Archive for the ‘Long Island Rail Road’ Category
rumour ran
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in prior posts, one has been making a real effort to keep up with kicking his feet about the neighborhood, and maintain a regular schedule of long and short walks. One of the stops I always make on my way to somewhere else is at the Sunnyside Yards, here in Long Island City.
“Hey asshole, why do you call it LIC when the word “Sunnyside” is in the rail coach yard’s name? You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about thereby, and all you say is false” is the sort of thing you’ll see in the comments section here occasionally.
If it’s west of Woodside Avenue, north of Newtown Creek, and south of Bowery Bay – it’s technically Long Island City. Astoria, Long Island City Heights Sunnyside, Hunters Point, and Blissville are all LIC – as in they were part of the pre 1898 municipal entity which dubbed itself as LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunnyside and Astoria have since become “kind of” their own thing. I refer to Northern Blvd. and the yards as “LIC” as they stand apart from the residential and mixed usage zones of Sunnyside and Astoria. Skillman Avenue west of 39th street is LIC, whereas east of 39th street it’s Sunnyside – for instance. I can say the same thing about Queens Blvd. west of about 37th street, which is where it stops being Sunnyside and starts being LIC.
The blurred lines and neighborhood borders of Queens are endlessly fascinating. Woodside and Winfield, or Astoria and East Elmhurst will yield subjective one side of the street versus the other opinions from the Queensican Commentariat. I call these gray zones “the angles between neighborhoods.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One actually sweats this assignation of nomenclature. The real estate people will claim that parts of Brooklyn which are closer to Nassau County than they are the East River are “Williamsburg” or “Bushwick” or my favorite – “Ridgewood,” which is actually found in Queens. Remember when a whole section of Manhattan went from being “midtown” to “West Chelsea” about twenty years ago?
I generally rely on what things used to be called prior to the REBNY era, which is before the real estate marketing people began assigning twee names to undesirable locations. Heck, I actually prefer the pre-1898 city consolidation names, in truth.
“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 dolphins
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A short walk found a humble narrator at one of his many holes. That’s a fence hole at the Sunnyside Yards, you pervert. Jeez.
I got there just as a LIRR train was rattling through the Harold Interlocking on its way to Manhattan, and since I had just updated the firmware on my camera to a new version that Canon claimed to have programmed vehicle based focus tracking into, I figured that this would be an ideal opportunity to test out the improvements to my technology.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned, this was a short walk. I scuttled up 39th street, past the hole mentioned above, then hung a right on Skillman Avenue and walked past a taxi depot which uses street parking spots to store their vehicles for free. The bike people use this term all the time – free car storage – to describe street parking. It’s an effective bit of political language, since it reframes something ubiquitous into an issue oriented phrase. For me, though, I see “free car storage” with a different lens.
Private businesses parking their commercial vehicles for free, and government agencies doing the same thing, eat up hundreds of parking spots which they’re not paying for. The vast amount of space eaten up by the NYC DOT’s vehicle fleets along Queens Blvd. just pisses me off, given that they’re the ones whose policies reflect a desire to eliminate as much citizen parking as is possible. Who watches the watchmen, huh? Me, that’s who.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I swung through Queens Plaza, then started scuttling along the diagonal lots along Northern Blvd. on my way back to Astoria. Along the way, this FDNY Ambulance caught my attention with its ribald strobing.
This is just about the day in middle December when the Covid Omicron spike was really getting started and ramping up. This time around, unlike March and April of 2020, you didn’t see all that many people getting carted off to Hospital. Hmm. It’s almost like the vaccines did their job and kept people from getting dangerously sick from the virus.
That can’t be true, though, because Jewish Space Lasers.
“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.
oppression waned
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whew, what a couple of weeks. One has walked or ridden a boat into 4 of the 5 Boroughs, including… Staten Island… in the last 14 days. I’ve been in Astoria, Long Island City, Bushwick, Greenpoint, East Williamsburg, Sunset Park, Red Hook, Manhattan’s Financial District and Lower East Side, and St. George. This whole spate of activity got started a couple of weeks ago in LIC when I had to meet up with a couple of Newtown Creek Alliance interns to teach them a couple of things about my beloved Creek. Good news is that most of this travel has occurred on boats, specifically on ferry boats.
