with neat panes of glass. They are Cossacks, who pine for depostism.
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
unmistakable replacement
Truth tellers of the Subway!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Occasion found me riding on the redoubtable IRT Flushing line recently, whereupon an older fellow noticed my camera and commented that I was an intelligence agent. I held my fingers up to my lips and made a shush sound, saying that the Russians were watching and asked him not to blow my cover. Once the train got under way, he took up position mid car and began a staggeringly well rehearsed speech about the Peoples Republic of China’s domestic security operations. What made this fellow stand out in my mind was – and I should mention that I’ve read a bit about how they handle dissent over there in the Middle Kingdom – was that he got a lot of it right. Names of the various agencies, location of reeducation centers and prisons… it’s scary when the paranoids are actually right about something.
He then began to opine that babies are traps set by female intelligence agents designed to snare unsuspecting males into child support servitude… but his info on the Chinese internal security system actually sounded fairly solid – and jibed with my admittedly limited knowledge of the subject. Maybe I’m destined to become one of those guys in my old age, the ones who carry a bunch of shopping bags and proclaim the truth of our times loudly to strangers on the 7 train.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Given the headlines in recent years, it’s hard not to believe any claim – no matter how wild it is. We seem to have abandoned evidence and data based thinking as a culture these days. Not too long ago, I called up my buddy Kevin from Forgotten-NY to discuss a couple of things and during our chat I opined that if he told that “a flying jelly candy horse” was spotted over Bayside I’d have to believe it since anything seems possible at the moment. I suggest you hit YouTube at some point and search for “Flat Earth” if you want to see what I mean, as far as the abandonment of evidence and data based decision making.
Back in high school and college, as my friends and I would engage in long conversations trying to figure the world out, we’d always apply Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is usually true) to any crazy story we came across. My answer to 911 conspiracy theorists has always been to remind them of every other thing which the George W. Bush White House tried to pull off, and ask if there was any indication that the same people who brought you the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 invasion of Iraq had it in them to pull off an absolutely perfect “false flag” operation. I then remind them of the complexities involved in arranging for six people to meet up for lunch at a diner on a Saturday afternoon (there’s always a Vegan to account for, and someone named Sharon who’s always late).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I don’t encounter the same sort of crazy on the IND lines, downstairs as it were, in the subways. The E/R/M lines are plagued by women doing the “Gypsy baby” routine, those acrobatic dancer kids, and the freaking mariachis. They’re all just grifting or busking though, and trying to earn a living. The Chinese conspiracy guy on the 7 line was highly entertaining, to me at least, and made my $2.75 fare a gladly spent trifle.
Here are three of my paranoid wonderings;
The woman who calls herself Britney Spears currently performing in Las Vegas is a lookalike double. The real Britney Spears is being held prisoner by her managers in a Nevada mental asylum. #freebritney.
The plastic or metal tips on your shoelaces are called aglets. Their purpose is sinister. #thetruthwillcomeout
Given the relative scale of the Gummi Bear to the Gummi Worm, it’s obvious that the Gummi universe is actually based on the Dune universe, with the Bears being the Freemen and the Gummi Worm representing the sandworm Shai Halud. #thesleeperwillawaken
Repent!
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 