Archive for the ‘Queens’ Category
used in
Spectacle on the Boulevard of Death, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had a bit of Newtown Creek related business to take care of, and found myself visiting the offices of a certain City Councilman last week to discuss the matter. As always, the exchange was amiable and after accomplishing the delivery of my missive to the office, I found myself wandering down Queens Boulevard in pursuit of a return to Newtown Pentacle HQ. My phone rang, and I wandered onto the median of the so called “Boulevard of Death” to discuss a friend’s upcoming Birthday celebration when a caterwaul sounded from the east bound lanes at the corner of Locust – or 44th street if you must.
An “accidental” had occurred.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seemed that some unlucky fellow, who was riding a bicycle and got struck by an automobile, was laid out on the Boulevard. Luckily, passerby were already calling 911 and guiding the always heavy traffic around the scene. There was also a USPS employee on scene, who was talking to the 911 operator, and since the NYS DMV has always told me – emphatically – that postal traffic has the right of way in all things traffic related, I felt like it was being sorted and did not require my intervention as the Feds were on it.
So, I stood there taking pictures. We all have a role to play.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The bicyclist, who seemed stunned when I came upon the scene, suddenly began to writhe about. The car’s driver and passenger managed the victim’s bicycle while the aforementioned postal employee and a member of the gathering crowd of gawkers chided the poor fellow to “not move” and “stay down.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Regardless, he sat up, but seemed thunderstruck (or at least Mazda struck). Off to the north, in the direction of Skillman Avenue, sirens began to ring out – no doubt in response to the multiple 911 calls coming in from the gathering crowd of “lookie loo’s.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Woodside Warriors, Engine 325, arrived. As mentioned in the past, my reaction to the arrival of FDNY units is “everything is going to be all right now.” Accordingly, I put the lens cap on my camera and started back on my path towards Astoria. Such is life in Western Queens, and the traffic corridor of Long Island.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle, when I was relating the tale above to her, asked me if I did anything to help. She immediately regretted asking, as I went through a whole set of “photographer” morality plays with her. It’s an odd thing, actually. My moral dilemmas about recording an event versus participating in it are rather tame.
Look at the war photographers for the true soul searching about whether or not you should stand there taking pictures or intervene while someone is bleeding out.
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with dreams
Constrained and contained.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The winter blues are upon us all, one fears. Dark skies and so on, combined with recurrent viral infections polluting the local outlook. Not so at this, your Newtown Pentacle. This week it’s not about the blues, rather it’s the purples, and reds, bright green, and lemon yellows. Every image that will greet you this week is chosen not for some narrative purpose, rather it’s a public service whose purpose is to help combat your SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and virus addled days.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This week you’ll be greeted by a series of shots culled from the archives, accompanied by a bit of text discussing that which is pictured, when warranted. Above, a barbed wire fence line in Blissville, Queens. Behind it rises the former headquarters of the General Electric Vehicle Company, which manufactured electric automobiles and trucks in LIC back at the start of the 20th century. I described the saga of GEVC in this post, which is actually a few years old at this point.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Williamsburg Bridge is actually the reason that there’s a Municipal Art Society, as the span was considered to be such an abomination when constructed that the gentry of the early 20th century wished to ensure that nothing like it ever occurred again. Personally, I don’t consider it that bad, although I prefer the venerable Manhattan and spectacular Queensboro bridges – speaking from a strictly esthetic point of view.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s at the bottom of the barrel, January, in terms of the wheel of the year. What one such as myself craves is color, saturated and bright. If all I can get is artificiality, I’ll take it.
If this Astoria vending machine, which is the sort designed to tempt a passerby to drop a few coins in pursuance of a stuffed animal which might be obtained via the use of a metallic claw, is all I can get – I’ll take it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The former Williamsburgh Savings Bank, over in North Brooklyn, has been laboriously restored to the glories typical of the era of France’s Second Empire. Luxurious detail and slavishly applied color is found on the domed ceilings of the place, both of which are sure to brighten up your wintry malaise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back to LIC’s Blissville, in the shot above, and a religious parade committed by a small army of Bolivians at St. Raphael’s on Greenpoint Avenue. If this quartet of dancers cannot brighten a January day, I don’t know what can.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Yuyzel on da cruss, as my Grandmother would have described the statuary above, is found at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Lower Manhattan. The cruciform is backed up by stained glass which provides for a bit of color at one of my favorite and most cinematic spots in NYC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You can’t go wrong with Times Square if you’re looking to brighten up and color up your mid January. Of course, since it’s actually everything that’s wrong with modern NYC made manifest, a trip there might just backfire. Come to think of it, Times Square has always represented everything that was wrong with NYC, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
FDNY always lights things up when they’re working, come to think of it.
