Archive for the ‘Astoria’ Category
certain theories
Central planning likes homogeneity, which is why they hate Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There really is no place like the Borough of Queens, and in particular the western half of it, for encountering sudden visual serendipity. You’ll notice the Triborough Bridge peeking out from a driveway between two semi detached houses in Astoria, a commanding view of the Manhattan skyline from a toilet’s window on Jackson Avenue in LIC, or a railroad train running through someone’s back yard at a BBQ in Woodside. Maspeth’s elevation offers grandiose views of the entire “soup bowl” surrounding the East River and Manhattan, as does Calvary Cemetery in Blissville, and I can tell you – Landing Lights Park in East Elmhurst is an exceptionally interesting place to bring a camera if you’re an aviation enthusiast.
It’s the patchwork nature of Queens that makes it a special place. Up until a little over a hundred years ago, all the “111” zip codes of modernity were part of an independent Long Island City, Woodside was a seperate town, and so too was Winfield distinct. That’s why you sometimes feel like you’ve crossed from one distinct “zone” into another in Queens, and why we all use our individual community names instead of “Queens” on return address postal labels. Disturbingly heterogenous is the way I’d describe the alignment of street grids, abundance of dead ends, and the chaotic building stock in Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Queens is still the way all of NYC used to be. Organic and quixotic, quite filthy in certain places, and there are entire blocks you’d be better off walking around than down. There’s too much traffic and not enough transit. It’s a Tower of Babel, with dozens of languages being casually overheard as you saunter along. There’s houses of worship to nearly every god you can imagine (haven’t been able to find a temple to Svarožič, the proto Slavic fire God yet, but give me time… it’ll probably be just north east of Elmhurst somewhere). There’s no form of food you cannot seek and find, product you can’t acquire, nor trouble you cannot get into hereabouts. I know a place in Jackson Heights that will custom tailor a gold thread embroidered Hindu wedding suit that comes with curly toe boots, for instance. The one governing rule in Queens is a complete lack of cross compatible unformity from one side of the street to another, and that there really aren’t any sort of rules. You do what you want or can do, until somebody from the City shows up and hands you either a ticket or a cease and desist order.
It drives the urban planning crowd insane, Queens does.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The City Planning types like order, geometric precision, and clarity of purpose. They also like ordering things to be done to Queens in the hope of “fixing” it and making it palatable to Manhattan centric sensibilities, something that started with Robert Moses digging trenches through Astoria so that his arterial highway system could feed traffic to his Triborough Bridge. You don’t get a street with a “Utopia Parkway” cognomen if urban planners aren’t involved.
These folks like “plazas” and theorize about “desire lines” while worrying about density restrictions and guide lines. They spend their working life at the exact intersection where politics and big money real estate crash together, and see some of their best laid plans laid to waste when a concession from a Real Estate Developer is paid to the exigent needs of the Politician who needs to ensure that “the International Brotherhood of Screw Turners Local 6” gets 15 on site positions for the duration of the project. They look and listen as the local community folks yell and scream about gentrification, displacement, and rising rents with calloused eyes. The same sort of eyes that a stripper looks at all males with, since they’ve seen only the toxic excesses and behavioral extremes of the gender. Urban planners, accordingly, have developed a thick skin to the voices of the “locals.” They call us “NIMBY’s” or some other derogatory term.
Thing is, out of chaos comes order, not the other way around. Chaos is life, and entropy is vibrant. Order is staid, banal, maddening. If you allow the urban planning crowd the chance, all of Queens will be covered in campuses visually reminiscent of NYCHA housing. Manhattan is not the model to follow for the “solution to Queens,” rather it’s the problem. I’d rather live in a forest than an orchard, personally.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
increasing pallor
I like when the DEP brings the show to me, saves a lot of walking.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The neighborhood is abuzz at the moment, here in Astoria, over a water main replacement project which has been going on for a month and change now. There’s been a tearing and a wrenching, lots and lots of noise and activity involving heavy equipment, and a somewhat random series of notices taped to the front door promising that DEP water service will be temporarily interrupted. My block’s turn for the latter occurred yesterday, and just down the street from HQ, the DEP and their contractors (Tully) finally opened up the hydrants and got busy with the underground stuff.
