Archive for the ‘Northern Blvd.’ Category
Archives #045
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s been a long and strange experience, the broken ankle thing. Far and away the most painful injury suffered during the last twenty thousand and nine hundred twenty five days. As of publication of this post, the broken ankle injury occurred roughly one thousand eight hundred and ninety six hours ago. I spent the first three weeks of that interval in an opioid haze caused by the necessity of pain killers. I was helpless as a baby, as well.
Voting was a challenge due to the ankle, but a Cop helped me get up a set of steps to the polling site for the parking area, and I then cast my lot.
2010’s ‘ceaseless mazes’ talks about an encounter with the New York & Atlantic on the LIRR’s Lower Montauk tracks in Maspeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The opioid interval of this experience saw me watching endless hours of police bodycam footage on YouTube for some reason. Since, I’ve been preparing a twenty item long list of ‘things you don’t do when the cops show up, as it really sets them off.’ One of these (#13) is ‘don’t threaten to track the Cops down where they live and kidnap their kids.’ That really doesn’t go down well with the gendarmes, who happily slap a ‘terroristic threat Felony charge’ on the ‘perp’ in return.
It’s Batman rules. You’re not going to win, so just give up when the cops get there. Shut your trap and let them do what they do. The only person you talk to is a lawyer. Batman rules. Batman rules? You’re not going to be able to beat up or resist Batman, that’s the rule. You also can not win a fight with the Cops on the street.
2012’s ‘poor substitute’ detailed a ride on MTA’s holiday nostalgia trains.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m hoping that these archives posts will be a thing of the past pretty soon, but let’s see how sound the ankle actually is, and whether or not I can truly resume my normal activities. Thanks for sticking with Newtown Pentacle through all this, it’s been a balm knowing that y’all are here.
These archive posts are reaching into Newtown Pentacle’s backups, and are pulling posts that went public on this date, in their respective years, going back to 2009. This practice will continue until I’m back on both feet full time, and new photos and stories can be gathered. For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, I broke my left ankle at the end of September.
Finally, 2016’s ‘unctuous haggling’ walks around the “Carridor” of Northern Boulevard nearby the border of Astoria and Woodside.
“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.
Archives #003
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Day #3 of archive posts arrives here at Newtown Pentacle, as your humble narrator continues to recover from a broken ankle. As mentioned previously, I’m pulling forgotten posts from prior years out of the dustbin. These were all published, on this date, sometime between 2009 and 2024.
On October 11th, in 2012, this post offered observations on a ritual site that was discovered in LIC’s Calvary Cemetery. This particular ritual site, on a hidden hill, was regularly inspected during my walks through the polyandrion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m happy about one thing, though, which is that I’m not in that walk up apartment back in Astoria during this ordeal. This whole experience would have been a hundred times worse in NYC. When the ambulance brought me into the ER here in Pittsburgh, I was immediately taken care of and didn’t have to wait my turn on a gurney in some hallway for hours and hours, which is common experience back in NYC.
Thought viruses, transmitted by written words, which can only infect the literate? This concept was pondered back in 2016 in this post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Every day there’s a bit of improvement to my situation. I’m sleeping fairly well, despite not having anything to feel tired about, as I’m sitting all day long. I long for a walk, to feel the radiates of the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself striking my skinvelope, waving the camera around as I go. Hell… I’d be happy just to be cleared to drive again.
This post from 2021 and it is the conclusion of a ‘72 hour’ series captured in Vermont’s Burlington. Whereas I didn’t discuss it publicly, the decision to move out of NYC had already been made, and this was a ‘first interview’ for what turned out to be my second choice for where to flee.
