Archive for September 2020
inextricably blended
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s a bird. Spotted it at Dutch Kills, in Long Island City. Any attempt to identify the bird’s speciation will result in me being mocked for my complete ornithological incompetence, so “bird.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s a materials handler, outfitted with a rig that allows it to pick up railroad box cars, spotted at the Waste Management facility in LIC’s Blissville section.
One experiences greater success with identifying this sort of thing than birds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Those are three birds, in Maspeth.
This has been a minimalist Wednesday kind of post, and one will be back in a more typically verbose fashion tomorrow.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, September 14th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
inhuman squeals
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My recent walks have been far ranging. In a post Zuzu the dog world, one has been able to resume being out of the house for hours and hours as I don’t have to provide her with the acute care and attention she required during her decline. Accordingly, one has been poking his lens into all sorts of places and really burning the shoe leather up. I’ve got an app on my phone which approximates the mileage and “number of steps” it accompanies me through. Resumption of my old “one day out, one day in” schedule has occurred, and a predominance of my time and attentions are being focused on the Newtown Creek again.
According to an app on my phone, which is expertly programmed to guilt me out, I’m walking a bit less than I was this time last year. This time last year, however, you actually had to go to meetings rather than log into them, and those meetings usually take place miles and miles from HQ, and there wasn’t a respiratory plague going around. App chiding notwithstanding, the stamina and ability to march around for six to eight hours at a pop have recently returned. Hibernation is bad for you.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Literally “DUKBO” or “Down Under the Kosciuszcko Bridge Onramp” in Maspeth is where this shot was gathered. Construction on the bridge is more or less finished at this point, but they are still turning the odd screw and tweaking this or that.
This is the 2.1 mile mark on the Newtown Creek, as in it’s that far back from the East River where I was standing. The Penny Bridge site is visible in the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The former property of Phelps Dodge, which occupied this section of the creek in one corporate guise or another for more than a century, the water quality in this area is both complex and poor. The original 19th century owner of this property was General Chemical, which manufactured several exquisitely toxic but lovely chemical cocktails here but their mainstay was sulfuric acid. Phelps Dodge turned the acid factory into a copper refinery, which persisted here well into the late 20th century. There’s a food wholesaler based here now.
Apparently they’re down a shopping cart.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, September 14th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
sane harborage
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week, one was wandering through Blissville. For one reason or another, a humble narrator decided it would be good to get a few shots of the enormous masonry wall offered by First Calvary cemetery for the amusement of passerby on Review Avenue.
My understanding of the function of this structure is that it acts as a retaining wall. Laurel Hill, the landform which Calvary was carved into starting in 1848, used to slope down towards Newtown Creek. Review Avenue is a “cut” and the engineers who worked for the Church probably had to worry about mudslides when laying out the place.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The wall itself is enormous, and based on observation from within the cemetery and atop it, around ten feet thick at the top and an unknown width at bottom. It’s composed on concrete and boulders, and likely bottoms out several yards under the level of the street and sidewalk. The boulders are typical glacial till, likely harvested from native soils, and nothing special.
My intention when shooting this was in theoretical pursuance of doing a cutaway illustration of the wall and subterrene, which was going to be accompanied by a bit of narrative reminiscent of an HP Lovecraft short story called “The Statement of Randolph Carter” wherein the exploration of a mortuary complex’s underground chambers results in a typically horrifying conclusion for a Lovecraft tale. That’s my actual thought process leading up to actuating the camera shutter.
That’s when I spotted them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When queried as to why I always have a camera with me, the answer is usually “if I don’t have this, then a ufo would land in the intersection and Bigfoot and Elvis would disembark from it.” Usually, a camera is your best defense against anything interesting happening within eyeshot.
These two defied that maxim, however, and they are to be applauded.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
They seemed to be a couple, these two, just picking their way along the rock wall.