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sophist shuffling
Taking my chances, vampire wise, in Long Island City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As all residents of Western Queens know, the Vampires which infest our section of the borough begin to wake up as the sun is setting. Accordingly, a humble narrator normally performs his daily rounds in the morning and afternoon, but one recent perambulation found me out and about during the danger time around sunset. Bereft of the normal sachet of garlic worn during evening walks, my steps quickened as I made for the relative safety of Astoria where bloodsuckers fear to tread due to the prevalence of Croatian and Serbian residents.
Both nationalities have long traditions regarding the nosferatu, as do the Greeks and Italians. South Eastern Europeans don’t play around with the Strigoi. My neighbor Dario spends his free time sharpening wooden spikes in the basement of Newtown Pentacle HQ, for instance, and the superintendent of the building next door keeps a ready supply of granulated garlic at the ready in case of emergency.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I decided the safest course for me to follow would be to leave Skillman Avenue and head home via Jackson Avenue. One of the many viaducts which cross the Sunnyside Yards is often referred to as “Queens Blvd.” but that street name only applies once this viaduct intersects with Thomson Avenue a block away. This is officially Queens Plaza South, and it provides a crossing for pedestrian, bicycle, motor vehicular, and IRT subway traffic over the titan rail yard. It’s not the friendliest environment for pedestrians, with the caterwaul of the subway above and the mephitic emanations of motor vehicles, but when one is concerned about vampiric attack – the most direct route is the best one.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking north easterly across the yards, the surviving factory buildings which surround the yards may be observed. The fires of gentrification have burned many of these older buildings away in recent years, replacing them with bland residential and hotel buildings. The yards were constructed back the first decades of the 20th century, after the Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909. Back then this pathway was called Jane Street, and it crossed an ancient swamp fed by Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary. LIC used to drain its sewerage into the swamp, which fed a series of endemic water based pathogens – typhus, cholera – that sort of thing.
Legend has it that the Vampires began to arrive in LIC about when the English displaced the Dutch, but that they avoided feeding hereabouts due to the various blood conditions in the populace caused by the stagnant water.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Heading towards Queens Plaza, one quickened his steps as movement was observed in the shadowed rafters of the IRT rail bridge carrying the 7 train over the yards. Plump and well fed after several holiday meals, my vital fluids would be a prized delicacy to the undead. The sun was dipping down in the west, after all, and I had no silver on me. My delicate physical condition, carefully maintained by a team of doctors with an arcane set of medications, began to manifest psychologically. Nervous and skittish by nature, one felt himself descending into “one of my spells” which usually ends with a humble narrator running through the streets screeching.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Elevated mood, coupled with a stertorous action of the heart, caused one to constantly look back over his shoulder for ghastly pursuers. Blood began to evacuate the extremities, rendering fingers into little more than chalk white claws clutching desperately at a camera. Beneath a filthy black raincoat, my shoulders began to hunch, and due to the aforementioned exsanguniation of extremity, my gait began to alter and I noticed that one of my feet was dragging along the pavement forcing the other leg to do all the work.
My eyes began to bulge, and mouth grow dry, which caused my lips to draw back over the teeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Signs and portents of lurking horror accompanied every pained step as a desperate narrator made for the safety of Astoria in a bizarre and somewhat ataxic gait. Surely the monsters nested above had noticed me at this point, and were licking their chops at the though of consuming the corpulent pedestrian below them. The night haunts would soon be dropping from the IRT rafters in the manner of rotten fruit, loosed from the prison which the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself imposed upon them. That’s when a plexiglass window, impressed into a construction fence at a former chemical factory being converted into residential housing revealed that it was already too late, one of the monsters appeared.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
But… a reflection? Vampires enjoy no reflection.
