Archive for the ‘Queens’ Category
whisper more
It’s National Crunchy Taco Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has two surviving memories from early childhood. The first involves being imprisoned in a playpen while my mother vacuumed the garishly colored (typical of the early 1970’s) carpet of my parent’s bedroom, and I must have been two or three years old. The other is sitting on my grandfather’s lap at the conclusion of a family dinner during the Nixon administration, an era when the family meal typically concluded with coffee and cake. I remember Grandpa grabbing my little kid hand, which was grasping a cookie, and then helping me dip it into his black coffee.
To this day, I’m still a black coffee guy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The aforementioned cookie wasn’t oatmeal raisin, instead it was something which members of my family refer to as an “Ida Cookie.” My Dad’s oldest sister, and the de facto matriarch of clan Waxman, was named Ida and she was a well practiced baker. Aunt Ida would routinely show up at everyone’s house with pounds and pounds of baked goods. Nearly everything she baked was designed to be quaffed with hot caffeinated beverages, and for one reason or another, if she had overlooked something to the point of it nearly becoming charcoal, we would all fight over possession of that particular cookie. “Char” was big with the family.
Ida also made amazing apple cakes, pies, and especially variants on the cookies. The most highly prized item she offered was something called a “raisin rock,” which was often shattered by knives rather than sliced.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle has been sharpening her baking skills in recent years. It started out when one of her advertising clients, a nationally known brand, required the production of example foodstuffs for marketing purposes but had no budget for doing it “the right way,” which in advertising speak means hiring a chef and a food stylist. Accordingly, Our Lady built up her skill set and began manufacturing items such as the spread seen above. I’d occasionally wave the camera around at her creations, although she did most of the photography, and we puchased a few low end umbrella lights to augment the process.
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noncommittal way
It’s National Ravioli Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s been so gray and cold for the last few weeks, I think it’s time for an injection of warm colors, and a break from the photos of intensely ugly things which a humble narrator normally presents. Don’t worry, next week this – your Newtown Pentacle – will dive back into the hellish reality which we’ve created for ourselves, but for right now… flowers, and puppies, y’know – the good things.
That’s a happy, busy, and quite buzzy bee above, whose countenance was recorded on the north – or Greek – side of Astoria last summer.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of Greek, that’s what a certain part of Greece looked like the last time I was there. Specifically, it’s a village house in Crete, during the early spring. The problem with waving a camera around in that part of the world is that there’s just too much light. Controlling the amount of information hitting the camera sensor is quite an endeavor at that latitude.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Closer to home, specifically my own porch, and an example of the domestic bounty which Our Lady of the Pentacle promulgates. Similar issues with an abundance of light are encountered in the shot above. Heavily saturated images like the one above are difficult to develop. The original raw shot was just a blob of brick red, and it took a bit of kajiggering to arrive at something that more closely resembled reality.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunflowers terrified me as a small child. My next door neighbor, a Polish holocaust survivor named Mr. Klein, was a prolific gardener who used his back yard plot to grow vegetables and fruit. To keep pesky kids like myself from jumping his fence in pursuit of an errant baseball, Mr. Klein planted an impenetrable hedge of sunflowers along his fence.
Cannot tell you how many times a young but already humble narrator stood there in terror, transfixed with loathing, staring at the wall of rotting sunflower heads swarming with bees. One still has dreams and night terrors related to this.
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well on
It’s National Artichoke Heart Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One does not want to deceive you, lords and ladies. A humble narrator often thinks about subjects both arcane and nebulous. A recent bit of pondering involved finding a way to hide things in plain sight, although my thoughts did not venture into the realm of nefarious or dubiously legal character. In Hollywood movies, there is a concept called the “Macguffin” – which is an object of desire that drives the protagonists and plot of an action movie. It’s the Lost Ark of the Covenant, the Maltese Falcon, the jewel called the Pink Panther. The Macguffin itself is less important than the events and characters surrounding it, of course. Where would you hide a Macguffin in modern day NYC?
I’m thinking the fleet of green Boro taxis would work.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Manhattan and its fleet of yellow cabs are relatively contained. Close the bridges and tunnels, monitor the shorelines, and you’ve created a closed box to search systematically in. The infinity of Brooklyn? The vast tracts of Queens and Staten Island, or the “attached to the continent” borough of the boogie down Bronx? Now you’ve got an intractable problem in finding the Macguffin, with open borders to other counties. The Boro cabs are largely individually owned, and do not return at set intervals to a central location in the manner of the yellow taxi fleets, which complicates locating them. Further, they are dispersed geographically, unlike the yellows.
The green cabs, due to their meters and other electronic components are able to be found on a GPS map, of course. Saying that, there’s a lot of turf to cover and you’ve only got so many cops. Additionally, once you shut the engine off and park the thing, it’s just another one of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles in NYC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nefarious purposes notwithstanding… let’s say the Macguffin is a box of pastry prized by the gendarmes, and not some dirty bomb or other claptrap. A box of donuts, for arguments sake. Would it be possible for the Cops to catalog the contents of every single cab?
