Archive for October 2022
gleaming rows
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First off – Newtown Creek Alliance will be honoring John Lipscomb of Riverkeeper, Christine Holowacz, and… your humble narrator… this coming Thursday night (the 20th) at the annual “Tidal Toast” fundraising event. Ticketing information can be found here, and the tax deductible donation of your ticket money will help to fund NCA’s ongoing mission to Reveal, Restore, and Revitalize Newtown Creek. NCA has been at the center of my public life over the last 15 years, and I hope you can make it. This is officially my finale, in terms of public facing events, and the end of this chapter of my life.
An afternoon walk that I found myself on, during the afternoon and evening of the 16th of September, ended up becoming a fairly long and extensive affair. I was “everywhere.” Pictured above is the collapsing bulkhead at 29th street, along Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary. Foremost in my mind these days is the fact that every time I’m visiting one of my “old familiar places,” it might be the last time given that I’m moving away from NYC in the now very near future.
I’ve been talking publicly about this for several months now, of course, but as the timeline grows short, and the seminal date wherein my life inextricably alters is near.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back at HQ in Astoria, it’s all business for me right now. I’ve torn apart most of the habitation, and there are piles and piles of cardboard boxes everywhere. Most of our furniture is in the process of becoming “gone,” at the time you’re reading this. So are the piles of books and comics which I’ve been storing for apparently no reason at all, given that I’ve never reread the things once they went into a box or onto a shelf. Saying that, there’s just something heretical to me about throwing out a book. Beyond all that, these are just “things,” manufactured items in the circular material continuum of a consumer based capitalist system. They have the value we assign to them, ultimately.
Ultimately, I don’t want to pay a mover to transport useless or unused items 400 miles westwards and then store them until I die. The less I take, the less it costs me. Believe me when I tell you that I’m keeping too much stuff anyway. Sentimentalism costs money.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everybody keeps on asking what I’m going to do in Pittsburgh, and will I keep up with updating the Newtown Pentacle. Then they ask me if I’m going to rename it Pittsburgh Pentacle or something. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but for the time being I’m going to keep in publishing here as long as it’s feasible. There’s a few ideas I’m toying around with, but another big change that’s hopefully about to occur – as this post is being written – is that I’m soon going to be a car owner. I’ve got a lot of new bills associated with that one – loan payments, insurance etc., and thereby my financial situation is altered in significant ways. I’ve got a new set of bills to pay, and financial homeostasis demands that my freelancing life give way to a salaried staff job somewhere. Regular tides, and all that.
“All depends on what sort of job I get in Western Pennsylvania,” that’s my answer to the Newtown Pentacle question. Saying all that, I’d be loathe to give up on broadcasting my various adventures. Have no doubt that adventure awaits, though. I can’t sit still. Let’s see.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the “meantime” of the next several weeks, however, I’ll continue to scuttle around and point the camera at things. Pictured is the Borden Avenue Bridge in Long Island City, crossing the Dutch Kills tributary of the lugubrious Newtown Creek. For some reason, the last few weeks I’ve found myself turning the camera sideways for “portrait format” shots. 99.9% of what I’ve shot over the last ten years has been “landscape format,” and I’m desirous of getting a few vertical ones in before I go into the west like one of Tolkien’s elves.
“Every time, right now, might be the last time.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has friends who try to trip him up along Newtown Creek, pointing at this nearby thing or that distant one on the horizon and asking “what’s that?”. I’ve become so familiar with this place, and its features, that trying to trip me up on the subject is a fool’s errand.
What are you asking me about – the Crane company, the Van Iderstine’s property, the nearby NYS DEC’s crank case oil remediation wells, the Railroad Avenue corridor, Waste Management, or maybe Green Asphalt? Maybe you want to know about the first major petroleum refinery in the United States that opened in 1837, just east of here? Lower Montauk tracks of the Long Island Railroad, or “Deadman’s Curve?” Blissville?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Kosciuszcko Bridge pictured above, the new one(s). I got to walk around on it, before it opened, with Carolyn Maloney and Eric Adams amongst others. I was there when Andrew Cuomo cut the ribbon for the new span, standing alongside a group of politicians who would now deny that they ever met him in person, despite the fact that “day of” they formed a little line and then waited on it patiently for their turn to kiss his ass.
