Archive for the ‘Maspeth’ Category
crazier people
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned, a new habit I’ve been actively cultivating in recent months has been to commit to an early morning photo adventure at least once a week. I’m a night owl by nature, and it’s quite normal for me to be wide awake at 3 or 4 in the morning. The solitude and quiet offered by these midnight intervals is cherished, but it royally screws me up during the winter months due to a paucity of light and being out of sync with everybody else.
Sunrises are cliche, sure, but the light is nice and there’s that whole Marcus Aurelius thing – “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
Whenever you’re feeling lazy, or unmotivated, there’s always Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius to fall back on. At any rate, it certainly does make you seem smarter or better read than you actually are. Saying that, huddling under the blankets sounds pretty nice, if you ask me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Loving portrait compositions of sewers, that’s what I think about. The one above is an exposure stack of multiple tripod shots, actually. That’s how I spend my early morning hours these days, which is why I’m a schmuck with a camera and not a Roman Emperor like old Markey Marcus. My morning had begun with a pre dawn arrival at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road and from there I walked westwards towards the Kosciuszcko Bridge, and these shots are literally from “DUKBO” or “Down Under the Kosciuszcko Bridge Onramp.”
Another one of Marcus Aurelius’ bits of advice I try to follow is to wear two entirely different sets of clothes – one for inside the house, another for the world at large. I tend not to wear the shoes I was walking around the Creeklands with inside of HQ, and make it a point of changing out of whatever I was wearing while photographing sewers when arriving back home. Saying that, when Zuzu the dog was still around, I would always get a full “sniff” inspection from her when I got home after proximity to this sort of infrastructure.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On this particular day, I had left HQ at 4:30 in the morning, and was on-site by 5 a.m. The shot above was captured at 8:14 a.m., so I was just north of three hours into the session. I didn’t get back to HQ in Astoria that day until about noon, so I guess I was out about 8 hours. I had other stuff to do, in addition to processing all of the photos, and didn’t get to bed until well after midnight. Suffice to say that I slept well that night.
Marcus Aurelius might have been proud, I would hope, but as a Stoic – he’d just expect this sort of effort.
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tarnished silver
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few more shots from my happy place, Industrial Maspeth, in today’s post. There’s another enormous construction project underway on the Queens side of the waterway, which will see yet another last mile shipping center built. There will be more truck traffic thereby, and despite sitting on a rail spur and adjoining maritime bulkheads, nobody in the government compelled Federal Express to explore their usage.
It just grinds my gears, hearing the politicians talk about climate change and environmental issues – specifically heavy automotive traffic – and when they have the chance to actually do something about the concerning future they speak of it’s time to feign ignorance. Look at LIC – a brand spanking new and fully planned “City” in which all of the problems of the old chaotic “City” have been artfully replicated. Go see the garbage mountains of Court Square on trash day, experience the lack of public bathrooms, or street seating, or…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Private car ownership used to be far more common than it is today in NYC. Fleets of yellow cabs have been replaced by fleets of ride share vehicles, but there really hasn’t been an “add on” in terms of “cabs plus Ubers” as some think. What has increased? Truck traffic.
Every consumer good, scrap of food, and dog collar in Nassau and Suffolk Counties arrives on Long Island, from Port Elizabeth Newark, after being driven by truck through NYC. We need to break that particular chain, and establish water transport of bulk shipping between the Port of NY/NJ and Long Island. Why are there no docks for intermodal cargo shipping at or nearby JFK? JFK is a major shipping port for NYC, but it’s all truck and airplane based. It’s surrounded by water, and connects in several places to the LIRR network of rail tracks, but we unload cargo from jets and use trucks to move the stuff around instead. That’s where your magnification of traffic has magically appeared from in the last 10-15 years.
Don’t worry, the bosses have decided to add another half mile to the Second Avenue Subway to negate having Upper East Siders needing to walk the two blocks to the 4/5 on Lexington. It is uphill, after all, and what upper Manhattan needs is more Subway capacity, right? It’s not like all of the leading economic indicators and the actual non Wall Street economy are centered around Brooklyn and Queens where north/south transit is accomplished using a four car long G line train.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sham of it all.
What NYC needs is a holistic master plan, one which governs in broad and not terribly specific strokes. You want to build an apartment building? Great. How are you going to engineer storm water neutrality into the structure? Check the requirements for that in the master plan and Mazel Tov on your new endeavor. Amazon or Fed Ex or UPS wants to expand their operation? Fantastic – NYC needs blue and brown collar jobs more than ever, but here are the electric vehicle/mass cargo intermodal shipping predicates which they’ll need to oblige.
Bike lanes will fix all problems instead. They are a panacea, a silver key which open up vistas of experience and reality that can only stagger the imagination. They’re like Coca Cola – the real thing.
