Archive for the ‘East River’ Category
bursting cachinations
Lurking in fear, for today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Onboard the NYC Ferry’s Astoria line heading for the City recently, one felt the oppressive gaze of an impossible thing that dwells within the cupola of the Sapphire Megalith of Long Island City (an inhuman intelligence which cannot possibly exist, nor stare down with avarice upon the world of men through an unblinking three lobed eye) fix upon me from up on high. Paranoid ideation and local rumor would suggest that other attentions were gathered from below the greasy waters as well. There are stories told in the Ravenswood section of Long Island City which describe frog or fish like men who sometimes emerge from the eastern channel of the estuarial East River, specifically the section of the waterway found between Roosevelt Island and Queens.
Who can guess what there may be down there, buried in the slime and post industrial sediments?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The thing in the megalith, which neither breathes nor sleeps, only knows hunger – and contempt – for the world of man. The aims and actions of the things in the river are less obvious, hidden as they are in the dark and sepulchral depths where the emanations of the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself never reach. In the aqueous silt, where the worms gnaw and wriggle and slither, there is rumored to be a complex of shadowed tunnels reaching out to all corners of the Great City above. These tunnels breach into the City’s sewers, allowing them egress to all sections and locales. Only the Mayors of NYC know the truth of the extent of these amphibian stranger’s ambitions, knowledge of which is passed from potentate to potentate across the generations in a letter originally penned by Mayor Fernando Wood in 1855.
Rumors of the contents of this letter are dearly held, but during a drunken stupor at a midtown speakeasy back in 1927, Mayor Jimmy Walker hinted not just at the confirmable presence of an amphibian race of “Deep Ones” in NY Harbor but also alluded to their monstrous desire to interbreed with terrestrial New Yorkers. Efforts by the fish/frog things in that pursuit had occurred during raids on the asylums and workhouses of Welfare (Roosevelt) Island during the late 19th century, launched from the water in the dead of night. The progeny produced by these couplings were, as the inebriated Walker indicated, a “hybrid pestilence” which demanded destruction. The victimized women who incubated them were afterwards found to be hopelessly insane, and driven towards suicide.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mariners and Longshoremen have long hinted at the presence of things observed in the Upper Harbor of New York, but never explicitly discuss such matters with outsiders. Queer and persistent raspings at the keel in Buttermilk Channel, those bizarre underwater light sources keeping pace with your boat at Hells Gate, the basso sounds encountered at Sandy Hook… those serpentine shapes that must have just been some extraordinarily large fish… perhaps a large Sturgeon? Those weird dark lumps spotted in the water at Newtown Creek that just disappear into the depths mere seconds after they are noticed?
Who, truly, can guess… all there is that may be found down there in the drowned metropolis of the worm just off shore?
Upcoming Tours and Events
June 9th – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
frenetic explosiveness
What ever happened to the anal probes?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Every chance I’ve had to get out on the water has been eagerly seized at in the last couple of weeks, despite the tepid nature of the springtime warmup. The weather was a lot better when Bloomberg and Obama were in office, so I blame DeBlasio and Trump for the unseasonable atmospherics.
One wonders if during the BloomBama years there was some sort of super scientific weather control technology at work, and that the DeTrumpio era of ascendant flat earthers and fake news decriers has ushered in a new dark age of ignorant speculation which has rendered formerly functioning technologies moot. Rhetoric over data, belief over baselines, and the truth is what they say it is because you can trust them not to lie like everybody else. Hell in a handbasket, us, with the Dope From Park Slope locally and a guy who actually went bankrupt in the Casino business nationally.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent conversations found me assuring a Republican friend that the Democrats did not, in fact, invite MS-13 into the country, and a liberal Democrat audience received a rousing lecture about first firearms and then political economies (the currency in that particular economy is called patronage, the discussion was about its value, who has it and who doesn’t). I also explained that we have the worst possible situation right now, where the children of politicians go to politician school where they get law degrees with a masters in politics, and then go to work for other politicians and amass fortunes of patronage until their respective parties decide it’s “their turn” to run. In Rome, these people would have been called patricians.
Has everyone lost their damned minds of late? Doesn’t anyone read a newspaper occasionally, or is it just posts titled “top 5 reasons why Republics fail” at buzzfeed?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Commonly held issues, like garbage and raw sewage in the river? Nope. Crumbling bridges and tunnels, a national locomotive freight system worth hanging your hat on, hospitals? Are we talking about the near future crisis in elder care when the baby boomers are fully immersed in senility and old age? A plan for national flood walls and levies… How about…
…Hey, I think I just saw Elvis Presley installing Hillary Clinton’s email server on Bigfoot’s UFO, which is staffed with Vladimir Putin’s spies and also Facebook transexuals. What about Veterans… and the illegal aliens… and who invited MS – 13 to my black panther party, those guys are high on goofballs. What ever happened to all those alien abductions anyway, isn’t that a thing anymore? Are the space aliens illegals, and if they are should we build a roof instead of a wall? You know who likes roofs? The Clintons and… Here’s the top ten reasons why Hillary Clinton is the worst and best thing since…
sheesh.
Upcoming Tours and Events
June 9th – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
pandemoniac howling
A few more shots from high over LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, an event found me in Hunters Point, and a friend invited me to get some shots from the roof deck of the tower building he lives in. Normally, I’m wallowing in the filth of the gutter and Newtown Creek, so whenever I have an opportunity to change the perspective, I take it.
The shot above looks down at the East River shoreline along the Hunters Point Park waterfront, and depicts the littoral gradation from dry land to river mud.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a new section of the park opening fairly soon, and construction on it has been briskly occurring for a while now. That green fenceline in the middle of the shot depicts the currently public area (bottom) and the new section which will soon be available for recreation enthusiasts (top).
