Archive for the ‘kosciuszko bridge’ Category
chaplet of vine
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All roads lead to either Calvary Cemetery and its emerald devastations or to the Shining City of Manhattan.
Oddly, modernity has severed most of the connections between the two, but the Long Island Expressway will still allow you to shuttle back and forth between them. Your humble narrator, of course, scuttles along the sidewalk to the polyandrion while shunning the metropolis.
The former is visited enthusiastically, but the latter is entered only when necessity demands so.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Surrounded by expressways, heavy industry, and the languid mockeries of the Newtown Creek, Calvary Cemetery is 365 acres of silent and sanctified surcease from the urban milieu.
Here lie kings, gangsters, soldiers, governors, and the huddled masses whose yearnings carried them to this ultimate destination. Untold multitudes are interred in this hill of laurels, which may truly be called a home to the tomb legions of Dagger John.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A great working will begin soon, and a colossus will be be torn away from its long habitation. In its place will rise a new shaping of steel and cement. Dire prophecies, attributed to the forest aborigines of central America, declare that 2012 will be a year of tribulation for the world.
In the case of this great bridge over the Newtown Creek, it would appear that they were correct in their assertion.
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Also:
June 16th, 2012- Newtown Creek Alliance Dutch Kills walk (this Saturday)
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Newtown Creek Alliance has asked that, in my official capacity as group historian, a tour be conducted on the 16th of June- a Saturday. This walk will follow the Dutch Kills tributary, and will include a couple of guest speakers from the Alliance itself, which will provide welcome relief for tour goers from listening to me rattle on about Michael Degnon, Patrick “Battle Ax” Gleason, and a bunch of bridges that no one has ever heard of.
for June 16th tickets, click here for the Newtown Creek Alliance ticketing page
June 23rd, 2012- Atlas Obscura Thirteen Steps around Dutch Kills walk
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Additionally- the “Obscura Day” Thirteen Steps around Dutch Kills tour proved that the efficacy and charms of the Newtown Creek’s least known tributary, with its myriad points of interest, could cause a large group to overlook my various inadequacies and failings. The folks at Atlas Obscura, which is a fantastic website worthy of your attentions (btw), have asked me to repeat the tour on the 23rd of June- also a Saturday.
for June 23rd tickets, click here for the Atlas Obscura ticketing page
June 30th, 2012- Working Harbor Committee Kill Van Kull walk
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My various interests out on the sixth borough, NY Harbor, have brought me into association with the Working Harbor Committee. A member of the group’s Steering Committee- I also serve as the “official” group photographer, am chairman and principal narrator of their annual Newtown Creek Boat Tour, and occasionally speak on the microphone during other tours (mainly the Brooklyn one). This year, the group has branched out into terrestrial explorations to compliment the intense and extant schedule of boat tours, and I’m going to be leading a Kill Van Kull walking tour that should be a lot of fun.
The Kill Van Kull, or tugboat alley as its known to we harbor rats, is a tidal strait that defines the border of Staten Island and New Jersey. A busy and highly industrialized waterfront, Working Harbor’s popular “Hidden Harbor – Newark Bay” boat tours provide water access to the Kill, but what is it like on the landward side?
Starting at the St. George Staten Island Ferry terminal, join WHC Steering Committee member Mitch Waxman for a walk up the Kill Van Kull via Staten Islands Richmond Terrace. You’ll encounter unrivaled views of the maritime traffic on the Kill itself, as well as the hidden past of the maritime communities which line it’s shores. Surprising and historic neighborhoods, an abandoned railway, and tales of prohibition era bootleggers await.
The tour will start at 11, sharp, and you must be on (at least) the 10:30 AM Staten Island Ferry to meet the group at St. George. Again, plan for transportation changes and unexpected weirdness to be revealed to you at MTA.info.
for June 30th tickets, click here for the Working Harbor Committee ticketing page
laced apertures
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An interval of soliloquy recently offered itself to your humble narrator, during a vast and shambling perambulation. Undertaken was a relaxed and lonely tour of the titan masonry which distinguishes the quite industrialized northern bank of the Newtown Creek, specifically in the hessian cursed hinterlands of Maspeth and Blissville.
Accessing obscure yet quite public locations, known to but a few, a thought occurred. Perhaps conventional wisdom is wrong, and the muddy sediments of the fabled industrial revolution- rich in all sorts of exotic materials- are actually what the great minds of earlier epochs were trying to achieve.
