Archive for the ‘newtown creek’ Category
a New Sludge Boat, baby, a new sludge boat
It’s called a Boat because it can’t launch a boat, that’s what Ships can do.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First – here’s what a Sludge Boat is.
This Sludge Boat’s contract was completed on June 12 of 2013, and she splashed into the world a scant 290 feet long. That boat you’re looking at in the shot above is the NYC DEP’s M/V Hunts Point, and she cost $28 million to build down in Louisiana’s Bollinger Shipyards.
Word went out that it had arrived at the Navy Yard, so a humble narrator set off for Brooklyn.
from nyc.gov
The M/V Hunts Point, the newest addition to the DEP marine fleet, recently completed its sea trials and left its dock in Louisiana for the trip around the tip of Florida and up the East Coast. It is expected to arrive in New York City next week. You can follow its progress here. The Hunts Point is the first of three new sludge vessels that DEP has commissioned and it will replace the 1967-vintage M/V Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
NYC DEP is a good choice if you need to confess a secret to someone who will never reveal it, by the way, and other than a few nuggets on nyc.gov there has been very little official discussion of this new boat. In some ways, it’s a bit mysterious, but there’s a whole contingent over at DEP who don’t understand the enthusiasm some show for their toys. The MTA on the other hand, actually encourages railfans.
With all the mystery vessels that have been presented at this, your Newtown Pentacle, over the years – I’ve developed some small aptitude for discovery. M/V Hunts Point uses call sign WDH2432, has a gross tonnage of 2,772 and is – as mentioned- 290 feet long. Her draught is 4.3m, and the reason that her stature is so reduced as compared to the less modern vessels of DEP’s fleet – it’s so that she can pass under the Pulaski Bridge on Newtown Creek rather than requiring it to open.
from nywea.org
Municipal sludge vessels have been a part of New York City’s sludge disposal system since the late 1930s. The Federal Work Projects Administration (WPA) funded and built the first three Motorized Vessels(M/V): M/V Wards Island, M/V Tallman Island, and the M/V Coney Island. Before these vessels were available, sludge was routinely discarded into the surrounding waters from the few sludge facilities operating at that time. As a result, the harbor waters became so polluted that incoming traffic would find their hulls cleaned of any marine life.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This change in behavior, the current sludge boats dock at the East River in Greenpoint to siphon off the product of the sewer plants’ operation, is predicated upon the scheme of these boats sailing up Newtown Creek from the East River and into the Whale Creek tributary which adjoins it. The boat will attach to a specially designed dock at Whale Creek. M/V Hunts Point is the first of three such vessels.
Need for the hated sludge tank and dock at the corner of Commercial Street will be eliminated, satisfying a key complaint of the community, by this operation.
Bollinger Shipyards provides new construction, repair and conversion products and services to the commercial offshore energy and marine transportation markets around the world, and to the U.S. Government and naval shipbuilding marketplace from our U.S. Gulf of Mexico facilities. Family owned and operated since 1946, Bollinger maintains ten ISO 9001:2008 certified shipyards and a fleet of twenty-eight dry-docks for shallow draft and deepwater vessels. Bollinger has earned a premier reputation for superior quality, value, timely service and delivery to its customers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A friend who is associated with the Brooklyn Navy Yard brought me in to the place with him yesterday, graciously allowing me to capture these and other shots at the location. Please welcome, Lords and Ladies, to your service – the M/V Hunts Point, NYC’s latest and greatest Sludge Boat.
from wikipedia
The United States Navy Yard, New York, also known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the New York Naval Shipyard (NYNSY), is a shipyard located in Brooklyn, New York, 1.7 miles (2.7 km) northeast of the Battery on the East River in Wallabout Basin, a semicircular bend of the river across from Corlear’s Hook in Manhattan. It was bounded by Navy Street, Flushing and Kent Avenues, and at the height of its production of warships for the United States Navy, it covered over 200 acres (0.81 km2).