I was hanging around the home office yesterday, developing shots from last weekend’s Tugboat Race on the Hudson, but found an interval when it wasn’t raining to grab the tripod and get a few shots of the flowing water.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The actual construction is “up the pipe” from HQ, thank goodness. You should see what the next block over looks like, they’ll be repaving that for months.
Ever notice the way that significant road work and infrastructure repairs only seem to happen when Election time nears? I’m told by those whom this tsunami of backhoes and construction workers have already washed over that a second wave of Con Edison gas main contractors followed the water people, and there’s been a protracted occupation by the NYC DOT nearby as well – who seem to be grinding down and then resurfacing the roads. The Zero Vision people can’t be far away, but it suddenly makes sense as to why the Department of Buildings forced all the local property owners to replace their sidewalks in the last couple of years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a bit difficult to actually lock down on actual government sourced numbers on this, as the DEP continually treats its most mundane capabilities and public facing infrastructure as a state secret.
There’s approximately 109,000 fire hydrants in NYC which are maintained by the NYC DEP for the FDNY’s usage. There’s also an uncountable number of hydrants maintained by other entities both private and public, and notably the NYC Parks Dept. has a large number of them installed on their property which are connected to DEP’s pipes but are Parks’ problem to maintain. DEP’s system uses two basic types of hydrant, the kind pictured above which is an “O’Brien Style Model, Series S,” and the “Dresser 500 Style.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The reason that the hydrant above was left open was to allow the construction crews to bleed out the water flowing through the water main they were replacing. The maximum flow of one these O’Brien models is about 1,000 gallons an hour, I’m told. The water in the hydrants is the same stuff delivered to residences, good old NYC drinking water from the Croton Resovoir system.
There’s two pipe fittings on the hydrants, one is for normal water hookup by FDNY, the other is for use by their pumper trucks. Since the 1980’s, when DEP shut down the old “High Pressure” network that dated back to the dawn of the 20th century, the hydrants have been installed with a street level flange that intersects them to the main. Prior to this, were a car or truck to back into the hydrant (which was directly connected to the buried pipe) it tended to damage the underground pipe and necessitate a messy and expensive repair job that involved opening the street. The flange connection instead allows the hydrant to get knocked about without the buried main pipe getting damaged.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That 1,000 gallons an hour flow was pouring out all day, or at least from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. with a couple of coffee breaks and a lunch hour thrown in. Since I had the camera mounted on the tripod anyway, and my block here in Astoria was closed to traffic because of the construction so I could stand in the street without getting squished by trucks, I decided to follow the flow down to the corner where it was all pissing into the drain.
As a note, DEP doesn’t like to use the word “sewer” ever. They call these bits of their system “street drains.” It’s also not “sewage,” it’s wastewater, they say. I’ve been lectured by one of the high muckety mucks over there about this, being told that the word “sewer” or the term “sewer plant” is offensive to modern day “Wastewater Management Engineers.”
I fear that Louie the garbageman is going to want to be called a “solid waste collection executive” or something soon.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gazing into the abyssal “street drain” in the shot above, one wondered how much of this flow was going to the somewhat archaic “Bowery Bay Wastewater treatment Plant” on the forbidden northern shore of Queens and how much of it was traveling down Astoria’s Broadway to 43rd street where an underground intersection is found that feeds directly into the Dutch Kills tributary of my beloved Newtown Creek over in LIC.
Hey, at least it’s clean water flowing into Dutch Kills for a change, a thousand gallons an hour worth.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
peculiar kind
Back in session, your Newtown Pentacle is.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oh, the humanity and the carnage! Happy Rosh Hashanah to all of you heathens out there, and a short holiday post arrives in your inboxes today. I’ve had quite a last week, and think I may have managed to piss off everybody encountered. It’s what I do, I guess.
