Archive for the ‘Queens’ Category
creeping silently
Always classy, Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since we seem to live in preternatural darkness and cold, Viking Hell as it were, one has decided to just accept the fact that it will never be warm or sunny again. There will never be a day when one needn’t pull on the twenty nine pounds of coats, boots, and sweaters again. This is how we live now, it’s the new normal, and “wet and cold” is this years version of a black t-shirt and a pair of Levi’s. Never has my Metrocard seen as much use as it has in the last few weeks, as I’m taking the bus and train to places that I normally walk to, something which I consider an admission of defeat.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The thing that’s really charming about this time of the year is the fact that garbage day has been cancelled numerous times due to all the snow, and giant piles of frozen trash are embedded in the mountains of ice and snow. This is fantastic for several reasons, but the big one around HQ is that my little dog Zuzu – who is an inveterate and unapologetic sniffer or trash bags – came down with some sort of stomach bug after a recent walk. Nothing improves the experience of being stuck inside more than a dog who is either vomiting or experiencing “dogarreha.” An expensive visit to the Vet seems to have cured her up, but Astoria has become a septic mess in the last couple of weeks. Realize who is saying that, incidentally, as I’m “Mr. Newtown Creek.”
How bad is the weather? The shot above is from my iPhone, which was used because I didn’t want to bring my regular camera out into this mess. Said camera is casually brandished during rain storms while out on the harbor, and I didn’t want to risk it walking down the ice clad sidewalks of Astoria. Similarily, I worry about risking the dog on these hazardous substrates.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The thing I worry about the most, dog wise, is actually stray voltage from brine soaked electrical infrastructure embedded in the sidewalks.
The second big dog hazard is something which I’ve been noticing the last few years. Salt is pretty terrible for the pads and naked feet of the pooch, but a simple prophylaxis against it entails the usage of something called “Musher’s Wax.” The oily substance is mainly beeswax, which when rubbed onto a dogs paw creates an oily barrier that protects and moisturizes. Of late, however, road salt has been declining in popularity in favor of some sort of “melt pellet” substance. These pellets seem to find their way into the webbing between the dogs toes, and work their way up into the pads. Since her feet are already wet, the pellets begin to dissolve and release solvents. Bad stuff, and before you ask, my little dog Zuzu ain’t gonna wear those stupid little red boots.
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horrible swaying
In the cold waste.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is preoccupied, driven to distraction actually, by the Big Little Mayor’s announcement yesterday that he will be using the full power of City Hall to drive the decking over of the Sunnyside Yards and the subsequent installation of a housing complex in that space which would eventually be home to some 30,000 people. It reminded me that I like “gridlock” and “divided government” as it keeps epically bad ideas like this from coming to fruition. The price of decking the yards, alone, runs into the hundreds of billions, for instance. The term “affordable” is determined using a federal formula called the “average median income” or “AMI” which will average together the income and tax data gathered within a set area and calculate what “affordable” means. This area will include the Upper East Side in Manhattan, where the Wall Street people live, which means “affordable” will translate into $50,000 or more in rent a year. The term “affordable housing” is a shell game, and the money would be better spent repairing the decaying NYCHA system.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Robert Moses threw his hands in the air at the idea of decking the Sunnyside Yards, saying that it was just too complicated. So did Nelson Rockefeller. A cultic group of urban planners, however, refuses to give up on the idea. Currently led by Dan Doctoroff, the right hand man of the Big Little Mayor’s analogue for Satan – Michael Bloomberg – these planners salivate at the idea of setting up an ideal community. Towers in the park, as the crypto fascist LeCorbusier would have described it. They use Starrett City as an example? Have you ever been to Starrett City? I have, and I don’t plan on going back to that impersonal collection of Soviet style apartment blocks ever again. Density is a good thing? How about we dense up the sections of Manhattan rife with four story town houses like the Upper East Side?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve been wondering what my 2015 was going to hold. Now I know. For those of you reading this at your office desks on Beekman or Chambers streets, start planning on this project not being as much of a slam dunk as you thought it would be. Your worst nightmare, pissing off someone who understands the “system” but isn’t beholden to it, has happened. The Sunnyside Yards project proposal is going to be opposed, vociferously. You can’t fight City Hall? Not on City Hall’s terms you can’t, but this is going to be a street fight, and your expensive suit is going to get very dirty before I’m through. I may call Queens home, but I’m from Brooklyn, and street fights are what we know how to do.
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corporeal tenement
Wind, snow, rats, egg rolls, fear.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An interesting visualization of the locations where rats were reported in 2014 in the City of Greater New York, as presented by the Village Voice, was reviewed over the weekend. The health department and the writer of the piece focused in on the seeming correlation between the addresses of Chinese restaurants and the location of rat colonies. Officialdom and the Voice writer speculated on whether or not the rodents have a preference for Chinese take out. When viewing the map, I couldn’t help but notice that the shape of the rat infestations closely mirrored that of the NYC Subway system. Follow the critters through Queens, and you can trace out the path of the R/M, 7, and F lines rather neatly. Same thing with Brooklyn, where you can trace out the G tunnels. Just saying… these restaurants are either located above subway tunnels or are nearby the entrances to the system.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personal observation of the Chinese restaurants here in Astoria, a few of which are on the Voice map, reveals that the owners of these establishments consider the corner sewer drain as a handy receptacle for the issuance of both fryer oil and the emptying of mop buckets. Rats love fatty foods (who doesn’t, after all?) and hang around the local sewer interceptors and underground vaults knowing that the good stuff will be coming soon. Thing is, my belief is that these sorts of anecdotes are coincidental to the real issue of where the rats are coming from – which are the MTA tunnels.
