Archive for the ‘Long Island City’ Category
perpetually ajar
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent serendipity found your humble narrator onboard a vessel plying the languid waters of the Newtown Creek. This particular adventure was part of a larger and laudable effort which will be the subject of a posting later in the week, but urgent demands and unavoidable deadlines preclude discussion of the outing at this point. Instead, one is anxious to share the scenic wonders and hidden landscape of this water body that defines the currently undefended border of Brooklyn and Queens.
Captured in the heart of DUMABO (Down Under the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge), the shot above depicts the far off and omnipresent Sapphire Megalith rising over industrial Brooklyn and framed by the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge while opening at English Kill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The self same Megalith again provides geographic context for the scene, and the thrice damned Kosciuszko Bridge and Calvary Cemetery occupy the foreground.
To the right is the Phelps Dodge site, and to the left is found the lurking fear and that rampant darkness which lurks on the Brooklyn side of DUKBO (Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the shot above, gaze in wonder at the skyline of the Shining City itself, as framed by the titan National Grid tanks and the myriad works of infrastructure arrayed across the Brooklyn flood plain. Inextricably linked, the heavy industries and energy installations along the Newtown Creek allow the Shining City to maintain the facade of assumptions which Manhattanites prefer to believe about this place where aspirant and realist metaphors clash.
More, on why exactly I was on this boat, will be forthcoming. Apologies for brevity and obfuscation.
Project Firebox 43
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lonely for olden times, this lonely sentinel stands vigil on Vernon blvd. in Queens. Once, it saw ferries and trolley lines busily engaging in their occupation, today it witnesses only automobiles coming and going from a big box store across the street.
fulgent images
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is not the world you know, this 3.8 mile long cataract of water which forms the currently undefended border of Brooklyn and Queens, whose mouth is found directly opposite the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in Manhattan. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume, and beneath the languid ripples of its mirrored surface hide a morass of centuries old poisons which have been allowed to agglutinate and congeal in fuligin depths. This is where the industrial revolution actually happened, around the canalized bulkheads of the infamous Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Great fortunes have arisen here- the Pratts, and Rockefellers, even Peter Cooper- all grew fat at this banquet table. Five great cities arose around the Creek- Williamsburg, Long Island City, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and New York- and by 1900 a thriving maritime industry saw more cargo cross this tiny waterway than could be found on the entire Mississippi river. The vast populations of those five cities found employment here, in titan rail yards and factory mills whose smokestacks blotted out the light cascading down from the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself. This is where the bill came due in the early 20th century, as you cannot have a “Manhattan” without causing a “Newtown Creek”.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Thought irredeemable, this place became a dumping ground, with raw sewage and every imaginable kind of filth allowed to pool and mingle with the water. By the end of the 20th century, it was a literal backwater and forgotten by all but those cursed to live nearby. Petroleum swirls about beneath the ground, mingling with the esoteric byproducts of early chemical factories and one and a half centuries of breakneck industrial growth. The top soil is impregnated by heavy metals, asbestos, and tons of soot deposited daily by automotive exhaust. Along the rotting bulkheads, sediment mounds of sewage rise from the water, and from forgotten pipelines unknown chemical combinations drip and drool. Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hope rises, however, at the start of the Superfund era. Federal authorities have begun the laborious process of analyzing and categorizing those sediments which lie fifteen to twenty feet thick on the bottom of the waterway, colloquially referred to as “Black Mayonnaise”. The Superfund legislation which governs their actions has compelled them to remove and remediate these sediments, and deliver Newtown Creek to the future in a healthier condition. Community groups, industrial stakeholders, and officials from both the State and City have begun the task of planning the Newtown Creek of future times. This is the literal backbone and center of New York City.