Could the Black Mayonnaise be some sort of vast environmental Peloid?
from wikipedia
Peloid is mud, or clay used therapeutically, as part of balneotherapy, or therapeutic bathing. Peloids consist of humus and minerals formed over many years by geological and biological, chemical and physical processes.
Numerous peloids are available today, of which the most popular are peat pulps, various medicinal clays, mined in various locations around the world, and a variety of plant substances. Also, health spas often use locally available lake and sea muds and clays. Peloid procedures are also various; the most common of them are peloid wraps, peloid baths, and peloid packs applied locally to the part of the body, which is being treated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The grinding heel of finances, omnipresent and dire, drives one toward desperate fancies and fantastical schemes. Idiot plans, plots- even gambling- are possible when one’s outlook is grimly narrowed by looming disaster.
Moments so described will weigh heavily upon even those possessed of wholesome aspect and character, let alone a misshapen void in space in the approximate shape of a man that is a humble but quite disgusting narrator.
An unthinkable ideation… unknowable and indescribable… utterly and inconceivably hatched.
from wikipedia
Haitians consume a large variety of different non-traditional foods in an attempt to quelch hunger pains. Mud cakes are traditionally fashioned and consumed, but items such as clay and chalk can also be eaten. Due to recent increases in food prices and growing starvation in Haiti, this habit has been extended and received much media attention.
Outside of hunger, mud and dirt can be consumed accidentally during sports and other outdoor activities. This has led to dysphemisms for poor-tasting food such as “tastes like dirt”, based on the experience of getting mud, dirt, etc. in one’s teeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Clove like the belly of a rotten fish, or Zeus’s brow when Athena was explosively born, this extranormal notion flowered approximately three and one half inches behind my eyes.
Gaining the product would be laughably easy, one would suspect that officials and administrators would be overjoyed just to be rid of the stuff. Historical precedent exists. During the halcyon days of the Newtown Creek’s early chemical industry, when a byproduct of the large scale manufacture of sulphuric acid at the works of M. Kalbfleisch or William Henry Nichols – called sludge acid– was dumped directly into the water, kids would collect the stuff where it pooled up downstream (in glass lined buckets) and bring it to some small operators in the chemical business for use as raw material for distillation and refinement.
That’d be making lemonade, if handed lemons.
from hydroqual.com
The routing of potential Newtown Creek Flushing Tunnels along with the locations and sizes of the pumping stations were developed in a previous study (URS, 1994), which are shown on Figure 7-7. Two tunnels would be constructed, each with a water intake located along the East River. One tunnel would go to Dutch Kills and have a 70 cfs pumping station near the terminus at the head end of Dutch Kills. The other tunnel is proposed to go to English Kills and then on to East Branch with 150 cfs pumping stations near the head ends of each tributary. Both tunnels were routed as much as possible under existing rights-of-way to minimize the potential costs associated with easement acquisition. However, due to the number of dead end tributaries to Newtown Creek and their distance from the East River the flushing water option would require around three miles of tunnels, two water intakes, and three pumping stations. In addition, the background conditions in the East River are not substantially better than the target water quality and thus flushing requires larger flushing volumes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gaining financial freedom by mining the muds of Newtown Creek and offering it to the nations apothecaries as a miracle cure, growing rich off… a moment of lucid fantasy, then detonated and disintegrated with the force of an exploding bladder. These sediments were left here for a reason, laid down by the great and gregarious- men like Charles Pratt and Peter Cooper and John D. Rockefeller. These men were public benefactors, underwriters of great charities as well as medical and scholastic institutions, and hailed as exemplars by their contemporaries.
Surely there must something beneath the water, hidden away in subterrene pockets and masonry clad voids, something horribly and anomalously uncanny which spurred these titans of an earlier age to action and seal it in.
Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
from wikipedia
A molehill (or mole-hill, mole mound) is a conical mound of loose soil raised by small burrowing mammals, including moles, but also similar animals such as mole-rats, marsupial moles and voles. They are often the only sign to indicate the presence of the animal.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Also:
June 16th, 2012- Newtown Creek Alliance Dutch Kills walk (this Saturday)
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Newtown Creek Alliance has asked that, in my official capacity as group historian, a tour be conducted on the 16th of June- a Saturday. This walk will follow the Dutch Kills tributary, and will include a couple of guest speakers from the Alliance itself, which will provide welcome relief for tour goers from listening to me rattle on about Michael Degnon, Patrick “Battle Ax” Gleason, and a bunch of bridges that no one has ever heard of.
for June 16th tickets, click here for the Newtown Creek Alliance ticketing page
June 23rd, 2012- Atlas Obscura Thirteen Steps around Dutch Kills walk
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Additionally- the “Obscura Day” Thirteen Steps around Dutch Kills tour proved that the efficacy and charms of the Newtown Creek’s least known tributary, with its myriad points of interest, could cause a large group to overlook my various inadequacies and failings. The folks at Atlas Obscura, which is a fantastic website worthy of your attentions (btw), have asked me to repeat the tour on the 23rd of June- also a Saturday.
for June 23rd tickets, click here for the Atlas Obscura ticketing page
June 30th, 2012- Working Harbor Committee Kill Van Kull walk
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My various interests out on the sixth borough, NY Harbor, have brought me into association with the Working Harbor Committee. A member of the group’s Steering Committee- I also serve as the “official” group photographer, am chairman and principal narrator of their annual Newtown Creek Boat Tour, and occasionally speak on the microphone during other tours (mainly the Brooklyn one). This year, the group has branched out into terrestrial explorations to compliment the intense and extant schedule of boat tours, and I’m going to be leading a Kill Van Kull walking tour that should be a lot of fun.
The Kill Van Kull, or tugboat alley as its known to we harbor rats, is a tidal strait that defines the border of Staten Island and New Jersey. A busy and highly industrialized waterfront, Working Harbor’s popular “Hidden Harbor – Newark Bay” boat tours provide water access to the Kill, but what is it like on the landward side?
Starting at the St. George Staten Island Ferry terminal, join WHC Steering Committee member Mitch Waxman for a walk up the Kill Van Kull via Staten Islands Richmond Terrace. You’ll encounter unrivaled views of the maritime traffic on the Kill itself, as well as the hidden past of the maritime communities which line it’s shores. Surprising and historic neighborhoods, an abandoned railway, and tales of prohibition era bootleggers await.
The tour will start at 11, sharp, and you must be on (at least) the 10:30 AM Staten Island Ferry to meet the group at St. George. Again, plan for transportation changes and unexpected weirdness to be revealed to you at MTA.info.
for June 30th tickets, click here for the Working Harbor Committee ticketing page
occasionally titanic
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Obsequious sarcasm will no doubt greet this posting, given the notion propagated by area wags that the Newtown Creek watershed is irrevocably poisoned, but early last week an expedition was mounted along the bulkheads whose express goal was to count and identify those avian lifeforms which inhabit its legend haunted shores.
Organized by the Newtown Creek Alliance Executive Director herself, our small party met in the wee hours of the morning at a coffee shop familiar to all residents of Long Island City and sallied forth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Two field experts consented to this mission, both familiar with the mores of ornithological clade and classification. Our group visited several sites which have often displayed a surprising diversity of birds, and over the course of our little expedition they described eleven distinct specie.
Every time that your humble narrator attempts to name a bird, corrections flood in, and accordingly this link is offered to the birdsbugsbuds.com blog by Shari Romar (who was one of the folks who undertook this trip) for genus, family, or common name. Additionally, Ross Diamond wrote a description of the day at this Newtown Creek Alliance page (wonder who that weirdo in the red baseball cap is, standing on the fence like he owns the place).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the spots decided on for this mission was obvious, as the multiple decade long abandonment of the Maspeth Creek tributary by industrial interests has resulted in the formation of significant “habitat” along its wooded shorelines. Cursed by a large CSO (Combined Sewer Outfall) at its terminus, Maspeth Creek often exhibits large slicks of garbage, fats, and other sediments which find their way into the wastewater flow. Nevertheless, the decaying shorelines provide ample purchase for coastal grasses and other marsh plants to grow.
This vegetation, in turn, offers hiding places for small fish and crustacea which attract birds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Maspeth Creek has been, and often still is, used as an illegal dump- of course. These sunken automobiles are de facto “iconic” Newtown Creek shots, and often photographed by thrill seeking urban explorers- including your humble narrator.