That curvy shape at the bottom right forms a roof for the home of a local restaurant called Coffeed, and the LIC Landing NYC Ferry stop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the mouth of Newtown Creek in the center of the shot above, which looks south along the Queens and Brooklyn waterfront towards the Williamsburg Bridge. The prominence on the Manhattan side is Corelars Hook, roughly the Lower East Side’s Cherry Street. Within the next decade, the entire left side of the view above will be filled in with residential tower development projects.
Upcoming Tours and Events
May 12th – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
May 17th – Port Newark Boat Tour – with Working Harbor Committee.
For an exciting adventure, go behind the scenes of the bustling Port of NY & NJ on our Hidden Harbor Tour® of Port Newark! Get an insider’s view of the 3rd largest port in the nation, where container ships dock and unload their goods from around the world. See how the working harbor really works and learn about what all those ships and tugs do. See giant container terminals, oil docks, dry dock repair, and more! Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
extent of
Getting high in Hunters Point.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Saturday last, a shoreline cleanup operation was scheduled by HarborLab and the Hunter Point Park Conservancy, and the Hunters Point Civic people were present to lend a hand as well. The goal was to gather up and dispose of the flotsam and jetsam that had gathered in the East River shoreline over the last couple of seasons. I helped out by offering a free walking tour of the area for some of the volunteers from HarborLab, and getting shots of the effort for usage by the various groups involved, and for one of my pals from Councilmember Van Bramer’s office – the irreplaceable Matt Wallace.
At one point, my friend Rodrigo announced he was going to go up to one of the roof decks at the Hunters Point South development and offered to take me along. The shot above looks eastward, along the spine of my beloved Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are actually two parks on the LIC waterfront, one managed by the City and the other by the State. Hunters Point Park is the southern one, and Gantry Plaza State Park is the northern one. The actual dividing line between the two properties is about mid block between Center Blvd. and 51st Avenue, if you’re curious.
The shoreline cleanup focused in on two locations, the rocky area pictured above where you see the crowd of people gathered up on the concrete, and another one just south of the ferry stop at LIC Landing. The NYC Parks Dept. sent along a garbage truck to collect up the debris, and a few employees who were there to help out and supervise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above looks north west towards Roosevelt Island and the Queensboro Bridge, and over the grounds of the NYS Gantry Plaza State Park.
As a note, this was my first time shooting from one of the Hunters Point South towers. Normally, I’m staring up at them from the gutter, where one such as myself belongs.
Upcoming Tours and Events
May 12th – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
May 17th – Port Newark Boat Tour – with Working Harbor Committee.
For an exciting adventure, go behind the scenes of the bustling Port of NY & NJ on our Hidden Harbor Tour® of Port Newark! Get an insider’s view of the 3rd largest port in the nation, where container ships dock and unload their goods from around the world. See how the working harbor really works and learn about what all those ships and tugs do. See giant container terminals, oil docks, dry dock repair, and more! Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
dark figures
If only I could be laconic, if.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunday last, I conducted a tour for the NY Transit Museum onboard an NYC Ferry. The narrative was governed by the history of ferries in NYC, with a general historical overlay of the East River corridor. There’s a lot of information to pass on, and I will admit that it’s a bit of struggle to fit it all in. The tour left from Pier 11 in Manhattan, and we debarked the boat in LIC. Given that it’s a transit museum group, the last third of the tour focuses in on the former ferry services of the Long Island Railroad offered out of Hunters Point and then I take the group a few blocks into LIC. I can usually produce a LIRR engine sitting on a sidetrack thereabouts, and there’s always the Sunnyside Yards to talk about as well.
It was really, really cold for April last Sunday, in the 30’s when I left HQ.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the second time I’ve narrated this particular tour, and hopefully will be presenting it again in the near future. Saying that, now that it’s been spoken aloud a few times, I’ve got some rewriting to do in the name of brevity and clarity. It’s so easy to bog down in historical minutia when discussing the East River, you have to be careful when narrating lest you lose the audience’s attention in a swirl of details. I never structure what I’m going to say as a dry recitation of facts and dates, which is the worst possible way to relate historical data, in my view. It’s a story, so tell it like a story, with a beginning/middle/end.
The cool thing about the Transit Museum is that they outfit me with a little closed circuit radio microphone and all the tour participants get these little radio headsets, so I don’t need to yell the whole time. That took a bit of adjustment time for me, as I’m used to using a booming voice and certain style of pronunciation on tours. Speaking into a mike is more a “radio situation” where you want to get all mellifluous in terms of vocalizations.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Suffice to say that shortly after the Civil War there were as many as 21 seperate “official” ferry lines crossing back and forth between Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan. Like a lot of 19th century industries, a politically connected monopoly emerged out of a company founded by Livingstone and Fulton which made regulation and inspection by Government officialdom go away, creating a lassez faire system whose excesses eventually led to the General Slocum disaster in 1915 1904 which made the idea of getting on a ferry rather unpalatable to early 20th century New Yorkers in the same way that entering a giant office building in the years following 9/11 was an unsettling experience. The Coast Guard was put in charge of safety matters, and they began to enforce strict safety regulations and practices on the ferry industry.
Then came Robert Moses…
Upcoming Tours and Events
April 14 – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
April 15- Newtown Creekathon – with Newtown Creek Alliance.
That grueling 13 and change mile death march through the bowels of New York City known as the “Newtown Creekathon” will be held on that day, and I’ll be leading the charge as we hit every little corner and section of the waterway. This will be quite an undertaking, last year half the crowd tagged out before we hit the half way point. Have you got what it takes the walk the enitre Newtown Creek?
Click here to reserve a spot on the Creekathon.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 