Of course, I wasn’t done walking around Queens yet on the 16th of September, and since I was standing on the “LIC/Maspeth” line, I decided to just scuttle on…
More tomorrow, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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.
fired spectacularly
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As alluded to yesterday, the bulkhead situation along the 29th street side of Dutch Kills most definitely got worse in the 2 weeks or so that I hadn’t been there. Unfortunately, I was not about to try and get some shots of it in the dark as it was way too risky due to the degradation of the shoreline. Saying that, I came back a couple of days later, during the afternoon, and documented the scene. I’ll show y’all that in the future.
Meantime, I visited all of my usual “stations of the cross” at Dutch Kills. There’s my favorite tree.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At what used to be the campus of “Irving Subway Grate,” another concrete factory is building its equipment and site. All the politicians are “very concerned” about the environment, but when it comes time to consider a heavy trucking based business from an industrial sector notorious for its product ending up in the water wanting to situate itself in LIC, they allow these businesses to set themselves up on the waterfront. Jobs. No requirement that they use their bulkheads, no preference or encouragement to use the nearby freight rail line. Nada.
Nothing matters, nobody cares.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The last meeting I attended as a Steering Committee member of the Newtown Creek Community Advisory Group was horrific. EPA offered a revised timeline of their Superfund project which pushed the “shovels in the ground” phase of the cleanup back to the 2040’s, with a 2050ish “done” date. Their team describe to the community how hard their jobs are, how many regulations they must oblige and how difficult that is, and how their efforts can basically be sent back to square one by reviews from anonymous “alphabet acronym” Federal level committees that no one has ever heard of. They don’t talk about how the Corporate and Governmental PRP’s – Potentially Responsible Parties – have run them around and around in circles for twelve years.
A blind elephant which only knows how to do one thing – moving forward slowly – and whose pathway can easily be nudged in one direction or another by regulatory or political nudging from the PRP’s Mahouts – that’s the EPA.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Yeah, I’m kind of pissed off about their schedule. Everyone on the meeting call gave the EPA a bit of spleen about the timeline. Many, including myself, commented on how we’ll all be dead and how every member of the EPA team will be long retired from Federal service by the time they stick a shovel into the ground.
I found myself having to remind them that each and every day that goes by is another one during which children in the always growing residential neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek are exposed to its poisons.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Doesn’t matter what they do. The scene you’re looking at above will be under water by 2050. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, and you don’t believe in climate change and rising sea levels. That’s cool.
I’m done, y’all. We had a window, and instead of addressing the existential issues that a metroplex built on a series of sandbar islands faces in the 21st century, we built “affordable” housing and jammed as many people as we could right in next to the water.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not exactly a cheer filled post, this.
My plan is to get out of here asap, and go live in the mountains. What’s your plan? I’m not saying you have to move on it right now, instead I’d predict you want to enact it within the next decade. That’s when things are going to start becoming fairly dicey from a weather point of view here in NYC. Your kids and grandkids are the ones who are going to have to deal and live with terms like “managed retreat.”
Me? I’m not a strong swimmer, so the safety of higher elevation is what I seek in my dotage.
“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.
falling on
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On September 10th, one found himself at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road, here in NYC’s borough of Queens. The Tribute in Lights at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, and this section of Newtown Creek has pretty good views, so there you are.
This shot was gravy, I was there for a musical performance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My pals at Newtown Creek Alliance helped out with this event, called the Newtown Odyssey. Kind of ethereal music, the high concept kind, was being performed. As part of the ensemble, they had rigged up these floating doohickeys with ukulele’s. A bow attached to a connected but separate float that rose and fell with the water differently the ukulele one did would play the ukuleles like violins.
There you go.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in Astoria, on September 13th, and I was at a bar drinking a beer when this “Smash My Trash” truck came by. Do yourself a favor and check out the site link for this outfit.
At last, lords and ladies, real anti-zombie equipment is in the field. Mobile, fuel efficient, smashing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the 14th, a humble narrator waited until about a half hour before sunset to sally forth for an evening constitutional. This was a relatively short walk, all in all. One of the type where I walk somewhere sort of far away from HQ and then take the train back to Astoria. On this particular night, my penultimate destination was the Hunters Point Avenue 7 train stop in Long Island City.
I stopped by “hole reliable” at Sunnyside Yards, and photographed trains for a little while.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a relatively busy interval at hole reliable, and commuter trains were zipping around down at the track level of the Sunnyside Yards. The one, on the left coming at you, is an Amtrak heading for the Hell Gate Bridge via the NY Connecting Railway, and the one on the right is a Long Island Railroad heading into the City.
