Archive for the ‘Long Island City’ Category
rotarian path
Burnt, literally and figuratively.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator feels a bit swollen in the brain today, a sensation which is coupled with a mild case of sunburn. Yesterday found me onboard a boat for the Waterfront Alliance’s annual conference, and one took advantage of the fantastic weather as much as possible by being out on deck after I had captured the photos which the WA asked me to get. Accordingly, my skinvelope is exhibiting the characteristic radiation burns one might expect after exposure to the emanations of the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned in earlier posts, a sudden flurry of activity has occurred in the last few weeks, which has been quite a distraction.
A recent event which I attended was here in Astoria – a visioning session conducted by the NYCEDC in pursuance of the BQX Street Car system as proposed by Mayor De Blasio – was actually quite interesting. I’m working on a fairly in depth series of posts exploring the idea, and next week I plan on walking the 16 mile route of the BQX to provide some sort of tangible visual documentation of the plan and route.
More on this one is coming.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Two events which I’m looking forward to will be occurring the weekend and week of the 21st – a walking tour of the Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint with Atlas Obscura, and a boat tour of the Brooklyn waterfront with the Working Harbor Committee on the 26th.
Come with?
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, May 21st at 3:30 p.m. –
A Return to The Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek,
with Atlas Obscura, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
imperfect posture
Just a short, and selfie, one today
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As one scuttles about from place to place, lots of things are observed. Recently, the young lady pictured above was taking advantage of a (fairly) recently installed bike lane on one of the truss bridges crossing the Sunnyside Yards, at 39th street, to capture a series of selfies as she rode along. Vision Zero, or zero vision?
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, May 21st at 3:30 p.m. –
A Return to The Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek,
with Atlas Obscura, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
went wherein
Tug Sea Lion, at Newtown Creek, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not too long ago, one found himself lurking around the Nature Walk at the Newtown Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant when the tug Sea Lion appeared on the languid waters of that legendary cataract of municipal neglect referred to, in hushed whispers, as the Newtown Creek.
It got me to thinking about life, and how much of the last decade I’ve spent photographing Tugs and Newtown Creek, or some combination of the two.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Constant pursuit of material examples of these two subjects has taken me to a lot of weird and interesting places over the years. I’ve met a lot of incredible people, and made quite a few friends who are also interested in both topics. The real treat has been the research, of course, and the broader story of a carefully hidden history that has appeared – one which I’m still piecing together.
It starts with Newtown Creek, and the tendrils leading out from the waterway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Erie Canal? I can tie that one back to DeWitt Clinton sitting on his porch in Maspeth. Jello brand gelatin? Peter Cooper in Greenpoint. In the shot above, which depicts the Sims Metal facility in LIC’s Blissville, are three distinct subjects which I’ve ended up learning as much as I possibly can about – maritime shipping, the garbage and recycling industry, and that tall building with the green stripe on top – incidentally – is the former GEVC factory where electric cars and trucks were manufactured in LIC back in 1915 (which led to me learning about early electric vehicles).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Creek forced me to learn about the early petroleum industry, and to study manufactured gas plants, which led to looking at the chemical industry. Luckily, Phelps Dodge was the owner of the former General Chemical factory at the border of Blissville and Maspeth nearby Penny Bridge. The Creek has also led me into Calvary Cemetery, which forced me to learn about 19th century Irish Catholicism and has somehow resulted in me photographing the Irish Language Mass at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on more than one occasion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Creek led me to study tugs, both their history and their current occupation in NY Harbor. Tugs led me to the East River Coastline of Manhattan and the vast ship building complex that existed between Corlears Hook and 23rd street. Manhattan real estate valuations in this area were so high, as early as the 1820’s, that ship yards began to relocate across the river to Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where the Federal Government established the Brooklyn Navy Yard at Wallabout Creek…
That led to reading up on Continental Iron Works, at Bushwick Inlet, where the USS Monitor and the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge were built and launched.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All down the Queens side of the Creek, there’s rail, which forced me to learn about that one as well. That led me to the Sunnyside Yards, which Dutch Kills once flowed through, and the grist mills operated by Dutch farmers, which led me to the English takeover of New Amsterdam and its satellites, and eventually to the American Revolution. Then I had to learn about Cornwallis and Howe and their occupation of Maspeth and how their troops rowed down Newtown Creek in pursuit of General Washington, who was fighting his way north…
It goes on and on like this.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everybody asks me when I’m going to write a book. I tell them to subscribe to this blog, as half the Newtown Creek book is already written and contained herein at this – your Newtown Pentacle. Thing is, the Newtown Creek story is so unbelievably complicated and so intrinsic to the story of not just New York – but the entire United States – that without pictures to prove what I’m saying about this waterway – you’d think I was making it all up.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
fetter upon
Wandering the post industrial wastelands of America’s Work Shop – that’s me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Spotted the numeral above in LIC recently, adorning the loading dock of some nameless warehousing company housed in the former Waldes Koh-I-Noor site nearby Dutch Kills. The Real Estate Industrial Complex recently discovered the former Degnon Terminal, it seems, and the Waldes buildings are currently being marketed as “The Zipper Building” by the powers that be and to opportunists who have connected themselves to LIC as some sort of stepping stone from Wall Street.
