Archive for the ‘Queens’ Category
mortal assurances
Did you feel that? Did a truck just go by?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The geology of Western Queens is fairly fascinating. A humble narrator is interested in all things, and one of them is the very ground beneath his feet. Historically speaking, the zone which modernity calls Queens Plaza and Court Square in Long Island City were wetlands. There is rock down there somewhere, but the “craton” which underlies this section of a very Long Island was deposited by the glacial retreat at an odd angle which slopes downward as you head south. A craton is essentially a giant boulder, and that underground slab of rock which is found in LIC’s neck of the woods is buried beneath layers of naturally occurring clay and sand, and a loosely packed 20-30 foot thick layer of anthropogenic landfill material sits atop it. True geologic bedrock doesn’t appear until you get to Maspeth, where the terminal moraine of Long Island begins.
Municipal landfill began to reduce the wetlands and swamps of LIC beginning in the early 19th century, which buried many of the now lost tributaries of both Newtown and Sunswick Creeks which flowed through these parts. Once, you could sail from Newtown Creek all the way to Northern Blvd. at 31st street, and by once I mean 1881. The desire to stamp out typhus and cholera in LIC, Dutch Kills, and Astoria during the “sanitary era” is part of what provided impetus for the landfill process.
The construction of the Queensboro Bridge and the Sunnyside Yards in the first decade of the 20th century finished the job of reclaiming what was – by all accounts – a pestilential swamp. Modernity has forgotten all about that, just ask the East Side Access guys who accidentally found one of those buried waterways – a catastrophic discovery which delayed their progress and added billions of dollars onto the cost of the project.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now, I’m not much of anything, let alone an engineer or a geologist. What I am, however, is a guy with a collection of old maps and a series of books which describe what things were like in the area surrounding Jane Street Queens Plaza from the colonial period to the start of the 20th century. The engineers who worked on Sunnyside Yards described some pretty esoteric conditions at the corner of Skillman and Thompson – for instance – including mud that would form 18 feet high waves spontaneously as the tidal action from surrounding waters transmitted through it. The Ravenswood houses are built on a tidal pond/marsh/swamp formed by Sunswick Creek, and the area around the present day LaGuardia Community college was known as the “waste meadows” until Michael Degnon got ahold of them in the 1910’s and filled the wetland swamps in with rock tailings harvested from the subway tunnels which his company was working on.
I’m also a guy who understands that even the stoutest limb will crack if it’s made to bear weight beyond its tolerance. Now, it’s pretty unlikely that a craton, which is a boloid of rock the size of an asteroid that is miles across and thousands of feet thick, would crack. It could sink, however, into the glacial till which it rests upon. This fills me with real concern, given the whole climate change/sea level thing that the Republicans claim isn’t happening. How much crap can you pile in one place before something “gives”?
The firmament is literally shaking in LIC these days, what with all the high rise construction going on, and the truck loads of structural steel and concrete rolling through.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My buddies in construction tell me that once you find solid footing – driving steel and concrete down until it meets that rock craton – you can pretty much build as big as you want. The piles sit on the rock, then you create a concrete slab which provides for a stable surface that spreads weight load out over a large area, and you build. Engineers calculated wind sheer, vibration, soil solidity and a thousand other factors years before the first shovelful of earth was turned. An elaborate bureaucracy of planners and building specialists have scoured the plans, looked for any possible error or issue, and made corrections when warranted. Believe when I tell you, these people won’t allow any single structure to crack the earth open anywhere in NYC.
Saying that, they are all largely looking at projects on an individual basis, and not a holistic whole. What will happen when everything scrapes the sky? Will the ground continue to shake, or will LIC just sink?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
squamous litanies
It’s a real migraine out there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s face it, what we New Yorkers actually do is raise a hell of a ruckus wherever we are, but especially so when we’re at home. Personal experience of visiting relatively rural and quiet areas, like Vermont, reveals the effect on my hearing that living in this constant din has wrought. For 24-48 hours after leaving the City, there’s a high pitched phantom tone constantly present. I’ve always thought that the “wheeeeeee” sound, in addition to having a medical definition and name, is my brains attempt to filter out the constant rumble and thunder of city life – cerebral noise cancelling if you will.