“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.
signficance of
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
August 3rd marked the beginning of a protracted heat wave here, in a City that never sleeps but certainly appreciates the value of a quick nap. Having seen the dire predictions of a week long spell of heat coupled with sky high levels of atmospheric humidity, one desired to get one walk in before things got truly life threatening. I also wanted “something to do” while waiting out the weather, and since I enjoy developing photos…
Saying all that, the dew point when I was shooting these photos was up in the high 60’s and it was truly a shvitzy night. The “urban heat island effect” coupled with high humidity levels – even at night – is an absolute killer and super difficult to do anything during. Accordingly, I opted for a short walk, one which carried me past “hole reliable” at Sunnyside Yards.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I got fairly lucky. They’re doing all sorts of track maintenance further east of Sunnyside Yards, the Long Island Railroad people are. That means that the train dispatchers are grouping east and west bound traffic much closer together than normal, in order to maximize the length of the intervals between, when the track workers can do their thing.
Normally, it’s one train every twenty minutes or so. On August 3rd, there was a gaggle of traffic flowing through the Harold Interlocking.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Difficult and technical, that’s how I describe my methodology for getting shots at “hole reliable” at night. The train is cooking along at a good clip, it’s dark, and where the scene is bright – it’s super bright.
F2, ISO 256,000 (!), and 1/125th of a second is the formula I used for these. As usual, you shoot for the edit, and I noodled these a bit during the developing process for contrast and managed to gain back about a stop of light by being careful with how the contrast ended up in the final render of the camera’s RAW file.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m quite happy with the way that the light from the train showed up in the gravel surrounding the tracks. I’m also pleased as punch that you can see the engineer driving the train behind the windshield.
The shot above was composed with the idea that “you need to do a few that leaves room for setting type into, for presentations and videos.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The heavy industrial ballet just kept on coming, and as LIRR 421 was leaving the frame, another train appeared and was making its way east.
Sometimes you get lucky, even when it’s a steamy August night.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rest of my walk was pretty uneventful. I scuttled up the hill to Queens Boulevard, hung a left, and then walked back to HQ in Astoria along 43rd street. These were the last shots I accomplished before the heatwave set in and the 85 degree temperatures at midnight began for a week. I hate “reverse blizzards,” so I hung around the air conditioner for several days.
Something different tomorrow – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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.
watcher’s window
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Firstly, as I’ve “caught up with myself,” Newtown Pentacle is returning to the familiar three images a day format for an interval. One had quite an abundance of photos to display from before and after the recent trip to Pittsburgh. Back home just in time for the Omicron surge, a humble narrator has resumed his “every other day” schedule of long and short walk around Western Queens.
Recent endeavor found one scuttling about Long Island City’s Court Square section, which has come to resemble Manhattan in terms of population density and building typology. One will point out – again – that despite this massive build out and investment in converting the “mixed use” zoning of LIC over to high density residential zoning, there has not been a similar investment in municipal services. Cops, fire, sanitation, hospital beds, transit. What that means is basically more mouths to feed with the same amount of bread as before. What could go wrong?
Nothing matters, and nobody cares.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The stolen sky of Long Island City is now populated by dormitories for the aspirant class and the already well heeled. One question that continually nags is why the new people don’t have or use window coverings. Drapes, Venetian Blinds, curtains – they seem to prefer letting it all hang out and displaying their lives to each other. I was visiting a friend a couple of years back who lives in Hunters Point, and was looking out of the windows of his tower apartment and noticed a guy across the street, clad only in his underwear, who was doing the dishes. I wondered why he didn’t have curtains, and more importantly – why you’d pay $3,000 plus a month in rent for a “luxury apartment” which didn’t have a dishwasher appliance installed. Weird.
Pictured above is what they call Five Pointz. Personally, I’d rather that the old Neptune Meter company building with its amazing artwork which the tower apartments have stolen the name of was still here, but that’s big real estate for you.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My neighborhood in Astoria is about to be similarly destroyed by a project called “Innovation Queens.” Proposed by Kaufman Astoria and Larry Silverstein, this monstrous ideation will decimate the south eastern section of Astoria by erecting a series of 20-30 story tall towers in a triangular section defined by 38th street and 35th avenue on one side and 43rd street and Northern Blvd./36th avenue on the other.
