Archive for the ‘Freedom Tower’ Category
pillars grouped
Ugghhh.. Manhattan.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After the boat trip with the United States Army Corps of Engineers ended when we docked at a ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle of a dystopian nightmare. One had to get home to Astoria to allow Zuzu the dog an opportunity to relive herself of bodily waste, and prepare myself for what turned out to be a highly annoying Community Board 1 Transportation Committee meeting. We were discussing ferries and bike lanes, so of course it got to the boiling point pretty quickly. Passions run deep amongst the bicycle fanatics.
Busy day for a humble narrator, huh?
It was hot when we arrived back in Manhattan, which is appropriate for an urban hellscape, I guess. Check out that little visible bit of the sky which hasn’t been appropriated to glass towers visible in the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the site of National Tragedy, more and more reconstruction is going on. Eighteen years, I have to keep on reminding myself. Eighteen years.
I made my way into the rebuilt subway station at World Trade Center, which is now found under a shopping mall which is populated by shops where there’s naught an ordinary person such as myself could afford, and then boarded an E line train to get out of dodge and back to Western Queens where I belong.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A number of people have commented to me over the years that my demeanor actually alters for the better upon passing over or under the border between Manhattan and Queens. At Queens Plaza, with its rotting concrete and dripping masonry, one transferred to the M line which took me the rest of the way back to blessed Astoria. Zuzu the dog seemed quite amused when I opened the door to HQ, but then promptly fell asleep.
Tomorrow – the other really cool thing I got to do last week will be discussed. It was an actual adventure!
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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.
slightly abated
A city of fortresses.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The thing which bugs me so much about the conceptual model evinced by the City Planning crowd and the so called “urbanists” is how much they actually detest the chaotic streets and the “hustle and bustle” side of NYC. Everything they can do to eliminate the “unplanned” or the “unsightly” is on display over in Manhattan. Long blocks without street benches or other “friendly” features, a lack of interesting mid block street level buisness which might draw you away from the corner. The preservation of “sight lines” in favor of planting trees or other greenery… favoring certain kinds of commerce – high end retail and or office space – over needed businesses like supermarkets and laundromats. Modern Manhattan looks more and more like Marie Kondo has swept through it and thrown out all the stuff that doesn’t bring the “urbanists” crowd “joy.”
I’ve offered this thought before, but it seems that the crew running NYC’s regulatory environment regarding municipal preferences on street life don’t like cities all that much. They want order, and predictability. They want midwestern shopping malls.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A comment often offered by a humble narrator to companions and sometimes passerby strangers involves me gesturing towards something and saying “Look, it’s just like an architects drawing. All the people in this scene are two dimensional, notice all those massing shapes and wayfinding infrastructure.” I once had a City Planner indicate to me, when I pointed out that a certain section of LIC’s street design was creating bottlenecks for pedestrians that necessitated walking multiple blocks just to find a place to cross the street, that “well, we don’t want people crossing the street there.” Thing is, people ARE crossing the street there, and what somebody in City Hall WANTS New Yorkers to do will always be trumped by what New Yorkers HAVE to do. Best laid plans, mice, men, all that.
I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with some NYS officials from Albany who told me that since they wouldn’t issue a fishing license for Newtown Creek, nobody would fish there because it would be illegal so there was no need for signage cautioning against the practice around the waterway. I inquired as to how the war on drugs was going, and proceeded to make my appeals to a different agency for signage. The Federal EPA saw my point, and there’s now signage around the creek stating the obvious.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
“Old New York” and “New New York” used to refer to the era of modernist skyscrapers coexisting with and alongside the 19th century town houses and brownstones or tenements of an earlier age. These days, at least in my mind, it refers to the differential qualities of areas which the City Planning crowd has “fixed” versus those it hasn’t. Luckily, there’s large sections of Queens which their tender mercies haven’t been applied to. Yet.
Look at Astoria, with it’s vibrant street life and retail economy of mom and pop shopping. “Disturbingly heterogenous” and “chaotic” is probably how the City Hall people would describe things, and they’d ask “is this the best use of the land”? The bulldozers would be sitting on Northern Blvd. idling while they wait for the answer they want to hear coming back from people who think just like they 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.
complete vacation
Happy Tuesday, Lords and Ladies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A couple of friends answered my request to get “high in LIC” in the last week. Last week, on Thanksgiving and the Black Friday following it, views from my pal’s roof deck high above the Queens Plaza/Court Square area were on offer. On Sunday last, another friend allowed me onto his roof deck over in Hunters Point. The birds eye shots from Sunday will be presented in tomorrow’s post, for the most part.
While I was in the neighborhood, I did a little bit of wandering about, and had a very odd experience.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is one of the birds eye shots, from about twelve stories over Long Island City, looking towards East River past the Queens Landing section of Hunters Point Park South.