All the engines, and generators, exhaust fans, jets, car tires on asphalt, buzzing things on utility poles, everybody talking, the subways, the chattering of millions of birds – the air is polluted not just with toxic gases and sewage bacteria rising on the breeze from out of the harbor – but with noise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s only during power outages and blizzards that you get to hear the City hush up for a while. I’d settle for regular powers like being able to effectively climb a ladder or balance my check book, but a humble narrator has often fantasized about possessing some sort of super power. My first choice would be invulnerability, of course, but a lot of the really interesting choices involve sight and perception. X-Ray vision? I’d worry about giving people cancer just by looking at them. Being able to fly without the invulnerability would actually be kind of dangerous.
What if you could visualize sound?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I know, that’s the sort of thing somebody would ask in a dorm room shortly after passing the bong, but still.
The BQE would probably look like something from Van Gogh, with crashing scalars creating fractal wavefronts which bounce and dance along the road itself and all the brick walls of the buildings which the highway weaves through. The East River would likely be a majestic sight, and would exhibit something akin to a sonic Jackson Pollack painting.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
thousand young
A goat with a thousand young, that sort of thing, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Magna Mater notwithstanding, one worries that he has lost his moorings, but I’ve thought that since the age of five.
So many dreams are left unfillfilled – such as sparking a witch panic in western Queens. It has also also long been one of my goals to lead a torch bearing mob, but little success has been found in pursuing this goal. There’s the nuanced side of it all – you need to store the rag wrapped sticks, the accelerants, and determine some sort of organizing point for the angry masses… it’s all quite complicated. You also need to get a group angry enough to take to the streets and chase the monster towards the old and flammable mill. There’s no way to start a political riot these days which doesn’t involve some sort of intense preparation, and advance permitting, and I’ve always been a spontaneous sort of guy. Also, my apathy can be considered as being weaponized, and I just can’t be bothered to pointlessly bleat. What’s wrong with a Monster anyway, who’s it bothering, and why do you want to slay it so badly?
At any rate – anarchy, chaos, and – wooooh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I spent last night at the District Office, which is what I call the bar in Astoria that I frequent, and chatted with the working guys for awhile. A surprising number of them were “big” on Donald Trump’s candidacy for President. In particular, they were in favor of the expulsion of “illegal immigrants.” I reminded them that most of these “illegals” who would get caught up in this effort wouldn’t be of Mexican lineage (whom most stereotype as being the “illegals”) and that a significant number of 70-80 year old Greeks, Croatians, and Irish people who have lived here for decades would be the likely victims of this policy. Why? Because back in the 1970’s and 80’s it was fairly easy to buy a green card from forgers.
Also, given what I know about the way things actually work in this City – you’d have to literally go from house to house and search every attic and basement for “illegals” to comply with the Federal Mandate.
Speaking strictly as someone of Jewish descent, this sort of thing has been tried before in other countries and it didn’t work out well for anyone involved.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s do the thought experiment though, said a humble narrator, of how President Trump’s expulsion program would actually play out – using Astoria as an example. NYPD sets up a cordon on 21st street, and on Woodside Avenue. A skirmish line of Police begin moving north from Northern Blvd., working their way through every building and business and demanding identification and proof of status from everybody they meet. Those individuals who aren’t “pure” citizens are arrested, and shipped out to a holding cell.
