Archive for the ‘Dutch Kills’ Category
shadowy cottage
It’s Friday!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dutch Kills, as in the tributary of Newtown Creek and not the neighborhood just north of Queens Plaza, was where one found himself on a recent late afternoon/evening. I need a bit of exposure to the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself, so a point has been made of revealing myself to the world. For the last several months, one has been vouchsafing his travels in plague torn NYC by leaving HQ late in the evening or just after midnight when all of you cootie carriers have been locked away inside.
Avoidance of sunlight however, has rendered my skinvelope into a sort of translucent jelly. Pallor has contributed to deficiencies of certain vitamins generated when the skinvelope is exposed to solar radiates. One is brittle, stiff, and toadstools have begun to appear on my back. Lichens too.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At Dutch Kills, just like the scene of Skillman Avenue mentioned yesterday, other people were uncharacteristically present. They were jogging, bike riding, and some individuals were even seen scaling things. One was not amused.
Newtown Creek is not a summer camp, yo. Be careful around these parts, as it’s an easy place to get dead, fast. So’s everywhere else these days, I guess, but at least there’s symmetry.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On a somewhat more positive note, this spring’s cadre of feral Kittens have produced a fine corps of Cats. I noticed this adolescent gadabout stalking around on one of the rip/rap piles which form part of the shoreline here at Dutch Kills. I have friends in the bird appreciation world who hate seeing wild cats, since these critters like to eat their critters. Personally, I like seeing ecosystems recovering, and that includes having predators as well as prey (baby chickens). Also, the people who create shelters and leave out water and food for these cats aren’t using chemical pesticides to control their onsite rodent population in the same concentrate that non feline hosting site managers do.
Less poison, more cats, I say. A little predation also force the birds to up their game and evolve, possibly even start a Darwinian arms race. Did you know there used to a be a five foot tall terror goose (Garganornis ballmanni) roaming around Italy? How does a nine feet tall Australian “Demon Duck” sound to you? The only thing standing between you and a future encounter with a terror bird might be that cat. All it takes is one egg with a mixed up genetic formula to start us down a road no one wishes to travel.
Kitty!
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, June 1st. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates as we move into April and beyond, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
doubly terrible
So, what have we learned?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s a view of the Montauk Cutoff above, one which took me a bit of time to line up and shoot, so there it is. While I was carefully manipulating the camera, so too was a humble narrator being closely observed by the local gendarmes, who subtly drove back and forth past me a few times. Same cops, before you ask. They didn’t stop, but wanted me to notice that they had noticed me. Meh.
One thing which I had to reconcile early on in my life was that people notice me. Old ladies clutch their purse, children whimper, men curl their fists when I near. The monster I see in silvered glass reflections hints at why.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s some sort of art installation under the Long Island Expressway, where the 19th street footbridge leads to, and it’s found on a short walkway which connects to 21st street on the north. The artwork is motion activated and involves the use of LED lights which cycle through several primary colors. For what used to be a dark and fairly scary choice, night time walking path wise, all that bright light is nice and welcome.
It’s the furnace light of the gentrification engine though… and it’s coming to Borden and Hunters Point Avenue’s next. Mark my words, the process has already started on what the City Planning crowd calls the “Borden Avenue Corridor.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above was actually handheld, rather than using a tripod for camera support as I did in the first two photos. Stay nimble, say I.
Another set of scenes from a quarantine, next week, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, May 25th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates as we move into April and beyond, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
each description
Empty Corridor.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Were it not for political maneuvering and the inertia for which a certain NYS authority whose mandate involves metropolitan transit is famous for, you’d have some open space in Long Island City to visit during this interminable quarantine, namely the Montauk Cutoff. The cyclopean wall on the left hand side of the shot above supports a set of abandoned railroad tracks which several of my chums and I have been trying to turn into a public space for years at this point. Ennui abounds.
One found his way down here last week, to an area of LIC which I often refer to as “the empty corridor.” When the Long Island Expressway and the Queens Midtown Tunnel were installed here, eight decades of blight began. Devil’s advocate, though, says that the chemical and pharmaceutical factories, as well as the lead foundry and varnish plant which the LIE displaced weren’t exactly “not blight” but at least there were a lot of people with jobs hereabouts as opposed to a lot of people driving back and forth to office jobs in Manhattan.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Empty Corridor is pure and utilitarian. Not a single thought was given to anything natural or “normal.” Anything green growing here is due to shrinking maintenance budgets on behalf of City and State authorities. It’s been decades since they sprayed herbicide, or sent in teams of arborists to clear cut the self seeded trees. Rodents walk around freely here, much to the joy of the residents of a nearby feral cat colony.
Illegal dumping is art. The streets are broken pavement, shattered automotive glass collects along the crushed curbs like rainwater, the air smells of burning wire insulation and automotive exhaust. The buzzing sound of failing electrical transformers echoes out from the manholes, infrequent local traffic rockets past at incredible speed, and half of the street lights are burned out.
I love it so.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When this whole “social distancing” thing started up, I thought of this particular scene and place.
