Archive for the ‘Astoria’ Category
scientific effects
Single shots, the humans of Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m taking a break/week off, and will be offering a single shot that I like for one reason or another.
For a change, the shots offered this week will feature people in them. Normally, I go to some effort to have no humans of New York at all in my photos, but occasionally I do the opposite.
Pictured above is one of my neighbors in Astoria, a seemingly homeless fellow known for his love of drink.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Poison Cauldron Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
Wednesday, August 24, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. –
Port Newark Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
laboratory windows
Single shots, the humans of Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m taking a break/week off, and will be offering a single shot that I like for one reason or another.
For a change, the shots offered this week will feature people in them. Normally, I go to some effort to have no humans of New York at all in my photos, but occasionally I do the opposite.
Pictured above is one of my neighbors in Astoria, a fellow known for his bellowing laughter.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Poison Cauldron Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
Wednesday, August 24, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. –
Port Newark Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
proferred food
Boredom, self hatred, and megalomaniacal fantasy – in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Possessed of a somewhat solitary and depressive personality type, a humble narrator is often forced to lurch forth onto the streets in search of diversion. These excursions are necessary, lest a psychological tumult be allowed to form behind the eyes and between the ears. Proprioception for one such as myself views the world thusly, with everything below the vault of the skull considered as somehow external – arms, legs, gut, and all the rest are merely there. “I” am found a few inches back from and equidistant to the ocular, nasal, mandibular, and auditory apparatus.
I’m all ‘effed up.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of my regular walks involves heading over to the Hells Gate section of the East River in Astoria from Newtown Pentacle HQ, which is found on the south eastern side of the neighborhood nearby its borders with LIC, Sunnyside, and Woodside. It’s a short walk, by my standards, which – there and back again – usually consumes about two hours of my time and provides some much needed physical exercise.
Saying that, I don’t always process this particular perambulatory route as being a particularly productive one from a photographic point of view.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My colleague Kevin Walsh from Forgotten-NY often wanders through residential neighborhoods and has a fine time of it, but one such as myself shuns populated places. A humble narrator enjoys the howling winds and concrete devastations, and is drawn to lonely, damned, or deserted places. Give me the abandoned, the derelict, the despoiled, the barren, the broken, the horrible. Oh to dance merrily along the poison shoreline and shattered bulkheads of some flowing gelatinous horror, with the night gaunts…
Of course, one cannot spend all of his time at Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Truth be told, one of the things that draws me time and again to Hells Gate is that it’s the antechamber of the “House of Moses,” where mighty Triborough reigns. One of the true signs of a growing madness is working on a “theory of everything,” and I’m afraid to report that one is indeed going down that road. White laboratory coats, long black vinyl gloves, and a series of goggles are on order at a certain Internet retailer named for a South American river system, and genetic samples of the long deceased Mr. Moses are in the freezer.
My plan is to clone the master builder, and release an army of “Mosei” upon the world. They shall pave over everything and create a thousand lane highway circling the globe.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My Moses army will pay no mind to complaints from the citizenry, instead they will crush all opposition. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” will be their mantra as they pour concrete for a highway whose path goes right through St. Peter’s in Rome on its way to and through Mecca on its way towards China. The Great Wall? Highway arches will be carved through it, but they will fall short of allowing buses to pass beneath them.
Part the Red Sea? The Mosei will turn the Red Sea into a parking lot dwarfing those of Riis Park or Jones Beach.. Enough of this hippie dippie environmentalist fad, let the automobile reign! The Mosei won’t lead a chosen people, instead they’ll choose which people to lead and where they’ll be led to.
Saying that, Amazon claims they’re out of stock on the mad scientist goggles, so my evil plans will just have to sit on the back burner. Someday, I tell you, someday… a real rain will come…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Megalomaniacal fantasy notwithstanding, one still had a rather formidable workload waiting for him back at HQ, so my sojourn to the forbidden northern coast of Queens was abbreviated and my scuttle turned back towards overly familiar vicinities. For some reason, every time I cross 31st street on my way home from Hells Gate, it feels like I’m passing through the gates of Mordor.
It’s probably the perennial shadows, or the smell of sulfur.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On Astoria Blvd., just before Steinway Street, this amusing signage was encountered on the door of a laundromat. One of the fun parts of living in a neighborhood renowned for its enormous immigrant population and legendary “diversity” is signage written by people who have less than a passing familiarity with English language grammar. Most of the neighbors just spell things the way that they sound to them, as is evinced above.