The detainees would have to taken somewhere for further processing. Since our jails are already fairly full, we’d have to create mass incarceration camps where they could await deportation. Our national nightmare is the presence of an army of terrorists on American soil, yes? I can think of no better way to create one than building concentration camps full of angry people that know implicitly how to avoid detection when crossing a national border whose only wish was to become Americans and live in the United States.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
found unfastened
It used to be called Jane Street, y’know.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent occasion found one perambulating from Astoria to Hunters Point. My eventual assignation was scheduled for the early evening (or late afternoon if you sleep in) and a decision to walk a less than efficient route was undertaken. A crooked hypotenuse is what I’d call the route chosen for transversing the somewhat triangular area, which would carry me into a couple of places I haven’t walked through in about a year. A year in LIC is long enough for square blocks of the place to have been demolished and for hundreds of feet of glass tower raised from the rubble, and since it was a nice day – off I went.
The DSNY earth mover was seen on Vernon Blvd., and for some odd reason, presenting these shots to you in a timeline inverse to their actual capture works better. Go figure.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Queensboro never disappoints. The Terracotta House restoration seems to finally be just about finished and a cursory inspection suggests that a pretty nice job of it has been done. For those of you not in the know about the New York Terra Cotta company, nor the sole remaining remnant of their presence in LIC, click here for a fairly old Newtown Pentacle post on the subject – from 2009.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One spent an awful amount of time in this area back in 2009, during the centennial celebrations of the great bridge. I was a parade marshall for the event, the first time I’d ever done something like that. I’ve become an old hand at conducting tours and being in public at this point, but back then everything was shiny and new.
If I knew then what I know now… I tell ya…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It won’t be long before Queensboro is hemmed in on all sides by towers and condominiums, and the glorious light of a winter afternoon will be occluded in the same manner as the East River Bridges in Brooklyn. For those of you who have never wandered around this area, it is highly recommended, but watch your back.
You are generally pretty safe around these parts, but if things go bad it happens pretty fast and the consequences can be awful. You mainly have to worry about traffic, but there are also inslaubrious characters hanging about here and there. Just keep moving, I always say.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The north side of the bridge had already been overshadowed by a series of new high rise construction projects. The tower you see in the shot above is over in the shining city of Manhattan across the river, a residential luxury tower which vaingloriously surpasses the height of the Empire State Building – called 432 Park Avenue.
As mentioned at the top of the post, the Queensboro bridge landing in Queens Plaza was once LIC’s Jane Street.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
bustling contact
If you see something, say something.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is LIC’s 41st street, between Northern Blvd. and 36th avenue, west side. The two shopping carts you’re looking at in the shot above have remained, unmolested, in this spot for more than a year. I know this because I walk past them on an almost daily basis. Not long ago, it occurred to me how long it is that they’ve been chained to this DOT owned sign post pole, and just how unusual that is. The City normally clips the chains of things attached to their property, and at the very least a Sanitation Inspector has been down this block at least once every couple of weeks.
At first glance, these carts belong to one of the many bottle and can collectors who work area streets for deposit returns. On second glance, however…
This is “weirdness” cart number one. (The numbers assigned are simply in the order of discovery and have no other meaning)
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The carts are stoutly secured to the pole, with a galvanized chain and a heavy commercial grade padlock. By commercial, I mean the sort of case hardened unit you see securing the steel gates of shops. Locks like these will run you anywhere from $10-30 – depending on make, model, and quantity. I’ve never bought a length of chain, so I couldn’t comment on the price of that. Shopping carts in Astoria are in the $20-30 range. That means that between lock and cart, you’ve got $50-100 bucks chained to this pole, and it has been for more than a year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On top of the carts is a piece of beverage tray plastic, wired securely to the top of the things. The black bags in the carts are “3 mil contractor” bags, and if you probe them with your finger – there are no bottles or cans inside. Instead, you’d feel about an inch of foam and behind it a hard shelled case of some kind.
It’s odd, but there’s a lot of odd things you’ll find in Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Steinway Street at the northeast corner of 36th avenue is where you’ll find another one of these assemblages. Same thing as the one on 41st – tightly folded up contractor bags perfectly filling the entire cart’s volume with a layer of foam and a hard shell hidden within.