elaborately fashioned
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While moving through DUPBO (Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp) the other day, a passing train forced me to halt my ceaseless marching momentarily. Suffering from a malfunction, my headphones were not working, and the ultimate horror of being alone with my thoughts occurred. A brief interlude with your humble narrator has been described as exhausting, and that’s when the interviewee is feeling generous or is governed by polite behavioral norms. Long exposures to my uniquely abhorrent personality have been known to induce madness, encourage alcoholism, and destroy all hope for peace. An expectation of normalcy is usually abandoned by those unable to escape my presence shortly after first contact.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My family describes me as best taken in small doses, and does their best to disavow, deny, and distance themselves. Imagine what it must be like, between my ears, as one cannot escape from oneself. With the headphones roaring their cacophony, it is often possible for me to drown my endless narrative of self referential critique and worry, but without them the omnipresence of paranoid wonderings is impossible to evade. What you read in this blog is what I’m like all the time.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Poverty stricken of late, my plan to get every last millimeter of sole from my last pair of hiking boots backfired, causing an injury of some kind to my left foot. Not severe, discomfort is barely noticeable until several miles into a walk, but after a while it becomes uncomfortable. While standing in DUPBO, one wondered if it might be something truly horrible and I began to ponder if it might be foot cancer. This led me to begin thinking about whether or not there was any such thing as “foot cancer” (there is), which led me to begin wondering about all the other aches and pains which I experience and attempted to ascribe a hypochondriacal “worst case” scenario to each.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Constant thought is given to being struck by a truck, or car, or train of course. I also worry about things falling off of buildings- did you know that bricks sometimes just come loose and fall? Falling air conditioners, electrified utility lines, even sinkholes could randomly cross my path. There are feral dogs, packs of rats, hordes of flesh eating centipedes, and aggressive seagulls… One could fall in the creek head first and get stuck in the mud, be drawn into a wood chipper, or end up stuffing a fifty gallon drum after taking a photo of something I shouldn’t have. It is not fun thinking these thoughts, and impossible for me to turn them off. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of things happen in New York City, things which are admittedly “statistically unlikely” but happened nevertheless- decapitation, bloodcicles, and pineapple with ham on pizza. Oddly enough, I seldom worry about being struck by lightning- go figure.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is, of course, why I keep my headphones buried firmly in my ears and the volume turned way up, on these long walks around Queens and the Newtown Creek. It’s also why, as soon as budget allowed, a new pair of shoes were purchased, because you cannot run away from imagined dangers when your left foot hurts. The repair to the headphones has been accomplished as well, and as this shadow of what looks like a man strides forth, he no longer is forced to listen to a fear crazed maniac within his head. Still worried about foot cancer though… So many things can happen to you…
constantly consulting
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gilman, Gilman, Gilman.
Idiotic, your humble narrator cannot break loose of the compulsion which drives me toward destruction, which will be the result of locating a certain grave amongst Calvary Cemetery’s emerald devastations. Weak of will and enslaved by fevered thoughts, once more do my feet fall upon a carpet of grass fed by a morbid nutrition, stumbling across and into the city of the dead. On the subject at hand, which is the attempt to locate a tiny needle in a gigantic hay stack- a needle not even certain to still exist in this age- let’s recap:
As mentioned in the post “Searching for Gilman“:
“Somewhere in the viridian depths of Calvary Cemetery lies an unremarked merchant from Massachusetts, who died in an accident along the delirious Newtown Creek in 1931. No obituary I can find discusses him, and Gilman slid unnoticed into the hallowed loam of Calvary’s charitable sections. His anonymity came to an end when, according to neighborhood sources and contemporary diarists, a relict 3 masted schooner arrived at the Penny Bridge docks and ordered an eccentric monument be erected on Gilman’s resting place. The captain of that black ship, a leathery bastard named Marsh, collected Gilman’s belongings and sailed via Newtown Creek to the East River, turning North toward Hell Gate- ultimately disappearing into the mists of Long Island Sound heading for New England.”
