Archive for December 2021
christmastoria
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Merry Christmas all.
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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.
dully exhibited
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Endeavor found me wandering around Long Island City again recently. For several reasons, mainly climatology related ones, I’ve been keeping the walks a bit shorter in recent weeks and staying a bit closer to HQ. Luckily, Queens never disappoints. HQ’s positioning on the southern border of Astoria allows strategic access to a number of visually interesting locations, like the Sunnyside Yards pictured above.
That’s one of Amtrak’s “high speed” Acela train sets heading towards its maintenance bay. Instinctually, I refer to the large blue building they service the trains at as a “barn,” but I’m sure that isn’t the correct etymology. Regardless, a Festivus greeting is offered to whomsoever it is at Amtrak that is responsible for all of the holes in the fences of the yards which allow me to get these shots.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Did you know that the cops have ambulances of their very own? The NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit operates their cop ambulances out of a former firehouse on Northern Blvd. nearby Steinway Street. Spotted this one just strobing its flashers into the night recently.
NYPD and FDNY have all the best municipal gear. They both have cool marine units, and every possible form of motor vehicle you can think of, but I don’t think that FDNY has helicopters or surveillance drones. They sure don’t have a tank whose main gun has been replaced with a battering ram, armored personnel carriers, or those cool ass K9 trucks that are full of excellent dogs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On my way back to HQ, this puzzling scene was encountered. Not the Queens Cobbler, this, since there’s two shoes. The cobbler only leaves behind one. These children sized rain boots were just sitting there next to a parking meter. I have theories, with my primary one listed below.
Obviously – a condor or other large bird of prey snatched a toddler away so efficiently that the kid was yanked right out of their shoes.
“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.
coffin shaped
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in November, two of my pals from Newtown Creek Alliance – Willis and Gil – got it into their heads to organize a street end cleanup at the Borden Avenue street end in Queens’ Long Island City section. This allowed me to bust their balls by calling the duo “Gillis” for the day, so win. Luckily, the NYC DEP wanted to help and they arranged for a series of dumpsters to be trucked in to support the effort. About 50 people showed up to perform the labor, including a decent number of teenagers. One of those teens dug the creepy baby doll pictured above out of the poison loam surrounding this distaff tributary of the fabulous Newtown Creek.
For the whole set of shots from the effort, wherein you’ll be able to witness the astounding four dumpsters worth of junk that the community gathered during the day, click here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The group’s labor came to an end when a magnificent band of thunderstorms blew through LIC. The high flying Queens Midtown Expressway, whose steel truss roadway hangs some 106 feet over Dutch Kills, provided us with some shelter, but everyone was huddled up against the sides of trucks and wooden fence panels to avoid the horizontal rain. A massive amount of water poured out of the atmosphere, but as is the case with such weather, it was all over in about a half hour.
That’s when we heard a rushing/roaring sound.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Found alongside the Borden Avenue street end is a storm sewer which empties into Dutch Kills. This particular one drains a couple of large industrial properties as well as a couple of streets and a section of the aforementioned Queens Midtown Expressway section of the Long Island Expressway. Thousands of gallons of storm water were ploughing out of the pipe and discharging into the waterway.
What fun.
“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.
retreating figure
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Five thousand four hundred seventy nine days ago a humble narrator was having a pretty bad morning (that’s about one hundred thirty one thousand and four hundred ninety six hours, if you want to get granular). When you learn to think about your life in terms of days rather than rounding up to years, it changes the perspective. My bad morning knocked me off the self chosen path I used to be on and set me on the current one. Ultimately, that bad morning resulted in the shots you see in today’s post being gathered on a cold November night in Queens Plaza by a wandering mendicant cloaked in a filthy black raincoat.
As a note, there are vampires residing in the steel rafters of the elevated tracks in Queens Plaza. You’ll be walking along minding your own business when a bluish white arm suddenly thrusts down at you, snapping its hand open and closed in a desperate attempt at clutching on and pulling you up to feed its need. It’s best to carry a garland of garlic in your camera bag when scuttling through at night, lest you get got. Because of buried streams all around Queens Plaza and the nearby Sunnyside Yards, the Vampires get stuck in this area, as they’re unable to cross over running water. That’s something I’ve learned in the last 5,479 days.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve learned to notice everything around me in this interval. Up, down, all around. Not to take things or people for granted, how not to be cruel or cowardly, and to always be curious. Amazing individuals have entered my life, including several exemplars whom I refer to as “the real thing.” I’ve found myself walking amongst princes and potentates, over bridges and through tunnels, and have seen things which only a handful of other people even know about. It’s been an exhausting 5,479 days, during which I’ve captured and published some 87,186 photographs of what I refer to as “the study area.” What you’re reading right now is the 3,390th posting of the Newtown Pentacle.