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brief space
An interesting effect observed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
By this stage of the game, lords and ladies, the shot above must depict a scene quite familiar to your eyes. The waterway is the Dutch Kills tributary of the fabled Newtown Creek, and the industrial buildings framing it part of the Degnon Terminal here in Long Island City, Queens. The water is frozen, as would be expected in this frigid month.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hanging around with the Newtown Creek Alliance folks, one of the terms I’ve learned which cannot be expunged from active memory is “sediment mound.” That’s when an open sewer deposits layer after layer of its cargo, over the course of decades, and piles up a mound. These mounds are normally indistinct to the eye, sitting hidden in the turbid water.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What’s interesting in these shots, to me at least, is that the sediment mounds and other features of the bed which Dutch Kills flows through, are visible in the melting edges of the ice. It appeared that the ice didn’t form as solidly at the shorelines as it did in the center of the water. The center was, in fact, a solid plate of ice which had garbage rolling around on it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These were captured on January the 11th, a very foggy day. The shot above is a stitched panorama, which depicts the entire water way while facing roughly southwards.
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scented waters
Solitude and the solemnity of my beloved Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It has officially been three weeks since I laid eyes upon Newtown Creek and it is official, I miss her. The sense of desolating isolation, the abandonment of hope, the loneliness of it all. Often have I wished that there were more people who could appreciate her for what she is, but most of those who encounter the Newtown Creek have an immediate desire to somehow alter her. Me, I try to appreciate her for what she is and leave behind only a set of footprints.
from wikipedia
A loner is a person who avoids or does not actively seek human interaction or prefers to be alone. There are many reasons for solitude, intentional or otherwise, and “loner” does not imply a specific cause. Intentional reasons include spiritual and religious considerations or personal philosophies. Unintentional reasons involve temperament, being highly sensitive, having more extreme forms of shyness, or various mental disorders, being introverted or prefer quiet over commotion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of these people are carpetbaggers from out of state think tanks, Albany bureaucrats, or do gooder types who moved to hipster Brooklyn in order to catechize the unwashed. They’re not bad folks, in fact they’re well intentioned, but seriously- leave the old girl to herself. She’s got enough problems with the Feds crawling over the place, and neither of us like too much in the way of company.
from wikipedia
Loneliness is a complex and usually unpleasant emotional response to isolation or lack of companionship. Loneliness typically includes anxious feelings about a lack of connectedness or communality with other beings, both in the present and extending into the future. As such, loneliness can be felt even when surrounded by other people. The causes of loneliness are varied and include social, mental or emotional factors.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most New Yorkers couldn’t find her on a map of the 5 boroughs, despite Newtown Creek’s position at the center of it. She’s like some ancestral specter, lurking at the flickering edges of a candle’s light, and only seen by those who truly wish to. Disregard her story, and her dangers, at your own peril, for until you accept what she is and what’s happened here over the centuries…
from wikipedia
The encounter with the shadow plays a central part in the process of individuation. Jung considered that ‘the course of individuation…exhibits a certain formal regularity. Its signposts and milestones are various archetypal symbols’ marking its stages; and of these ‘the first stage leads to the experience of the SHADOW’. If ‘the breakdown of the persona constitutes the typical Jungian moment both in therapy and in development’, it is this which opens the road to the shadow within, coming about when ‘Beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty … as if the initial encounter with the Self casts a dark shadow ahead of time’. Jung considered as a perennial danger in life that ‘the more consciousness gains in clarity, the more monarchic becomes its content…the king constantly needs the renewal that begins with a descent into his own darkness’ — his shadow – which the ‘dissolution of the persona’ sets in motion.
“The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself” and represents “a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well”. If and when ‘an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others — such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions — …[a] painful and lengthy work of self-education”.
The dissolution of the persona and the launch of the individuation process also brings with it ‘the danger of falling victim to the shadow … the black shadow which everybody carries with him, the inferior and therefore hidden aspect of the personality’ — of a merger with the shadow.
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elder world
Another archive shot, one of my faves.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the New York Paving Company down there, in DUGABO (Down Under the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge Onramp), in Blissville, Queens. The Newtown Creek, loquaciously, lurks in its ancient bed of silt and clay as it has always been wont to do.
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ragged purple
My all time favorite tugboat shot.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This was shot on November 17, 2010.
It’s a memorable date, as a fellow named Andrew Cuomo came to Newtown Creek to announce the formal settlement between NYS and ExxonMobil, concerning the Greenpoint oil spill. The Brian Nicholas entered the Creek at an optimal moment, lighting wise.
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