For those of you who know the area – the movie theater, PC Richards, the pool hall, Malbin Pipe, Harley Davidson, and all of those mechanic and used car businesses are toast. All of the blue collar “walk to work” jobs hosted by these businesses are similarly going to go bye-bye. If you want to make an easy $5,000 bucks, contact the Innovation Queens people and tell them you’ll advocate for the project.
You’ll have to get in line, though, since they’ve already bought off a local bar owner, the driving school people on Steinway, a couple of the NYCHA tenant association presidents, and a “community leader” to flack for them.
“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.
wide scattering
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another night, another walk around Long Island City in the wind and cold. Another shot of the same gas station in the dark. One thing about this pandemic time… it enforces you being in a rut. Same old, same old, nothing matters, nobody cares. Meh.
I want to see waterfalls and mountains. Vast forests, full of critters, and experience the novel, the new, the unexpected. Right now, I’ve got traffic and gasoline tanker trucks though, so I can’t justify the ennui. Better than nothing, or homogeneity and sprawl. As the now classic song by TLC would advise – Don’t go chasing waterfalls.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One reminds himself that he’s actually grown quite jaded over the years, here in Western Queens. When you’ve got a high school with a fighter jet in its parking lot just a short walk from the house, which you pass by on your way to what used to be the world’s most valuable maritime industrial zone, not finding “something worth taking pictures of” speaks to your own lack of imagination more than anything.
I was going somewhere specific this particular evening, however.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s 29th street, between 47th avenue and Hunters Point Avenue, in the Degnon Terminal section of Long Island City. Just beyond the chain link fence in the shot above is found the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek. Specifically, it’s the “turning basin” of Dutch Kills. If you look at an overhead map, this is the hammer head shaped area.
There’s been a slow moving shoreline collapse happening for about three years now. When the original collapse began, NYC DOT came out and inspected the roadway for signs of instability. They pronounced it safe for travel and traffic, three years ago. Subsequent collapses have not drawn them back out to take another look.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Thanksgiving weekend of 2021, about 25-30 feet of land collapsed into the water, and just about the second week of 2022 the rest of it gave way. Now, this area was a wetland/swamp just over a hundred years ago and the land was “reclaimed” by a developer named Michael Degnon, hence the dub of “Degnon Terminal.”
The way they used to do this, back in the day, was to build out a network of timber box cells. These timber structure boxes, with piles driven into the water and muck, were then filled with rubble and fill which created dry land that they could build on. It’s that hundred year old timber which is giving way, allowing the contained fill to excavate into the water. Unfortunately, 29th street is sitting on top of this and the street itself has started to sag downwards.
As mentioned – nothing matters, and nobody cares. This, however, matters to me and I’m working on making “them” care.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nothing is natural here, it’s all built environment.
This land was once owned by a Governor of New York State – Roscoe P. Flowers. Gov. Flowers passed away in the late 19th century, and Degnon purchased the so called “waste meadows” of Long Island City from his estate shortly before the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that they would be developing the adjoining marsh and swamp land into the Sunnyside Yards.
Degnon was either incredibly lucky or he had the inside scoop, but either way that’s how the Degnon properties came to be and how they were “reclaimed” from the tidal wetlands of Dutch Kills. Dutch Kills was canalized, and at the end of the turning basin there used to be infrastructure that could load rail cars onto barges and vice versa. This connected to a series of tracks known as the Degnon Terminal Railway, which offered connections to the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks at Sunnyside Yards and to the nearby Long Island Railroad Lower Montauk tracks along Newtown Creek. When the PRR and LIRR assets became “nationalized” by Nelson Rockefeller in the late 1960’s and the MTA was created, the properties here in the Degnon Terminal were part of the property portfolio that the agency was thereby born with.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
29th street isn’t a proper NYC street, thereby. It’s a “railroad access road” which the NYC DOT surfaces and sets parking rules on, as well as deciding traffic patterns, and they get to erect signage over it. MTA/LIRR still owns the land below, and the bulkheads which touch the water. Thing is, this NYS land is regulated by another agency – the DEC, and NYC DOT, and the Army Corps, and the Coast Guard, and the EPA because of superfund and…
Calgon, take me away…
“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 