Staring into the pale visage of an ancient monster – with its bulging eyes, and lips drawn back over yellowed teeth, it’s pale and numbed claws reached out towards me – and I was compelled to do the same. That’s when the supreme horror presented itself, as my finger touched that of the monster’s in the reflection, and it is why I shall never again know peace.
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from behind
Breaking in, stretching out, forced marches – in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The holiday season saw me largely sitting on my butt, and eating too much, which caused my butt to grow largely. Accordingly, muscle tone has slackened and tendons have grown stiff. As one doesn’t heal as fast as formerly, a series of short perambulations around Astoria have seen me wandering in circles around Newtown Pentacle HQ, which have grown concentrically larger as the days have gone by.
HQ is found along Broadway in the 40’s, a part of Astoria known to the historical community as “the German Settlement” which was founded by members of the German Cabinet Makers Association back in 1869. Catholics from the south of Germany, they settled here at the border of Woodside and Astoria in pursuance of something they referred to as “Kleindeutchland” or “Clean Germany.” The Germans, or Dutch as their contemporaries would have called them, had a huge footprint in western Queens and North Brooklyn. The German population center was actually in Bushwick and Ridgewood “back in the day.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wandering down Broadway in the direction of the East River, at 34th street a new pizza shop has opened and I’m happy to see that my personal “naming convention,” which tacks “Astoria” onto any other word which ends in an “a” has been adopted by the owners. One hopes they can make a go of it, but this is one of those “cursed locations” where one restaurant after another has opened and then closed shortly thereafter over the years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We have a new graffiti writer in the neighborhood, who has been prolifically sharing their wisdom in a distinctive block scripted typography. There are three new writers, actually. The second one is in love with “love” and extols the emotion’s virtues in a flowery script which is writ large. The third works in a crude block script and describes various societal ills while detailing the sins of capitalism and the financial industry.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swinging north on Crescent Street, on a whim, this lovely line of Long Island City style row houses has somehow resisted being broken up by the fires of gentrification. I didn’t get close enough to them to look for the little flecks of iron pyrite which typifies the specie, but from across the street they seemed to be dressed in the yellow Kreischer Brick which adorns the Matthews Model Flat type row houses. This yellow brick is found all over Western Queens, incidentally, which has nothing to do with the fact that Steinway’s kid married Kriescher’s kid.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Continuing north, one encounters a series of homes which enjoy automobile garages on their lots. It is amazing that the NYC Dept. of City Planning hasn’t drawn a gigantic development bullseye on these structures as of yet. One can envision a “super block” of maximum density super tall buildings here. It would fit in with the current logic evinced by the municipality – the neighborhood schools are overcrowded, the sewer and electrical system at capacity, the Police already overwhelmed by the current population, it’s fairly distant from the subways – exactly the sort of situation into which you’d want to insert thousands of families into in de Blasio’s New York.
Incidentally, this side of the neighborhood is what those of us who live in the “German Settlement” side of Astoria refer to as “Astoria, Astoria.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of “Astoria, Astoria,” you don’t get much more “Astoria, Astoria” than the corner of Astoria Blvd. and 31st street.
Just a block away is the spot that Robert Moses raped the Triborough Bridge and Grand Central Parkway into, and 31st street carries the elevated tracks of the N and Q IND subway lines. It’s a high traffic zone, and street crossings are made at your peril. Accordingly, our local “connected” development group – HANAC (Hellenic American Neighborhood Action Committee) – has installed several mega structures hereabouts which primarily serve the aging Greek community. HANAC has also been given several large lots on 21st street to develop by the powers that be. They are building “affordable” and senior housing all over this section, and there is an unspoken understanding that the residents will all vote “Democrat” on Election Day.
Of course, the powers that be forget that most people in Astoria will tell you that they don’t vote, as it inevitably results in getting called for Jury Duty and being forced to report to some court in Rego Park or Jamaica at 7:30 in the morning.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nearing 31st street, a taxi driver was doing his religious duty and praying on a mat – presumptively before starting his shift. Didn’t have the desire to interrupt him and tell him that he was pointing north east, and that his devotions were being directed towards Boston rather than Mecca.