So intent on their task were they that notice of the strange old fellow with a camera trained on them standing across the street and laughing hysterically didn’t seem to register. This genuinely amused me, and I like to believe that one of them said to the other that “the floor is lava.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
They never got more than five or six feet off the lava, I would mention.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As I’m often quoted as saying – you never know what you’re going to see at Calvary Cemetery. Even when the place has remained inexplicably closed to the public at exactly the moment when its acres of green space have been most needed, the people of LIC will make it their own.
Awesome sauce.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, September 14th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
nameless panic
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The view of NYC you encounter when onboard the Staten Island Ferry is – as the British would say – “gob smacking.” You’re looking at the peninsular section of lower Manhattan called the Battery. To the south east are the Brooklyn and Queens East River coastlines of Long Island, and on the north west is New Jersey and the Hudson River section of the world. My understanding is that there are other places beyond the actual omphalos of the universe which is New York City, but I can’t speak to legend.
The actual site of the Garden of Eden is found at the crossroads of 42nd street and Broadway in Manhattan – that’s a fact. The tree of Good and Evil – it was a fairly substantial sized garden, Eden – was found at Herald Square, which later became a hellmont. The hellmont factor is why the 34th street subway complex is always so incredibly hot, as it’s a vertical tunnel that leads directly to the fire of Gehenna itself.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s always something interesting to see when riding the Staten Island Ferry, such as the Vane Bros. Hunting Creek tug managing a fuel barge with a whole pile of maritime cranes providing a backdrop for it.
One didn’t spend too much time on… Staten Island… and after checking out the vainglorious shopping mall which has recently opened to thunderous silence in St. George – Good Work, EDC – I boarded a Manhattan bound big orange boat and headed back towards Pier 11 and the NYC Ferry Astoria line for a ride back home.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another tug managing another fuel barge was spotted on the way home, this time nearby Corlears Hook – which is better known as the section of Manhattan that the WIlliamsburg Bridge touches down on.
One of the epicenters of ship building during the colonial era in NY Harbor, this is the neighborhood that spawned my favorite “Gangs of New York” era group of tough guy bandits – the Sewer Rats. Freshwater pirates, they would row out into the river in the dead of night and rob anchored shipping.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, September 7th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
tremendous resolution
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s all still there! Despite what the television said, the hot war between Antifa and the Boogaloos hasn’t actually burned the City away and left it looking like Dresden. Son of a gun! That’s the Helen Laraway Tug, spotted as it passed by an old fruit pier in lower Manhattan which has been converted over to a vehicle maintenance facility for the DSNY in modernity. That’s where the proverbial banana boat used to dock, that pier, and it’s the one that your grandmother would accuse new neighbors of having arrived into NYC via.
As mentioned yesterday, a long-standing resolution of mine has been to get the hell out of Queens for an afternoon and go ride on the ferries. This is the first year in more than a decade that I haven’t spent a good number of my summertime evenings riding around on boats and photographing the maritime world, so I had to do something about that before it turns cold and dark again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Brooklyn Bridge – still there. Lower Manhattan too.
My plan for the day was to a) spend as little as possible and b) get as far away from Queens as was feasible. The Astoria line NYC Ferry travels south along the East River. Its new north terminal stop is at 90th st. in Manhattan, then there’s Astoria, Roosevelt Island, LIC North, 34th st., Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the southern terminal stop is at Pier 11 Wall Street in lower Manhattan. From there, the Staten Island Ferry is about a ten minute walk away.
The NYC Ferry Fair was $2.75, and the Staten Island Ferry is free. That’s “A.” Staten Island accomplished “B.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Upon debarking from the NYC Ferry, a dredging operation being committed by the DonJon company was noticed. This is just south of Pier 11, and I can make several presumptions as to who, when, what, where, and why. Thing is that I’d just be speculating that; the EDC, in some time prior to March, decided to expand Ferry operational capabilities here at the foot of Wall Street, to please their masters in the real estate industry. Speculation, however, so don’t take that to the bank.
Tomorrow – what I saw from onboard the big orange boat.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, September 7th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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 