I’ve literally taken this sort of shot, from this vantage point, thousands of times. Can’t get enough of it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One decided that since I hadn’t been to Dutch Kills in a couple of weeks, and inspected its collapsing bulkhead on 29th street, that it would be a good idea to do so.
South, headed a humble narrator. More tomorrow.
“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.
furtive groping
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described yesterday, one was perambulating through a long walk back to Astoria from East Williamsburgh in Brooklyn, and transversing Maspeth. There’s lots to see, and even more to photograph on this route.
Along the Long Island Railroad tracks nearby the legendary Haberman siding, a company involved in the minerals trade was filling rail cars with their stock products.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A brief sit down in a shady spot along Rust Street was enjoyed, and one of those Spotted Lantern flys landed on a branch nearby. I wish that I had a macro lens on the camera for this one, instead of the long lens telephoto job that was already onboard. This is an extremely cropped and zoomed in photo, if you’re wondering.
One continued down hill, and along the way ran into an old friend with whom I argued about vaccines for a few blocks. She was heading off in another direction, and I was heading for the sort of place which is everybody’s last mailing address, eventually.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was told that this is a Kestrel, by an actual Ornithologist, and it was spotted sitting on top of a statue monument at First Calvary Cemetery in Long Island City’s Blissville section.
It’s been a long, long time since I wandered through Calvary, a place where I used to spend a lot of my time.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All the familiar places, huh? Leaving NYC at the end of the year, and the psychological process that’s kicked off, has made me soppy and sentimental. Every time that I find myself in a place which has had meaning for me in the past, I think “this is likely the last time I’ll see this.”
The last boat trip on Newtown Creek, the last East River Ferry ride, the last walk through Calvary… that’s me, right now. I’m also trying to see a few friends whom I’ve not been in the physical presence of for a while, because realistically – odds are I’ll never see them in person again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After crossing out of Calvary, and over the Long Island Expressway, I was in “proper” Long Island City and heading north. Along the way, I had the horrible realization that the teenagers are physically back in school now when walking past Aviation High School.
Brrr… teenagers… no impulse control.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Some will tell you that the section of Queens you’re looking at above is in Sunnyside, but most of them are Real Estate Agent Shit Flies. I stand hard on the notion that Sunnyside starts at 39th street. Don’t argue with me, I’m right and you’re wrong if you disagree. This is LIC.
More tomorrow.
“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.
subdued sort
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After returning from Pittsburgh, a humble narrator set about developing photos and chilling out for a couple of days before resuming the normal round. Some Newtown Creek Alliance business found me in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburgh section, alongside the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, on September the 8th.
We were checking out a venue for our annual fundraiser – the Tidal Toast – and needed to do a walkthrough. NCA is awarding a humble narrator with the “Reveal” award in this – my last year on Newtown Creek – on October 20th. If you’d like to attend, and support a great organization which has been central to the last 15 years of my life, click here for more information.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a week of traveling in Pittsburgh, and all of those heavy breakfasts, the idea of a walk back to Astoria afterwards sounded fantastic to me. The weather was great, and my camera batteries full.
This is the view from the venue that the Tidal Toast will be held at, which is the Brooklyn studios of a hand painted advertising sign and billboard company called Colossal Media.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My plan for the afternoon was simple. I walked down Grand Street, towards the Grand Street Bridge crossing on Newtown Creek’s tributary English Kills, where Grand Street transmogrifies into Grand Avenue when it enters the Maspeth section of Queens.
Along the way, there’s a lot of sights. Pictured above is a metals recycling operation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Grand Street Bridge, which is going to be replaced fairly soon. Something I’m going to miss out on.
Since I was in the neighborhood, one pointed his toes first at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road, and then at the Maspeth Creek tributary.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There were a passel of Canadian Dicks Geese in the poison waters of Maspeth Creek, swimming around and dunking their heads into the slimy liquidity, to eat up whatever debased forms of life they subsist off of.
In recent years, Newtown Creek has become infested with noisome and quite aggressive Canada Geese.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A cast away automobile was visible on the shoreline when I was passing by. Visibility is related to where you are in the tidal cycle for this sort of thing.
The geese didn’t care, nothing matters to them either.
“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 