I like to believe that only “cos players” can piss therein.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, August 14th, 11:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Calvary Cemetery Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
Sunday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Poison Cauldron Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
Wednesday, August 24, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. –
Port Newark Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
accomplished whatever
whatever, dude.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you might discern from the shot above, Our Lady of the Pentacle has a lovely set of tomatoes. She’s been busy growing stuff all summer, here at HQ in Astoria. Today’s post is a rather light one, and it’s being published late to boot, which long time readers of this – your Newtown Pentacle – will tell you is indicative of an enormous amount of new photos and posts being in production at the moment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happily did I observe a flurry of published articles over the last week, proclaiming the Bronx as the new frontier for the Real Estate Industrial Complex. Hopefully, the ruination of Brooklyn and Queens will ebb a bit, as the REBNY shit flies find themselves attracted to those greener pastures and lower property evaluations that are found to the north.
Robert Moses did his level best to annihilate the Bronx decades ago, just as he did to Queens back in the 1930’s and 40’s. Perhaps the REBNY people can finish the job, and finish twisting City Hall’s knife into the “final frontier” by eliminating actual affordable housing in the name of building “affordable housing.” Carrion eaters follow the fecund scent of decaying meat after all, and despite their best efforts they haven’t managed to totally annihilate Brooklyn or Queens yet – they’ve just driven property prices so high that no one can afford to build anything here anymore. Bronx people, if you need to talk, ring us up.
The shit flies will be promising you new schools, community spaces, and waterfront parks – make sure you get them first, before they start to build the condos.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
How green does your garden grow? Whatever, dude, whatever.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, August 14th, 11:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Calvary Cemetery Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
Sunday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Poison Cauldron Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
following day
puzzling things, general weirdness, and an update on that transformer fire in Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Out on the water in NY Harbor recently, the scene above was observed.
Famously, one of those “harbor advocacy” statements which one is oft heard announcing on my walking and boat tours is that “maritime is the greenest way to transport cargo, with a single barge carrying the equivalent of thirty eight trucks worth of stuff,” but you seldom see it literally expressed by a barge carrying an actual truck. My rhetorical statement is actually built around a full sized flat top barge carrying cargo containers and guided by harbor sized tugboat type of scenario, rather than a smallish work barge that’s carrying a dump truck and being towed by a little push boat.
The push boat is the TJ Miller, btw, which operates of Staten Island’s Millers Landing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Passing by the Fuller Brush, or Flatiron building if you must, recently – I couldn’t get the whole 23 Skidoo stuff to exit my brain. I went to college a few blocks away at the School of Visual Arts, and Manhattan’s 23rd street was – and remains – one of the main thoroughfares of my life. Post college, most of the advertising agencies which I worked for were located somewhere within a few blocks of the Flatiron for some reason. I seldom photograph along its route, however, as the School of Visual Arts is – as mentioned – just down the block. They have a world class photography program there, and the 23rd street corridor is probably one of the most “captured” spots on the planet. While I was at SVA, I was in the illustration program, so unfortunately I haven’t got much in the way of documentation of the 1980’s version of it as I was drawing comics and painting and stuff back then.
It makes me wonder, however. Taking the Flatiron as an example, which is one of the most photographed buildings in NYC, and has been for a century… one ponders what information about our environment could be gleaned from assembling the decades long recordings of its appearance. Weather patterns, erosion, particulate levels in the air?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in Astoria, after that transformer explosion I described to you a couple of weeks ago, it took the Con Ed guys about three days – working 24 hours, mind you – to put things back in order. There’s still crews working around two to three blocks north and to south, as presumptively wherever the wires connected to that failed equipment led to must have been also been damaged or affected by the event. That’s my guess anyway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It took the Con Ed crews just under a day to get the blacked out block of 44th street between 34 avenue and Broadway back on the grid, but that’s when their real job began. I don’t know too much about their operation, but I can describe how it played out. First there were emergency crews who arrived in red trucks who “put out the fire.” They were followed by a far larger contingent of blue truck crews who arrived with a variety of equipment and what seemed like a third party contractor. As the project went on, the cable trucks arrived, one of which is in the shots above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The (seemingly) third party contractor got busy digging up a pretty sizable trench leading from the transformer and following the curbline. The blue truck guys were moving in and out the manholes and had a substantial amount of equipment deployed. They were all working during the sweltering July heat, incidentally.
About three days after the transformer fire, they all suddenly left.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just another blackout in Astoria, Queens, I guess.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Tuesday, July 26, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. –
Glittering Realms Walking tour,
with NYC H2O. Click here for more details.
Wednesday, July 27, 1st trip – 4:50 p.m. 2nd trip – 6:50 p.m. –
2 Newtown Creek Boat Tours,
with Open House NY. Click here for more details.
Saturday, July 30, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
DUPBO Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
Sunday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Poison Cauldron Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 