“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.
something tangible
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent endeavor found a humble narrator in my happy place – Industrial Maspeth – before the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself emerged from behind Nassau County in the east. I was at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road, with the tripod and full bag of gear.
Daylight savings time, coupled with the paucity of daylight hours and the atrocious angle of the winter sun relative to NYC’s street grid, negates a lot of photographic opportunities. Sunsets and sunrises are really your only chance for “magic moments” this time of year. One has been making an effort to commit to one or the other time interval at least once a week.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Maspeth Avenue Plank Road is the stubby remain of a bridge which last crossed Newtown Creek during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, and it’s found just shy of three miles from the East River. It adjoins a section of Newtown Creek called “the Turning Basin.” This area is conventionally referred to as being the most environmentally compromised section of the waterway, as a point of interest. Industrial usage of this zone of Newtown Creek included an enormous and quite dirty Manufactured Gas Plant on the Brooklyn side, and a chemical/acid factory and high volume copper refinery on the Queens shoreline. There were a lot of other businesses with lovely occupations housed on both sides – fertilizer and rendering mills, night soil processors, secondary manufacturers and packagers for petroleum refining byproducts like paraffin waxes and naphtha – for instance.
It’s nice. At sunrise, fleets of birds take to the air.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The big LNG fuel tank at the right side of the shot is one of two such apparatuses found in Greenpoint at the National Grid property. Grid’s footprint used to be Keyspan, and before that it was Brooklyn Union Gas’s. BUG was the manufacturer of the “natural” gas mentioned above. When Grid bought up all of the BUG assets, via their purchase of the Keyspan outfit who had previously acquired the property, they also assumed Superfund liability and responsibility for cleaning up all of BUG’s “yuck” here in Newtown Creek’s turning basin.
That’s the happy place for ya.
“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.
apologetic hesitancy
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Grand Street Bridge pictured above, which I’d suggest you photograph soon if you were planning in doing so. The NYC DOT is going to be replacing it in the very near future, and this crossing of yet another Newtown Creek tributary – the East Branch – is going to look very different in just a few years time.
Oddly enough, at the start of the 20th and end of the 19th centuries, this was a very popular spot to commit suicide. There was a Catholic priest who did so here in his full ritual vestments, carrying his Mitre and everything. What?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of self destructive ideations, this sort of graffiti has been turning up all around the Creeklands in recent weeks. Allow me to decode this one for you – a “fat” lie plays into a certain political dog whistle which states that the only people who get sick or die from Covid are either overweight or already burdened with comorbidity factors like diabetes or heart disease. The “rugged individualism” types push this out there to let you know that they are too morally and physically strong for the virus to find a foothold in them. It’s like lord of the flies, I tell you.
Other lines from the same crowd include “I’ll get the shot when the illegals get it,” and “I’d gladly sacrifice my grandmother’s life for the sake of the economy.” As I’ve been opining for nearly two years now, don’t listen to Politicians about anything. Instead, observe what the most risk averse corporation in America does. Watch Disney.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Did you know that nobody has ever died on Disney property in either Florida’s Disneyworld or at any of their global parks, resorts, and cruise lines? A monorail operator employee of theirs was decapitated in an accident in Florida, and Disney’s EMT’s kept the guy’s heart beating until the stretcher wasn’t on their property anymore. He died in Orlando, not Disneyworld. Like I said, “risk averse.”
The chair pictured above was discovered on the approach to the Grand Street Bridge, and it was covered in barnacles (here’s a close up). The logical supposition is that somebody pulled this thing out of Newtown Creek. The good news is that there seem to be barnacles in the water.
“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.
portentous meanings
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One found himself at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site recently, attending and photographing a Newtown Creek Alliance cleanup event that occurred on a lovely Saturday afternoon. One of the property owners nearby this site has recently been compelled to do some remodeling of their shoreline. I’ve known about this for a bit, but given that I’m usually here either at sunset or after dark, haven’t explored the new situation.
It’s not a good idea to be poking around in the bushes after dark in Industrial Maspeth, and especially so if you’re on foot and alone. Given that NCA had a fairly large group here, scooping garbage and debris off of the shoreline, I figured “why not?”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shoreline in this spot has been fairly impassable during my years at Newtown Creek, and largely ignored by the industrial operation which worked busily on the other side of a large concrete and steel fence. An artist I know had briefly set up a small structure back here which he used as a hangout and ad hoc painting studio. That structure had been taken over by some mendicant in the last year or two. Artist, structure, and mendicant are all gone now and there’s all sorts of geographically appropriate plantings here now.
This is where I got into the fight with a raccoon back in 2020, during which I had to poke at the thing with my tripod.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the mouth of English Kills, the Newtown Creek tributary that flows all the way back to Johnson Avenue in Bushwick. It’s also where water quality along the Creek sharply drops off. If you think Newtown Creek is bad, as everybody including the Federal Government does, you should see English Kills. Yuck.
Back tomorrow with more from my beloved Creek.
“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 