from epa.gov
The first survey of Newtown Creek was completed by Dutch explorers in 1613-1614, and the Dutch acquired the area from the local Mespatches tribe shortly thereafter. Initially, the Newtown Creek area was used primarily for agriculture, but following the Revolutionary War, it became industrialized with glue and tin factories, rope works, tanneries, and the Sampson Oil Cloth Factory operating along Newtown Creek and its tributaries. There was a shift to shipbuilding in the Pre-Civil War Period. Following the Civil War, textile manufacturing and oil refining replaced shipbuilding along Newtown Creek and its tributaries.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It has been established, circumstantially, that the accident which claimed Gilman was definitively in Blissville, and happened westward of Penny Bridge but east of the Greenpoint Avenue crossing. Additionally, disturbing intonations that the packs of feral dogs which were contemporaneously described as endemic to the area avoided the cadaver, but that the local rodent population did not find itself constrained from feasting.
from the posting “A World Yet Inchoate“:
“Enigma, my search for the elusive final resting place of the Massachusetts based dealer in far eastern art has taken me to distant and forgotten sections of the City of Greater New York. I have consulted with asiatic mystics in Manhattan’s Chinatown, visited a heretical Kabbalist in Brooklyn, and have drawn the ire of certain extant allies of the dead man whose influence and reach extend into the federal government and modernity itself who wish me to remain silent on the subject.”
from 1892’s History of the Catholic Church in the United States, By John Gilmary Shea – courtesy google books
The burial place for the Catholic dead of the great city now required, apparently, a vast extent of ground. The little plot around St. Peter’s Church had been the first, but a nook in Trinity Church yard held, and still holds, some Catholic dead. Then the ground around St. Patrick’s Cathedral was used, and in time a cemetery was purchased on Eleventh Street. These had all proved insufficient. Bishop Hughes looked beyond the limits of the city for a spot not likely to be reached for many years by the rapid growth of population, yet comparatively easy of access. Thirty acres of the Alsop farm, on Newtown Creek, Long Island, were purchased, and the ground was solemnly blessed by Rt. Rev. Bishop Hughes, as Calvary Cemetery, July 27, 1848, and in a few days the first interment took place. The cemetery has been enlarged by subsequent purchases, till it now contains more than a hundred acres.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Problematic in locating even a general area to search within, for the obsequious and gauche monument which the eponymous Capt. Marsh installed within the cemetery in remembrance of the fallen Gilman would have been in one of the so called “poor sections” of the polyandrion. Imagine, the sheer volume of dead bodies shipped out from Manhattan in that era, reported at the time as nearly one hundred on an average day (and far higher in times of fever, plague, and riot). These poor, or charity, sections saw hundreds of interments per week. Could it be possible that the monument to Gilman actually adorned his own grave, or that it might somehow still exist within the walls of Calvary?
from the posting “marble glories”
“Of course, this is a Roman Catholic cemetery, which suggests that the multitudes who lie here were sealed off- magickly- by the sacrament of “Extreme Unction” from suffering such macabre experiences as walking about the earth seeking living victims in some post mortem half life. The heritage of the Catholics extends back through time to the Dagon devotees of Syria and the tomb worshipping Etruscans, and the Romans spent enough time in Egypt and North Africa to have picked up and incorporated many of the Magicks they found into the syncretic system of beliefs and rites known as and inherited by modernity as Catholicism. The mysteries of the church are many, and varied, and more has been forgotten or lost over the centuries than any single lifetime can recover.”
from 1890’s HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES, By JACOB A. RIIS –courtesy google books
Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom the doctor’s skill is powerless to save. When the white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odds. Fifty “summer doctors,” especially trained to this work, are then sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with free advice and medicine for the poor. Devoted women follow in their track with care and nursing for the sick. Fresh-air excursions run daily out of New York on land and water; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers in Calvary work over-time, and little coffins are stacked mountain – high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners’ boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery.
The Newtown Pentacle 