Shortly after recording this shot, I bid my host “adieu” and made my way down towards the street. Heading off towards Newtown Creek to the south was my goal. Upon reaching the corner, a sudden panicked call of “please help me, sir, please help me” rang out. An unusually tall blonde woman, my impression was that she was Russian (or some similar flavor of “Slavic”), approached and beseeched me to escort her back to her apartment house as she was terrified of a “driver” who “said all these things, horrible things, things…” She was brandishing her phone, which was on speaker with a man she said was her father. Fully aware that I might have wandered into the jaws of an old street grift called “cat fishing,” one nevertheless guided the lady back towards her building whereupon she disappeared within. Strange encounter with a quite hysterical person, but I got to feel like I helped some stranger out of a jam she was in, so “win.”
Life on the streets of NYC for an itinerant photographer.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wasn’t at all nervous about having to possibly “handle” a Russian hooligan if indeed I was being catfished (modern context notwithstanding, this is the one where a lady gains the attention of a man, whereupon she appeals to him to help her in a variety of circumstantial but always urgent situations, counting on his gallantry, who then leads him to usually male confederates who beat the tar out of the fellow whereupon the gang splits whatever loot he’s carrying) I was apoplectic about the masses of unsupervised teenagers gathered about the well lit East River waterfront.
Brrr, teenagers.
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cacophonous pause
6,210 days ago…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Yesterday, one spent his day participating in several call in meetings with the various folks I work with. On my last call, with Access Queens, the reopening of the Cortlandt Street MTA station, which somehow took the powers that be seventeen years to rebuild, came up. The seventeen years thing stuck with me, however. It also occurred to me after the call that there’s an entire generation of voters who will, next year, be pulling the levers in the voting booth whose formative years and world view were entirely shaped by the Terror Wars. They grew up in a country that’s now on a permanent war footing, and have never known anything else.
Did 911 really happen seventeen years ago? Seventeen years? On a Tuesday morning.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The level of optimism in pre 911 America was total, for those of you who have forgotten or were too young to perceive it. Back then, the politicians and pundits were talking about the end of history after the end of the Cold War with the now fallen Soviet Empire. They gloated about the weakened Russians, proclaimed that the neoliberal agenda had prevailed, and generally behaved like a rich bully in a bar room. Then, those two planes came screaming down the Hudson.
I lost friends that day, but others lost everything they loved. Vengeance, we all cried. Bomb them into the Stone Age, we said. Kill, kill, kill. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. French Fries were renamed Freedom Fries. “They” hurt us, so we hurt “them” back. Let’s Roll…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Seventeen years later and we are seemingly coming apart at the seams. Reactionary populism, division of the electorate into ever smaller slices and interest groups, Americans at each other’s throats over relatively minor political issues… All of this was present back then, but not to the degree it is today. The Terror Wars are just a fact of life now, and it’s normal for American Soldiers to be deployed overseas in combat zones. The Freedom Tower, rebranded as just “One World Trade” is open, and is where you’ll find a memorial museum which is a very popular destination for foreign tourists. Personally, I’ve never managed to well up the courage to visit it.
I also don’t like to visit my father’s grave, as I’d rather remember him as he was before cancer ate him alive.
Seventeen years.
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splitting crescendo
I get around.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Ye olde Newtown Pentacle is back in session, I tell ‘ye. The weather has been bizarre and unpredictable, with the storm tossed wrath of jehovie breaking out randomly, but a humble narrator has nevertheless been scratching his way around and through the mortal coils of the great Metropolis. Pictured above is the Shining City itself, the eidolon of the system, according to those who rule over it. It’s where all the gears and works resolve back to, and where they get all gummed up in political patronage and intrigue. Imagine it as an outer borough, rather than as the center. That’s how an ‘effed up humble narrator thinks.
Manhattan is the problem, not the solution. Remember that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A big orange boat is pictured above, which one hadn’t been on in several months when this particular shot was captured. That situation has since been rectified, but such matters will be discussed in a future post. The big orange boat was originally privately owned, by Commodore Vanderbilt himself. Recent conversation with one of the bicycle fanatics forced one to describe the ludicrous state of affairs back in the days when the big orange boat charged a fee for riding it, and that the costs of employing the ticket sellers and takers and money counters was nearly that of operating the boat itself. It turned out that running it without a fare was cheaper than it was with one, given the size of the per passenger subsidy paid out by taxpayers. You listening NYC Ferry?
That’s why it’s free to ride the Staten Island Ferry, and one continually wonders why no thought is given to creating a third terminal for the service in Red Hook or Bay Ridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has also found himself on the subway several times in the last weeks, and I will reiterate my slogan that “The “A” in “MTA” is for adventure.” Several times over the last few weeks has one simply taken the first Queens bound train that comes, rather than the one that goes anywhere near my actual destination, under governance of the notion that getting out of the Shining City and back to Queens as expeditiously as possible is what matters. Once I’m back in Queens, I have options – walk, crawl, etc.
Unfortunately, there really isn’t a publicly section of the Queens shoreline left (which isn’t a park) that’s deep enough or expansive enough to dream of there being a terminal built for the big orange boat.
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.
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The Newtown Pentacle 