Archive for the ‘newtown creek’ Category
poppied silks
Sweeping, ever sweeping.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The loudest of all municipal vehicles, other than certain members of the NYC Congressional delegation, has to be the street sweeping trucks operated by the DSNY. Heard this one coming from blocks away, spinning its steel brushes and singing its song of internal combustion.
Ever get hit with the pebbles, detritus, and other shrapnel these things spin off? Ow.
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not voluntary
The banal joy of it all is what today’s post explores.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Have to admit that despite my confession to suffering from a bit of a rut, which is a seasonal complaint often offered at this time of year, the places which I continually find myself seldom disappoint. Case in point today are shots collected from the Queens side of the fabled Newtown Creek, amongst the concretized wasteland of DUPBO (Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp). Pictured is a view of my beloved Creek looking towards Greenpoint and the GMDC (Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center) found at the Manhattan Avenue Street End in Brooklyn from DUPBO, which is ultimately kind of a depressing image for me. Your humble narrator has been spending far too much time in Brooklyn lately, and not enough in Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Brooklyn is lost in soliloquy again, currently obsessing over ways to spend its ExxonMobil settlement money. There’s all sorts of stuff going on over there, with everyone in 11122 cooking up an idea to mulch this or compost that and applying for funding. It’s all good stuff, but gardening isn’t going to do much against the torrents of waste and sewage which flow out of Manhattan everyday. Greenpoint is the Mississippi delta of municipal waste, and Manhattan is an upstream pig farm whose shit pipes flow directly into the river. Western Queens, on the other hand, knows exactly what role it is expected to play in Manhattan’s gang of subordinates and doesn’t pretend not to know.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Carpet baggers from all over the City and State, sometimes from other states even, can smell the cash over in Brooklyn and want to take a bite. Foundations and think tanks roam about over there, pronouncing the need for “green infrastructure” (gardening) and other buzzy concepts which the masters over on Manhattan (and their Brooklyn representatives) have decided on as the fix for all things related to sewage runoff. I’m not against it, of course, how can you stand up against gardening? It’s just that over in Queens, We’ve got a highway which feeds a couple of hundred thousand auto trips a day into a tunnel that is just a couple of blocks from the Creek. Said highway runs alongside the concentrating point of all rail on Long Island, which is neighbored by two major automobile bridges (Queensboro and Triborough).
How can you garden your way out of that?
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not necessarily
Sunset at Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In Greenpoint to attend a meeting of the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee, a community group whose mission is citizen oversight of the DEP construction process at the sewer plant, one found himself ridiculously early for the event. Accordingly, having no place else to go due to the pariah status I enjoy when nobody requires something from me, retreat was made to the banks of the loquacious Newtown Creek to confirm that it was still there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happily, the waterway had not been paved over in the intervening week since my last visit, and given the specific chronology of my residency there- the diurnal arc of the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself was waning. Atmospherics resulted, as the outer space based fusion ball attained an acute angle to that section of the planet occupied by the great human hive called New York City, painting airborne fumes and miasmas in orange and fuchsia- as pictured.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The NCMC meeting which followed discussed several topics. The disturbing role and intentions of a corporate entity called Veolia (which has been given managerial control over the NYC DEP) came up, as did the subject of a dredging project which the DEP requires to complete a certain phase of the plant’s construction, and the ongoing saga of getting horticultural staff in place at the Nature Walk public space (from which these photos were shot) was also explored. It was all very depressing, but its always nice to be amongst people who aren’t chasing or hurling things at me.
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prosaic materialism
All believe themselves to be saints, not sinners.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dia de Los Muertos, Áraw ng mga Patáy, the second day of Samhain, or just plain old All Saints Day- here we are again on the track towards the dark and cold wastes of winter. Given a humble narrators abiding interest in the Newtown Creek and its surrounding communities, its only natural for me to think about those who passed through its coils over the centuries. Will you raise a glass to the saints of local industry- Charles Pratt, John D. Rockefeller, The Van Iderstine family, or Ambrose Kingsland- tonight?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Something that I’ve been attempting to reconcile for awhile now is the role of these historical figures in the development and despoiling of the Newtown Creek. Hurricane Sandy showed us what it would be like to live in New York City without a functioning energy sector, and it forced me to reconsider these characters beyond the popular narratives of modernity. From an environmentalist point of view, these are loathsome individuals whose crimes against the earth are countless, and their bones should be scattered in the same way that Marius did to Sulla’s. From an economic point of view, the relict grandeur of early 20th century Greenpoint and Long Island City existed solely because of the energy sector, which provided hundreds of thousands of jobs over the course of a century and “lifted the raft” for the entire community.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s so complicated. This tale of industrialists and robber barons, which is one of the central dichotomies of the American mythology with its narrative of progress. At least they did something with the place which was productive, that generated wealth- is how most of the MBAs would see it. Today, most of these MBA types look to Newtown Creek as a place to throw objectionable materials away, whether it be garbage or sewage. Does modernity have the right to judge the past? Can we understand the “on the ground” circumstances that they were working with back in the 19th century? What have we done, to “lift the raft”?
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atavistical menace
Welcome to the darker side of the year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Call it what you will. There’s Samhain, and Calan Gaeaf, and we’ve also got All Hallows’ Eve – but it’s just Halloween here at Newtown Pentacle HQ. 2013 has been a slow one for the occult and magick beat, I’m afraid. Haven’t been able to bring you much more than a few headless chickens found on the rail tracks in Maspeth, actually. It’s not that I haven’t been looking, mind you, but I just keep on finding singular shoes divorced from their mated pair. Try and convince me that there isn’t some serial killer at work behind this phenomena, I dare you.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A lurking fear of mine is the sure knowledge that there are rats in the walls. Just beyond the reach of station lights, they squirm and breed and hunger. Remember last year- directly following the storm- when concerns about this rodent army leaving the flooded tunnel system to try their luck above ground, in the darkened streets of lower Manhattan, were openly debated? Who can guess all there is, that might be down there?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Manhattan terrifies. Its teeming masses yearn to breathe free, but are forced to congregate in the great human hive in the name of industry. The atmosphere hosts a thriving variety of bacterial and viral specie, which float along on gusts of contaminant laden air from host to host. Pandemic is inevitable, and it would not be the first time either. First Cholera, then Typhus, Tuberculosis, and Influenza have historically cut great swaths of the population down on this crowded island. Always there are those who cannot afford to be sick, and are forced to go about their business with the affect and manner of the walking dead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Halloween though, isn’t about some mad serial killer operating in Queens, or an army of starving rats emerging from the Subways to feast, nor some plague that renders its victims with a virulent visage reminiscent of the living dead. Instead, it’s about spectral menaces rising from graveyards to wander the land in search of living souls to take back to hell with them, silly. The Danse Macabre is underway, so watch out Newtownicans, for evil of the most vile sort is afoot.
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