Nothing in Queens Plaza is real. The entire place is a built environment, and even the ground you’re walking or driving on is the roof of a structure. Tunnels shoot through the loam, allowing shiny metal boxes to move about below. There’s running water, streams and creeks which only the Lenape had names for, somewhere at the bottom of it all. That’s the flowing water which precludes the Queens Plaza vampires from invading the dense residential communities of nearby Sunnyside or Astoria. There’s also the Mafia, of course, who had long been at war with the undead back in Sicily. The Ottomans brought the Nosferatu plague to them, which then spread out into Eastern Europe on Turkish trade routes. When both vampire and mafioso came to North America in the 19th century, a new front in an old war opened up.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
131,496 hours ago – which translates to some seven million, eight hundred eighty nine thousand and 760 minutes – my very bad morning occurred. There’s multiple timelines which can branch out of that moment, and someday while attending a trans dimensional Council of Mitch’s meeting I hope to explore what happened to all of the other versions of me that walked out of the moment. I’m hoping that one of us pursued mad science and there’s a reality where a “me” has his own army of Atomic Supermen and has taken over the world. I imagine I’d be a real Dick if I had absolute power. I can’t picture myself going “full Hitler” but that’s the thing about me – the second France stepped out of line, I’d likely send the Atomic Supermen in to teach them a lesson. Next thing you know, death camps and I’m attacking Russia during the winter. It’s inevitable, really.
For the curious, the Council of Mitch’s meets once every three years. We all go to a hotel in Puerto Rico, where there’s a ball room that hosts a dimensional nexus. I missed the 2020 one because of COVID, since I live in the reality where that genie got out of the bottle and the other Mitch’s have been spared the experience. We Mitch’s normally get together and explain obvious things to each other, complain a lot, and then compare bits of NYC historical trivia that we’ve uncovered in our individual timelines. It’s all quite pedantic. We all claim to be “Mitch Prime” but acknowledge that we might be wrong about that. We’re all also a bit jealous of each other, but pretend that we’re happy about each other’s achievements and sarcastically passive aggressive about them. All of us agree that it’s been an odd and interesting 5,749 days.
“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.
abnormal ticking
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Well, Merry Christmas, huh? Actually, Festivus comes first – on the 23rd, then Christmas on the 25th, and Kwanzaa is the 26th. So exciting, ain’t it, the holiday season? Yesterday was December the 19th, and I feel compelled to mention the date as being the anniversary of the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, and the USS Constellation fire at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1960. This was your calendrical paragraph of the day, lords and ladies.
The shots in today’s post were captured while scuttling home from a visit to Long Island City’s Degnon Terminal area, which adjoins the Dutch Kills Tributary of Newtown Creek. This particular walk (from and to Astoria) is kind of my default destination when I have no particular destination in mind. My feet just point in the right direction and I follow them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over the last decade, a great gnashing of teeth in Western Queens has revolved around a movement for safer streets. The answer to all things safe has revolved around bicycles, bike lanes, and a well organized lobbying campaign which engages in the tried and true methodology of redefining commonly held terms and tropes. Bike lane advocates offer that a car isn’t “parked” along the curb, instead it’s “free car storage.” Automobile owners and operators are described as wheeling around in “two ton murder machines” for instance. I’m actually quite impressed with some of the people and organizations who have led this charge, and less so with several of the quite volatile sock puppets who show up at governmental meetings.
What is always forgotten in these conversations are pedestrians. As a dedicated pedestrian, I spend a good amount of my time these days dodging electrically powered bikes riding at 20 mph on the sidewalks, and crossing the street in several places in Western Queens is now a horror show. You used to just step off the curb when the vehicles passed by, now you’ve got to worry about a secondary line of traffic too, one which doesn’t obey stop sign/red light/yield to pedestrian indications. At least cars have license plates and an insurance company to sue if you get hit by one. Meanwhile, in all the arguing and tumult, basics like street lighting and roadway maintenance are ignored. The corner above hosts a bike lane on the sidewalk, relegating foot traffic to a narrow and dark corridor.
How narrow and dark, you might ask?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That narrow and dark, I answer. I’ve opined to the “bicycle people,” whose aims I’m generally quite supportive of, that it’s only a matter of time until the political winds blow in a different direction and the City of Greater New York does what it’s historically done regarding every other issue encountered in its long history and legislates that bikes will need to be registered with an bureaucratic agency and be adorned with some sort of license plate. Operator licenses won’t be far behind that, either. This will be a nightmare, using a City version of NYS’s Department of Motor Vehicles as a model. It’ll become a revenue source for the city, with traffic agents handing out tickets for bikes illegally stored on fences and utility poles. Ask a car owner what to expect.
NYC officialdom has told me point blank that bike lanes are easy for them to do, since it’s a low budget improvement they can make. Those little plastic sticks, officially called “flexible delimiters,” are a lot cheaper than actual concrete separation for bike lanes. The ones without the sticks are “just paint.” Now… the paint isn’t paint, it’s a substance called thermoplastic which is applied to the street. When the paint degrades and fades, where does the plastic go? Into the sewers, that’s where, and since NYC has a combined sewer outfall system which discharges directly into the harbor…
We are just doomed. Merry Christmas.
“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 