The immense street level loneliness of places like the Empty Corridor belie their actuality. Whereas in my mind, I was totally alone with my personal biome, in reality I was surrounded by crowds of people. The Long Island Expressway is descending into the Queens Midtown Tunnel at the left of the shot, and just beyond the tunnel is the population center of Long Island City at Hunters Point. On the right is the New York City Housing Authority Warehouse, and most of the street parking is occupied by their fleet of trucks. Biome wise, therefore, there’s probably a couple million people’s worth of cooties floating around in the air down here, or they’re stuck to some greasy smear.
I’m going to get the Montauk Cutoff done, as we need some more open space. Or, at least I’m going to reduce the number of streets in Western Queens without sidewalks. There’s no sidewalk on the left side of the street in the shot above, for instance.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, May 25th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates as we move into April and beyond, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
dissolved in
Dutch Kills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s become a fairly rare thing for a humble narrator to be out and about whilst the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself is still wobbling about in the sky, but just the other day this was the case. The light was purple in coloration, given that the aforementioned ocular fireball was descending in the west behind New Jersey.
The air smelled uncharacteristically nice at Dutch Kills, which is a tributary of the fabulous Newtown Creek. Dutch Kills diverges from the larger waterbody some .7 of a mile from Newtown Creek’s intersection with the East River, and proceeds into Long Island City roughly 3/4 of a mile. It’s crossed by multiple bridges, and since maritime industrial usage of the bulkheads is zero, self seeded vegetation lines Dutch Kills’ banks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If you could see through time like me, you’d observe a swampy marshland here in the pre industrial Dutch Kills watershed. Islands forming around Juniper and Cypress roots covered in cosmopolitan plant colonies – mixed speciations of salt resistant shoreline vegetation. Critters would abound – the Dutch settlers in this area often commented on the vast numbers of deer and birds in this area. So many deer, in fact, that the north side of Newtown Creek reportedly had a wolf problem and Government entities offered a paid bounty for wolf pelts all the way up to the Civil War in the 1860’s.
Upland streams and wetlands were eradicated between the Civil War and the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, and the subsequent creation of the Sunnyside Yards and the Degnon Terminal in the 1910’s and 20’s finished the job of isolating Dutch Kills from the land surrounding it. The waterway became an industrial canal, with railroad tracks crisscrossing the reclaimed land around it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It turns out that some of the trees pictured above, the ones with the purple flowers, are called Empress or Princess or Foxglove Trees (Paulownia tomentosa) and their presence is directly linked to the presence of those rail tracks. To start, Empress Trees are quite opportunistic, and can root themselves into cracks in the concrete, or even in the mortar between bricks. They are also an “invasive specie” native to central and western China. Ecologically speaking, they are amazing organisms to encounter, as their leaves “fix” nitrogen in a very efficient fashion and enrich the soil they grow in as dead leaves decay on the ground. Empress trees also drink up a lot of CO2, sequestering 103 metric tons per square acre of the greenhouse gas into their wood. They also look cool, and as mentioned, the flowers are pleasant smelling.
It seems that during the 19th century, Chinese porcelain manufacturers would use the pillowy seeds of Empress Trees for the same purpose that a modern day counterpart would use styrofoam packing peanuts. Cargo traveling by boat and rail spread the seeds along their courses, which is theoretically why you see so many of this type of tree growing wild in areas like Dutch Kills. Perhaps, in a century or so, there will be styrofoam trees found here.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, May 25th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates as we move into April and beyond, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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.
strange minuscule
Still rolling, yo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For those of you ideologically opposed to acknowledging the circumstance of the world surrounding you, a humble narrator recommends that you find the like minded and gather together in large groups. Please pass the doobies about from mouth to mouth, share drinking vessels, and remember to cough on each other as that will really show the snowflakes and liberals what’s for. That’s my public service announcement for the day. Messaging was forwarded from and paid for by Socialism Central.
Pictured above is a Caterpillar 450F, a backhoe loader which weighs about 25,000 lbs. or maybe – it’s just photoshop – part of a Demonrat/International Bankers Cabal conspiracy designed to make you believe that construction equipment is real and subvert your freedoms. You caught me out, spreading the sort of ideas that George Soros and Bill Gates want you to think.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes it isn’t. That abandoned umbrella in the shot above, encountered while wandering around Long Island City one recent evening? Clearly placed there to aid me in producing an image which Alexandria Oh Castro Cortex secretly monetized by diverting tax dollars away from first responders and all of the other noble soldiers of the State. Did you know that a small number of Americans die every year of impalement by cast off umbrellas? They would have died anyway, so what’s the big deal about COVID?
One of my neighbors reminded me just yesterday morning that the only people dying from the virus are “the weak.” A good American point of view, that, and the sort of rousing rhetoric you might associate with Captain America or Superman. The strong survive and the weak or the sick can just go fuck themselves. Buying tombstones stimulates the economy, right?
Ever hear the one about Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, and Rand Paul going into a bar? They order their drinks and then die from drinking tainted booze because there are no regulations governing what bars can serve in a glass. Lol.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you may have guessed, I’m gobsmacked at the colossal lack of empathy and compassion on display at the moment. Just like the asshole parked across the street from my house, while I’m writing this, who is playing his shitty auto tune music at top volume, can we find it in ourselves to think of others for just a moment? Is that too much to ask for? Walk a mile in another man’s shoes? Do unto others?
What am I saying. Go to orphanages and tell the kids that Santa Claus is a deception, designed by the deep state to sell toys.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, May 25th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates as we move into April and beyond, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“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 