The shot above is from the sidewalk of Borden Avenue, alongside the Long Island Railroad’s moderately ancient Hunters Point Rail Yard. The current facility is the ninth iteration of a rail yard on this spot. Once, there was a gigantic glass and steel train shed here, and there were turntables that allowed rail engines to reorient themselves from one track to another.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Some of my travels have involved hopping on the subway. A humble narrator found himself at Queens Plaza just as a 7 line train was entering the Manhattan bound lower level tracks at the elevated MTA complex.
Just in the name of decrying how bad the management is at the redoubtable MTA… so, they had 16 months where basically nobody was riding the trains. During that interval, which you’d imagine as being a golden opportunity to perform upgrades and maintenance, they complained about declining fare revenues and an uptick in crime. Give us more money, they said, and the Feds bailed them out. Now, with the City reopening and everybody trying to get back to normal, just this last weekend they started doing signal upgrades to the Culver line. The F was running on the D, the D on the F, and R service was completely turned off in Astoria. Instruction was to take the 7 to Jackson Heights, and then transfer to the E, which was stopping in seemingly random places – none of which were where I was going.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above was gathered by shooting through the dirty window of a N train bound for Queens Plaza. One day it will happen – I’ll be on an N train which doesn’t look it was parked under a flock of seagulls and it will have clean windows offering a crystal clear view of the scene above.
Frustrating, the MTA is. That’s also a good sign of some sort of return to normalcy. How do you bring people together in our politically divided culture? Answer is: our common hatred of MTA management.
Speaking of getting back to normal… what are you doing on August 7th? I’ll be conducting a WALKING TOUR OF LONG ISLAND CITY with my pal Geoff Cobb. Details and ticketing available here. Come with?
“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.
hushed evening
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What with the vaccine and everything, I’ve been out a lot during daylight hours and have been missing my nocturnal scuttles. To remedy this, one packed up his old kit bag and smile, smile, smiled. This was a relatively short after dinner walk, one which saw me head out of Astoria in the direction of Queens Plaza where I looped back around onto Skillman Avenue for the return trip. Luckily, this is a feature rich and visually interesting pathway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Evidence suggests that wherever the Queens Cobbler went to during the pandemic, said Cobbler being a probable serial killer who leaves behind single shoes as macabre tokens, they have returned to continue their campaign of savage conquest here in Queens. This particular momento was observed in the gutter on 42nd street at Northern Blvd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On my way back home, which found me walking along Skillman Avenue, several examples of Long Island Railroad’s inventory were observed hurtling along the tracks. The particular nature of the fences along this stretch negate photographic opportunity, but there’s a spot or two just big enough to squeeze a lens into.
You have to know where they are. I do.
“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.
earthly logic
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One found himself at a Sunnyside Yards fence hole often referred to as “the old reliable” waiting for a train to roll by, a desire soon satisfied. There’s a reason I call it the old reliable, after all. I’m learning how to best utilize the subject tracking feature baked into my camera. By design the software which controls this looks for human/animal faces and eyes when directing focus, but it also allows me to lock onto something moving through the frame – like a LIRR train – and the camera readjusts focus continuously as the thing rolls through. This is neat.
During the few instances in the last few months which have seen me actually photographing human beings again, this focus tracking business has produced very nice results. I’ll post them in some future NP post, but you get a very nice separation twixt background and subject when using this particular setting. Good stuff.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the particular evening that the old reliable was being exploited, I kept on encountering cast off food, like the half eaten McDonalds double cheeseburger pictured above. Personally, I only eat McDonalds 2 or 3 times a year, and that’s usually when I’m either desperate or drunkenly craving fast food. I forego the fries, and my order at the Golden Arches is either a small coke with two quarter pounders w cheese or two regular cheeseburgers with no drink or fries. If it’s not on the dollar menu, it ain’t me.
It’s not like I don’t eat burgers and fries, before you ask. It’s just that McDonalds’ offerings pale before what you can get from any old Queensican diner or bar. Why spend money on semi expensive crap when you can have a decent meal for more or less the same money?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The next bit of food dumping encountered this particular evening is pictured above. Some veg, some garbage, all left out in the rain for someone else to clean up. Grrr.
I carry any trash I’ve generated while moving around in my pockets, and empty them when I encounter a waste basket or other receptacle like a dumpster. This really isn’t hard to do. The mental process involved in leaving the house with a box of cabbage and then carrying it to a fairly remote spot along the fences of a rail yard and saying “here, here is where I will abandon these cabbages” is something I don’t understand.
“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 