The Newtown Pentacle

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Archives #019

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Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The most wonderful time of the year, and I’m missing it. Bah.

Some good news which this humble narrator can share with you is that my doctor has cleared me for use one of those boot things and then encouraged me to WALK AROUND WITH IT ON. I start physical therapy next week, so I’m taking things slow, but I actually left the house yesterday and drove around Pittsburgh for a few hours. Filled the car’s gas tank while I was out, and had the camera with me while I was motoring about and listening to Black Sabbath, on an atypically warm afternoon. Didn’t take a single shot, the camera just came along for the ride.

Hey! It’s Halloween!

A fairly well read post – by this point in time some 15 years after its original publishing date – is 2009’s Halloween offering of a western Queens ghost story called ‘The White Lady of Astoria.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As I’ve mentioned in the past, given the number of people and residences in NYC, there are surprisingly few city ghost stories. I’ve always chalked this up to real estate valuation, as haunted condos don’t sell as well as the ones without spectral amenities. NYPD seems to not use the term ‘serial killer’ that often, I’d also mention. Probably don’t want to get the people nervous.

Just saying… If you calculate NYC’s head count (The New York City metropolitan region, often called the Tri-State Area, has a population of around 20 million people. This includes New York City itself and surrounding areas in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), a strictly statistical point of view demands that there have to be at least a few serial killers loose and ‘doing their thing’ in the five boroughs at any given moment. (Historically, it’s estimated that about 0.3-0.4 serial killers per one million people are active in the U.S. each year. Translating that into a percentage, this rate would be approximately 0.00003% to 0.00004% per million people annually.)

2014 saw my revelation of the Queens Cobbler’s activities back in Western Queens and revealed them to the world. How’s that for a Halloween post?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I seem to recall being ‘stuck’ for a Halloween post for this one. A post I was working on fell apart, so I left the house and shot some spooky photos around LIC at night, and got to writing something ‘grimdark.’ The rail bridges in the shot above are the Montauk Cutoff, by the way, on Skillman Avenue.

This grimdark post was from Halloween, in 2018,

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.

Written by Mitch Waxman

October 31, 2024 at 11:00 am

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