What made my morning, however, was the cormorant hunting in the waters amongst them. As described in earlier posts, and by all accounts, there is a startling diversity of benthic and littoral life to be found here- in waters recently described by at least one NY State environmental official as “anoxic, and a dead sea”.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Firmly held, your humble narrator clings to the belief that if the human infestation could only forget about finding new ways to exploit Newtown Creek and it’s tributaries- whether it be burning garbage to generate electricity, or the installation of vast new populations along its shores, or just finding a way to not have raw sewage belch filth directly into the water every time it rains– that nature itself would and could perform the necessary remediation of its poisons.
Adaptation and the evolutionary process, rather than some cold and industrial methodology, might be all that is required.
On the other hand, some mutant race of atavist cormorants might arise from the Newtown Creek, leading to the extinction of mankind itself so maybe we should just pave over the place- as suggested by certain members of the aforementioned community referred to as “area wags” at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
swept chill
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Laurel Hill Blvd. slouches roughly as it descends toward Review Avenue, where the Penny Bridge once stood and the Long Island Railroad once maintained a station and the Roman Catholic funeral ferries docked. Thrice damned, the Kosciuszko Bridge occupies the shallow valley between the so called Laurel Hill and an easterly elevation known as Berlin Hill. The whole zone was called Maspeth, or “bad water place”, by an aboriginal Lenape tribe called the Maespetche who are said to have coined this term for the marshy wetlands that lay between Sunswick and Newtown Creeks.
Native Americans as a people, it should be remembered, are famed for an ironic and well developed sense of humor, and these Maespetche just might have been having some sardonic fun at the expense of the naive Europeans who had just paid them a fortune for an insect infested swamp.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lonely and desolate, one such as myself can only feel succor in this kind of place. A hinterland not too far from the geographic center of a megalopolis whose tendrils stretch out hundreds of miles in every direction called New York City, this is one of the least walked stretches of pavement in the entire metropolitan zone. It’s where the Alsops, Brutnells, and Wandells chose to locate their farming operations and just up the hill from where a few hundred British soldiers were garrisoned during the revolutionary war.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To the west lies Calvary, First Calvary, where Dagger John consecrated the soil of Protestant Newtown for the use of the Roman Catholic church. The elevation of Laurel Hill is quite apparent, here, as the 9 story General Electric Vehicle Company factory’s roofline is at eye level, and it is found at Borden Avenue and Starr- only a few blocks away. The hill was once a bit higher, but the construction of the cemetery in the 19th century removed a few hundred million tons of topsoil from it (the subject of a lawsuit in state court, wherein the farmers of Newtown sued the RC church, as the topsoil was shipped by to Jamaica Queens for use on the catholic plantations there).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Turning widdershin, the first aperture available for transit into the most literal interpretation of the term “DUKBO”, literally “Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp” is 54th avenue. Not unlike the sensation experienced on the spiral footbridge examined in the two postings preceding this one- “maddeningly untransmissable” and “danger-widespread“- the inveterate pedestrian feels as if a corridor of transition has been arrived at. One world exists at the entrance and something totally different will be found on the other side.
A titanic vibration is sensed rather than heard here, no doubt due to the pulsating waves of vehicular traffic crossing overhead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nondescript and strictly utilitarian, there is nevertheless something quite unnerving about this overpass unrelated to any measurable stimuli. An odd sensation of loathing and imminent danger, as if some cackling, untoward, and quite unimaginable fiend was about to swing down from the overhead steelwork and claw at passerby. Despite this discernible and distasteful atmosphere of paranoid wondering, however, there is virtually nothing to see under here. The cement slab on the left of the shot is a sort of water catchment device.
Like all parts of DUKBO, there are businesses which operate in the underpinnings of the bridge, or in the shadow over the creek which has been cast from it since the 1930’s.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Behind these oddly sinister gates are a couple of trucks and what appears to be a few “storage cubes” or small shacks, but nothing out of the ordinary or in any way noteworthy. Oddly enough, this street is routinely crossed by a city bus, which has a stop on the next corner. Speculation would be served if one was to postulate that this might have been the pathway which workers from Sunnyside or Woodside would have taken enroute to shift work at Phelps Dodge or Alloco, down by the Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The continuation of 43rd street, which was last tread on the other side of the highway in Celtic Park, begins at this point, after the cloverleaf onramps which provide the singular intersection of the Long Island Expressway and Brooklyn Queens Expressway complete themselves. This stretch of 43rd street will someday be the new DUKBO, and easement purchases for the new bridge have already seen nearby homes and business buildings shuttered and demolished.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Reason and logic seldom count for much in the neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek, but one assumes that there exists an ancient municipal regulation which designates or zones this area as “the Crane district”.
