dark nether
They brought the show to me!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator spends a great deal of time and effort trying to find something interesting to take pictures of. Often, upon stumbling across an interesting scene, one has to think fast about how to manipulate the camera in unfamiliar settings. Imagine then, my happiness when the most familiar of settings – the stretch of Broadway here in Astoria that I live along – was suddenly plastered with orange signs proclaiming that a road paving operation was nigh.
The shots in the embedded YouTube video above were gathered over the course of a few nights. Terrifically dusty and noisy, the first night saw a road milling contractor at work scratching away the asphalt roadbed of Broadway. On two subsequent evenings, workers of the NYC DOT arrived with a lot of heavy equipment to lay down a new asphalt roadbed. They were pretty noisy as well, and then there’s that delicious hot asphalt smell…
No sound on the slideshow video above, so no need to listen for something. Not yet, anyway. Hint, hint.
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Upcoming Tours and Events
Thursday, July 25, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Greenpoint Walking Tour w NYCH20
Explore Greenpoint’s post industrial landscape and waterfront with Newtown Creek Alliance historian Mitch Waxman.
Click here for ticketing and more information.
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 
[…] Act, dictating that NYC can no longer use landfills to dispose of road surfacing materials. When the contractors working for the NYC Department of Transportation scrape away a road’s armor, the milled materials are transported to Green Asphalt or a […]
altered youth | The Newtown Pentacle
March 12, 2020 at 11:01 am
[…] in the recycling business, ultimately. When the NYC DOT or its contractors are resurfacing a road, milling machines are brought in first, which scratch away the top layers of “road armor” which are collected in dump trucks. That […]
hieroglyphed dial | The Newtown Pentacle
May 17, 2021 at 1:00 pm