As a note, five is the only prime number that ends with the number five. It’s also the only number which seems to be entirely European in origin, having little verisimilitude to Arabic or Indian glyphs that represent the number. There’s five senses, five books in the Torah, five wounds of Jesus, five pillars of Islam, and in western music – a perfect fifth is considered to be the most consonant of all the harmonies. In geometry, there’s the Pentagram, and of course – you’re reading the pentacle.
Five.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of Dutch Kills, when you see a structure of creosoted logs held together with iron, as you do nearby the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge – the official term for this sort of thing is a “dolphin.” It’s meant to vouchsafe the bridge against an accidental collision by maritime traffic, but since there’s little to no maritime traffic on Dutch Kills – a tributary of the legendary Newtown Creek – these days, it’s just a thing to take pictures of.
There’s twelve former trees, infused with creosote oil, in that shot above.
Twelve is thought to be a Germanic/Old English term describing the smallest composite number which has exactly six divisors. It’s the largest number that has a single syllable name in the English language. A cube has twelve edges, the human body has twelve cranial nerves. The Western zodiac has twelve signs, as does the Chinese variant, and the 12th moon of Jupiter is called Lysithea.
Twelve.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the Newtown Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant Nature Walk in Greenpoint, should you have a medium long zoom lens on your camera, you can observe the Sims Metal Management Company at work – processing all sorts of metallic things. In the case of the shot above, it’s derelict cars in the process of being recycled. After collection at Sims on Newtown Creek, these automobile carcasses will be barged out to New Jersey where they will be fed into a shredder that will reduce them down to metallic bits and a cloud of dust.
As I count it, there’s eighteen automobiles in the shot above.
The number eighteen translates from the Hebrew word for it (Chai) as “Life.” There’s 18 chapters in the Bhagavad Gita, which is part of the 18 book Mahabharata. Chinese tradition declares the number eighteen as a lucky one. Eighteen in binary code is “10010” which is a seven block long zip code in Manhattan – from 20th to 27th, and from Sixth avenue to the East River.
51218, you ask? According to the National Institue of Helath, that’s the numerical designation of a gene we inherited from our single cell ancestors.
What all of this means, I can’t say, but it’s kind of freaking me out.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
into which
I been everywhere, man.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is fully “back in action” after a long hermitage. In the last seven days – I’ve conducted three walking tours of the Newtown Creek watershed, visited the Kosciuszko Bridge construction project, attended and partcipated in a Working Harbor Committee tour, and have also found myself cathechizing elected officialdom about the dangers of CSO’s (Combined Sewer Outfalls). I also shot and developed a few hundred photos, and you’ll be seeing some of them over the next few days.
I also got to take the most photogenic of NYC’s subway lines the other day, which is the IRT Flushing or 7 line, as evinced by the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Two of my walking tours last week were private affairs, and involved exposing groups of students to LIC. I brought the kids down the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, then along the main stem of the Creek itself, and we eventually ended up along the East River waterfront in Hunters Point.
The counterpoints between “America’s Workshop” and the “Modern Corridor” are jarring, and seeing the post industrial section contrasted with the gentrified residential sections really seemed to hit home with them. I love taking out groups of students, incidentally, as ultimately our world will be theirs someday, and they have to start thinking up the solutions to the colossal mess we’re going to be leaving behind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, what with all the running around, I ended up walking close to forty miles last week as I scuttled around from place to place. This weekend, I’ve got another private group tour on Saturday, but on Sunday there’s a free event I’m helping to conduct with my colleague Will Elkins from Newtown Creek Alliance. Details are found below for attending the “North Henry Street Project,” which will meet up at 11 a.m on the corner of Kingsland and Norman Avenues in Greenpoint.
This one is part of the citywide MAS Janeswalk event, and I’m hoping you can come along and check out the plans NCA has been concocting for the “Unnamed Canal,” a minor tributary of Newtown Creek.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 