Every block or two, it would seem, there is a corporate yard which hosts the sort of enormous building industry derricks commonly seen at work around the city. There’s one or two in Long Island City, of course, but there are a lot of these companies located in this neighborhood once known as Berlin- but now called either Laurel Hill or West Maspeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Bizarre associations are often a curse for your humble narrator, and on the day I was walking through here- entering Berlin- I couldn’t help but notice that the cranes here bore the colors of the tricolor flag of the modern Deutche.
We’re going to leave DUKBO at this corner for the moment, but will continue along this route next week. Remember- the Kosciuszko Bridge project will be starting in 2013- this summer and fall will be your last chance to see this district of the Insalubrious Valley of the Newtown Creek as it is and has been.
August 23rd, 2012 will be likely be the last birthday of the Kosciuszko Bridge.
danger widespread
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Note: For the first section of this walk, click here for the “maddeningly untransmissable” posting of May 3.
As mentioned in prior postings, those principates and potentates who occupy the proletarian palaces of Albany have prescribed that the process of replacing the 1939 vintage Kosciuszko Bridge with a modern design will begin a full year earlier than originally planned. Paramount, concern and attentions have been devoted to recording a pictorial record of the place as it exists today with the hope that future generations will be able to realize the pulsating horror envisaged by use of the acronym “DUKBO” (Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swirling, ever swirling, the steel and concrete of the footbridge which carries pedestrian traffic from the street grid of Celtic Park to the colour stained creekland hosts a resident troll, but also offers egress to the eastern border of venerable Calvary- a street known as Laurel Hill Blvd. Gentle elevation is encountered here, and the motion followed is of a clockwise bent.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A severe fence, composed of tiny chain links, encompasses the walkway and suggests that one has entered a bizarre corridor. Cellular telephone signals seem to drop off on the bridge, isolating one from the omnipresent cloud of telecommunication radiation, but the singular device carried by your humble narrator utilizes the AT&T network so this is not that unusual. Michael Faraday himself could not have imagined a surer form of electromagnetic cage, one suspects.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A rotunda is observed at the masonry abutment which supports the steel truss, which offers a startling view of both Calvary Cemetery and the skyline of that Shining City which lies to the north and west. Careful observers will notice that a hole exists in the mesh at an optimum viewing angle, no doubt due to the labor of some photographer from the wicked past. This is not the work of your humble narrator, it should be pointed out, although this aperture has suffered my exploitation on more than one occasion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Beyond the emerald devastations of Calvary, whose consecrated loam and forbidden secrets lie obfuscated and reveal themselves only to the most dedicated seekers, the wholesome spire of St. Raphael’s and the fearsome Sapphire Megalith of Long Island City struggle for attention with the shield wall of a spectacular entertainment called Manhattan. The elevation enjoyed by Laurel Hill, which is in actuality a foothill of and part of the sloping eastward ascent leading to the Maspeth Plateau, allows one a perspective normally denied to all but roofers and chimney sweeps.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gaudy, modern Manhattan is merely window dressing for the wonders of New York City, a painted temple whore squamously squatting in the harbor which is designed to entertain and enthrall foreign travelers, aspirant bourgeois, and the credulous. To experience the reality of New York, with it’s terrors and tragedies and naked truths and miracles- one must come to the so called “Outer Boroughs”. Here, in places like this DUKBO, there are no flashing neon lights and truth is manifested in cement, marble, and steel.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Tomorrow, we descend into the gentle valleys of DUKBO on the Queens side of the fabled Newtown Creek, and visit a location or two which will be obliterated by the construction of the new bridge, while pondering upon that which what might rise from the ashes. What unknown and unsuspected treasures might the ground imprison here, which has been unturned since 1939? Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there? Timorous and possessed of a weak constitution, your humble narrator nevertheless endures such journeys for the interest of both the prosaic and prurient at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
The Newtown Pentacle 