Not trying to be a smart ass here, as I’m actually curious about this – my understanding of Muslim devotion is that your daily prayers are meant to be directed towards Mecca. Is there a methodology by which one finds the correct direction towards the Arabian penninsula? As an technology obsessed American, I would make it a point to carry a compass if I was obligated to such devotion, but is there an Islamic “way” to determine the vector?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Crossing 31st street, there is yet more construction going on, as observed when headed in the direction of the 114th precinct house found along Astoria Blvd. The good news here is that the construction has revealed some historical graffiti which was long hidden by occluding structures which occupied this land in the interval since the paint was laid down. One lives in hope of witnessing graffiti that dates back to the Nixon era revealed as the furnaces of gentrification are further stoked here in the ancient village.
“Turn on, drop out,” that sort of claptrap.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of the 114th, we really have to figure out some kind of parking solution for the unformed officers who vouchsafe the community in these parts. One of the reasons that the local kids don’t respect the badge is simple observance of the blue army breaking the laws which they are meant to enforce on a daily basis. Every car you’ll see illegally parked along Astoria Blvd. between 31st and Steinway Street has a PBA placard on the dashboard, or they’re off duty radio patrol cars done up in NYPD trade dress as seen in the shot above.
Do as I say, not as I do? Indeed?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
squamous aspiration
Constantly disappointing, and complaining, that’s me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Winter boredom is anathema to one such as myself. The cold and dark, the thirty five pounds of insulation, the constant flux between the dry and cold air of the out of doors contrasted with the high temperature and humidity found within. The constancy of a drippy nose. Bah.
It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why some feel the need to jack the heat up to the mid 80’s inside of structures, knowing full well that inhabitants and visitors will be wearing clothing appropriate for the out of doors. The worst culprit on this front seems to be the subway system, where you’ll step off of a station platform whose atmospheric temperature is commensurate with the freezing of water and suddenly find yourself in a hurtling metal box whose ambient air mass is heated to something approaching that of an afternoon in July. Add in the sniffling, coughing, and dripping orifices of the mob…
Well, I’ve often opined that what this City needs is a good plague – and I’m fairly certain that one will eventually start on a Subway in Queens during middle January. Don’t touch that subway pole, if you can help it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Ultimately, one is awaiting a particularly personal moment which occurs every year, when a humble narrator’s boredom grows so intense that he has little choice but to brave the cold and head back outside. At this juncture, however, the moment hasn’t arrived, and one has been spending his time reading about the Second Empire period of French history, Otto Von Bismarck, and researching the chemicals which the seething cauldrons of industry produce that are classified as petroleum or coal distillates. One does a lot of reading during this time of the year.
I’ve also read up a bit on Kazakhstan, the Crimean Tartars, and the Deccan Plain on the Indian subcontinent. Briefly, I also looked into the Chicago stock yards and the post civil war meat packing industry as well as the suffragettes of 19th century Brooklyn Heights. I continue to study the rise and fall of the Roman Catholic empire in New York City, which is fascinating. Also reiterated will be the fact that if you enjoy gelatin based desserts – never, ever, inquire too deeply as to what gelatin actually is nor how it is produced for you will never, ever, eat it afterwards. Jello brand gelatin was invented by Peter Cooper in a glue factory on Newtown Creek in the 19th century, which is all you really need to know about it. Isenglass is also soul chilling.
Sexy stuff, I know, but the so called “fin de siècle” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are when the foundations of our modern civilization were laid down and it remains a certain benchmark from a cultural point of view. Labor unions, representative government (both socialist and capitalist), industrial warfare – all of it was imagined up back then. It’s also when the environment surrounding us began to die off due to anthropogenic reasons. The dominoes were lined up, quite unconsciously, back then for the end of our world.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
“Fin de siècle” is a French expression which gained popularity in the first decade of the 20th century, a part of the run up to the Great War, which indicated that the “end of the cycle” or “end of an age” was apparent. It’s part of a phenomena known as millennial fatalism, wherein a culture believes that the “end of the world” nears. It’s difficult to not think that our culture may have reached its breaking point, given what we see on the nightly news. The fatalism and general horror which the various news organizations pump into our heads is, of course, not accidental. Don’t forget that most of the news gathering and dissemination companies are owned and operated by defense contractors.
I’ve always been an optimist, however. What other choice have you got, ultimately? Winter will come and go, and then… flowers and puppies. That’s the way that the wheel of the year spins, after all.
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The Newtown Pentacle 