One can report that, based on apocryphal reports offered by those involved with the trade, narcotics and other illicit goods are commonly moved about the City by taxi and car service rather than by private vehicle. Criminal elements amongst us know everything there is to know about forfeiture laws, and the building of RICO cases by association. The favored methodology for moving “weight” is not to have a known gang member carry the stuff (a kilo of Macguffins), but rather to find an innocuous courier whom the cops will not notice nor suspect. In my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, it was common for the mob guys to employ Orthodox Jews as paid couriers for cash and dope for exactly this reason. They blended into the background, just like the Boro Cabs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As a note – something about living in Trump’s America has been causing my conspiratorial theorizing to go into overdrive. Hasn’t been this attuned to the hidden and obscured since the late 1980’s. Paranoid wonderings and obscure connections just seem to blossom these days. A box of donuts isn’t just a box of donuts anymore, instead it’s likely something sinister and laden with more than just too much sugar and fat. We live in a bigly country, and donuts are great again.
I wonder if I could move a box of donuts through the City, undetected, using nothing but green cabs.
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bubbling steps
It’s National Egg Cream Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has always had an odd dream, inspired by that old television series “The Wild, Wild, West.” The two leads of the show lived on a train which carried them to their adventures, specifically in a sleeper car that had been modified for their usage. One has always wondered about the specialized rolling stock which might be attached to the end of a subway train. I’ve seen some of MTA’s more esoteric kit over the years – their work trains, a specialized unit which analyzes the tracks, once or twice I saw the actual “money train” shooting by on an express track. I’ve always desired a private sleeper car on the Subway. This would be selfish, and more than I deserve or could afford, so it would need to operate like a hotel.
So, here’s my idea: we attach a car to each and every subway train that has blacked out windows and a custom interior, whose doors only open with a key card swipe. There can be several types of these private units, used for a variety of purposes which currently elude officialdom on the surface.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A certain percentage… say 70%… of these Subway rooms would be luxury units (the LUX line). The State would list availabilities for these units on AirBNB type sites, and found within would be all the amenities expected at a high end hotel. The walls are lined with mahogany panels, the floor lushly carpeted. There’s a king size bed, a heart shaped hot tub, and a commode with fine finishes. Naturally, there’s a mini bar as well. 25% of these short stay residential cars could also be set up as dormitory style hostel cars (the ECON line), designed for students and European tourist cheapskates.
The remaining 5% would take its interior design cues from either 19th century slave ships or Soviet era army barracks, and these could function as homeless shelters – accomplishing the “out of sight, out of mind” policies of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo nicely. The Mayor doesn’t take the train, and neither does the other guy.
Alternatively, should Riker’s Island ever get closed down and cleared of jails so that the real estate guys can develop it, a couple of cars on each train could repurposed to serve as mobile jails. This would be the “DFPS line,” named for the Mayor, our very own Dope from Park Slope. The big guy would probably love this, as it would completely eliminate NIMBY’ism from the creation and placement of homeless shelters. “It’ll only be in your neighborhood for 3 minutes…”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On a non sarcastic note, I finally filled in one of the two holes in my photographic catalog of NYC’s Subway lines with a shot of the Times Square Shuttle, as seen above. I just need to get to Brooklyn to get a shot of the elusive Z and then I can move on to other things. Perhaps, someday, when this current cold waste has retreated…
Go have an egg cream, lords and ladies.
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important sidelight
It’s National Potato Chip Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Any part of the urban landscape which the voracious minions of the Real Estate craze sees as “having a large footprint” is in danger of being consumed by it. Supermarkets, factories, warehouses, and in the case of today’s post – gas stations. One has noticed over the last few years that filling stations with a small bodega have largely replaced the “gas pump and mechanic” style facilities. These latter versions, which host a larger number of pumping units than their forebears did, now seem to be disappearing as well. There’s a few left in the “central core” of NYC, but this non municipal infrastructure seems to be disappearing as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Used to be… not too long ago… back when I was a boy… how sick one grows of using these phrases. Cab drivers have told me that they are often forced to travel long distances to fill their tanks these days. Forget about “normal” vehicles, of course. What are we going to do when all that’s left in NYC are apartment buildings?
Pictured above is a gas station on Northern Blvd. at Steinway/39th Street, where one can witness – around 3:30 in the afternoon, an armada of taxi cabs filling up before the shift and driver change at 4 p.m. Here in the Astoria and Sunnsyide sections of LIC, there’s still a few gas stations left, but this one – so close to what would be the development site described in the Sunnyside Yards decking proposal – would clearly be wiped away.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Part of the reason that the yellow cabs fill up in Queens is that there are so few gas stations left in Manhattan. The taxi industry used to be based along Manhattan’s west side, until a real estate craze there in the 1970’s and 80’s pushed them out. They relocated to LIC, largely, where the same process that pushed them out of Manhattan is now playing out.
That’s one of the few survivors in Manhattan, below 96th street, pictured above. It’s at the northern edge of Hells Kitchen, adjoining the Hudson Yards development site.
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