Currently, there’s a large group of bicycle enthusiasts angry at me for describing their tactic of waiting for somebody to get killed and then rallying for more bike lanes while acting like buzzards circling a highway and looking for more roadkill. They’re nice.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Taxi people also don’t like me. I personally don’t care that their dying industry has been disrupted by better versions of “for hire” cars. I’ve never had an Uber or Lyft driver refuse to go to Queens, or say they won’t take me to industrial Maspeth from Astoria, and even though I’m sure that the venture capitalists running both of these services are eaters of roasted baby flesh in their off time – when I need a ride on a rainy night, I don’t find myself standing in the middle of nowhere as cab after cab rejects a street hail so that they can get back to Manhattan or the airports.
Google up who owns the majority of the medallions issued by TLC, and you’ll discover a less than salubrious bunch of millionaires whose exploitation of their work force would curl the mustache hair of any 19th century robber baron.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The government people are annoyed by me as well, for the constant pointing out of their shortcomings.
Hey, you don’t run a blog about NYC without the intention of complaining, right?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
unusually odd
Friday odds and ends.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
MOOOOOON. That’s what I said. Ultimately I should have said “cable clutter” since that’s what you notice first. I will never understand how the spectrum/rcn/Verizon people are allowed to get away with this sort of thing in Queens. The City will hand out tickets for looking at something too long in this Borough, treats local businesses like a cash register with fines for minor infractions, and polices parking like clockwork. We have DSNY inspectors picking through the trash, building inspectors ordering sidewalk replacements all willy nilly, but when it comes to the metric shit ton of dead wires hanging off the utility poles – nada.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Same sort of thing applies over in Brooklyn, as a note. If your home had a cracked water pipe, the DEP would gladly bill you for every gallon and then fine you for the flow going into their sewers. When it’s the City, on the other hand…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The thing in the Sapphire Megalith just laughs.
Have a great Labor Day weekend, Lords and Ladies – I’ll be walking amongst you in the shadowed edges, amongst the revenants and along the remnants.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
splintered state
How many bees would you get if you bought a pound of bees?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One had planned on offering you a batty story today, but alas, the photos are still in the oven and are being cooked. It will be a satisfying repast, I believe, but that particular dinner isn’t ready yet. Accordingly, here’s a few odd and end shots collected over the last couple of weeks that utilize the daytime long exposure techniques recently described.
Once it cools down again, and we’re in the post Labor Day period when the beaches are fairly empty, I plan on doing some shooting with this technique in areas with truly energetic water. For now, the East River and my beloved Newtown Creek will just have to do.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What I’m looking for are shorelines with some serious waves blasting against the shoreline. I’m thinking the southern coastlines of Brooklyn are perfect, as is the eastern coastline of Long Island out in Montauk, for this sort of endeavor. These shots use the ten stop ND filter recently acquired, and represent about thirty seconds each of movement for both water and wind blown vegetation.
The first shot is one of the dolphins surrounding the Roosevelt Island Bridge, the second is Hallets Cove in Astoria, and the one below is from Newtown Creek in Maspeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Half of the Newtown Creek’s environmental issues result from a lack of laminar “flow” which allows for the buildup of a bed of sediments referred to as “black mayonnaise.” At low tide, and using the long exposure technique, you can eliminate the specular highlights of the surrounding environment encountered on the surface of the water and peer into the shallows. I’ve always wanted to chuck a chunk of magnesium into the Creek to light up the water column (magnesium burns in water and emits a blinding white light) but I’d probably end up blowing up Maspeth or burning down Greenpoint.
Tours and Events
Canal to Coast: Reuniting the Waters Boat Tour. Only $5!
Thurs, August 30, 2018, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM with Waterfront Alliance
Learn about the origins of Brooklyn’s Erie Basin as the Erie Canal’s ultimate destination, and its current role as a vital resource for maritime industry on this guided tour of Red Hook’s Erie Basin and the Brooklyn working waterfront, departing from and returning to New York Water Taxi’s Red Hook Dock. Tickets here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 