This is “weirdness” cart number two.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Beverage tray is secured to the cart, with wire that is tightly twisted in a manner suggesting the use of pliers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Stout chain, expensive padlock.
It’s odd, I tell you, odd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is “weirdness” cart number three.
36th avenue, south side, at 38th street is where you’ll find it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Around the corner, at 38th street’s east side, at 36th avenue. Foam, hard case within, contractor bags tightly wrapped. You’ll notice some blue material showing through, which was actually TYVEK – the same plastic fabric that construction tarps and COSTCO bags are made of. Can’t say if this stuff was in all of these carts, but… odd.
This is “weirdness” cart number four.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Beverage tray wired securely to the cart, twisted tightly.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Expensive lock and galvanized chain.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is “weirdness” cart number five.
36th avenue, north side, at 37th street. This one has a wire grill attached to the top, but it too is wire tied to the cart. Again, finger probing of the black bag revealed not bottles or cans, but instead the now familiar foam padding around a hard case like interior.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is “weirdness” cart number six.
37th street, east side, at 36th avenue. The arrangements of these carts became increasingly regular. Always at the same relationship to a corner, chained to the first sign pole on the block.
It is increasingly odd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The beverage trays were securely tied off, the foam and hard interior shell present, and so were the heavy chains and expensive padlocks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
36th street, east side, at 36th avenue.
While photographing this one, I got a “hey, whatcha taking pictchas of” comment from a fellow leaving his house. We chatted for a moment and he said this cart had been in this spot for more than a year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of these carts were arrayed along 36th avenue, I should mention. I should also mention the abundance of subway tunnels which are directly below. I continued my little survey, but the carts were not found anywhere beyond 35th street. I decided to head down towards Northern Blvd.
This is “weirdness” cart number seven.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is “weirdness” cart number eight.
35th street, west side, between 37th avenue and Northern Blvd. This one was a little bit different, lacking a beverage tray on the top, but in all other aspects it was the identical setup with a padded case of some kind and the heavy chain with expensive padlock.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wandering back towards HQ, on Northern Boulevard, north east corner, at 42nd street. Same setup, with beverage trays and so on.
This is “weirdness” cart number nine.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These carts on Northern at 42nd had a bit of garbage stuffed into them, but anything you leave on the street in Queens will soon turn into a trash can.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
35th avenue, south side, at 43rd street. Again, same setup. There were a couple of empty carts sitting alongside the two chained up ones.
This is “weirdness” cart number ten.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The whole affair was being held together with the now familiar wire tie offs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What’s going on here – along this stretch of Northern Boulevard, 36th, and 35th avenues, between 43rd and 36th streets? These ten cart installations hide whatever is inside those foam lined cases from discovery or inspection using skillfull camouflage. They look like just another bit of the sort of street ephemera you don’t notice – the bicycle wheel chained to a fence, a shopping bag stuck in a tree, a lamp post or firebox. At first glance you think “yeah, some bottle guy chains his cart here.”
Or – There’s a bottle and can collector – hereabouts – who uses high end padlocks, steel chains, layers of water tight contractor bags, TYVEK, foam, and a hard shell case that perfectly fits into a shopping cart to protect his ten caches of bottle deposit returns which are kept only in areas which are over subway tunnels.
Speculation is a silly thing to engage in.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you’re reading this post, I’m also sending it over to the 114th precinct for the boys in blue to consider. It’s probably nothing extraordinary, but I don’t like the locations or heterogeneity of these carts, given that they are all sitting on top of subway tunnels and are found at busy intersections which carry thousands of vehicles every day. I’d love to cut into one of these carts and find out what’s inside, but I’m a photographer not a cutter. It’s probably nothing, and the cops will proably just waste their time if they do look into it, but…
This cart business isn’t just odd, it’s downright weird, and my “spidey sense” is tingling for some reason.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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