Ask anyone who lives in public housing – the worst landlord in the City of New York is actually the City of New York, which passes strict rules and enacts a series of fines on the citizenry to enforce them, rules which it does not find itself obliged to follow. Show me a New Yorker who hasn’t seen a rat in the Subway and I will declare them a one percenter who normally gets around town in the back seat of a limo. Show me an apartment house owner with black mold on the walls and no available heat or hot water, who never gets fined, and I’ll automatically tell you the owner is the City of New York.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After the snow finishes falling, look around tomorrow. You’ll be able to discern which properties in your neighborhood are owned and operated by the City simply by noticing which sidewalks haven’t been shoveled (with the exception of schools, courthouses, and anything within camera range of Manhattan’s City Hall). These City owned stretches of pavement will remain covered in snow, which will shortly compact down into a plate of milky colored, rotting, wet ice that will persist until the spring thaw. Sadly, many of these spots will surround Subway stations and bus stops. This is one of the things which “I don’t get” as even the Soviet Commisars acknowledged that they had certain responsibilities to the Proletariat. The connection between high volume restaurants and rats is actually a correlation of the proximity of these establishments to Subway infrastructure. Dealing with NYC’s rat infestation should begin with that which connects us all – the subway tunnels. Then, we should work our way up to the surface and blame the Chinese restaurants.
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distant valley
Ridgewood has its charms, lord and ladies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I love the esthetics of the section of Ridgewood nearby Fresh Pond Road, which offers block after block of pretty as you please row houses – many of which utilize Kreischer bricks in their street facing facades. I don’t know this neighborhood as well as I’d like to, as it’s quite a hike to walk here from Astoria. Last week, occasion carried me to Ridgewood, where this view was gathered. One plans on spending a bit more time in this section in the coming months, although I’m still a bit uncomfortable in residential areas – preferring the concrete devastations and lonely industrial zones surrounding my beloved Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This kids ride was sitting outside a deli, and it caught my eye. Haven’t seen this goofy Pelican sculpture before, normally you get horses and race cars on these things. One of my local bodega owners on Broadway in Astoria (he’s got one that sports a pink elephant) told me that he splits the earnings with the company that owns the unit 50/50, and that he can expect more than $300 a week from the thing. That’s a lot of quarters.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Street furniture like these kid rides are the sorts of things that the big league historians typically overlook, as the “college boys” prefer to focus in on structures, infrastructure, and demographic patterns. They tend to miss the little stuff in favor of broad swath trends, in my opinion. When, exactly did “penny candy” become surprisingly expensive? When did the Bearclaw disappear from NYC? That’s where I come in. Now, you got a quarter? I want to ride the pelican.
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terrific doctrines
Today marks the 206th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s birth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent opportunity found a humble narrator tramping about in Machpela Cemetery over in the Glendale section, not far from the currently undefended border of Brooklyn and Queens. This cemetery was established in 1855, part of the build out of burying grounds that followed the Rural Cemeteries Act, and when it opened visitors would have told you that this non sectarian yet overwhelmingly Jewish polyandrion was found in Newtown.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Those of you knowledgable about Machpela have probably already guessed what drew me here – to a cemetery which sits across the street from the far larger Cypress Hills Cemetery – but I’ll be discussing “him” later in the week over at my Brownstoner column. Instead, since this is the first time that Machpela has been visited by a humble narrator, photos from a stroll around the place are presented today.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There seemed to be quite a lot of grounds keeping issues at Machpela, with ancient trees dropping large limbs, or as above – the entire tree went down. Pictured above was a tree whose trunk had been segmented by workmen. The thing appeared to have been struck by lightning, presuming that the blasted black char observed on several of the segments was caused by atmospheric electrical discharge. The fallen tree wiped out a whole section of monuments on its way down, which were tumbled about.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Fallen limbs were observed everywhere at Machpela, and there were a couple of places which seemed none too safe. Perhaps the unusual amount of rain and wind we’ve experienced in the last few months contributed to the carnage, but as in the shot above – many of these broken branches seem to have sat undisturbed and in the position that gravity and inertia placed them in long enough for decay to set in.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To be fair, older cemeteries like this one suffer from conditions of severe financial hardship. All across the so called “Cemetery Belt” in Queens and Brooklyn are graveyards which were largely filled by the end of the First World War a century ago. If any surviving relatives persist in the area, the cemetery corporations find it difficult to collect any funds for the upkeep of a great great grandfather’s grave from them. New interments are few, and the operating funds available to modern management of cemeteries like Machpela are slim pickings.
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The Newtown Pentacle 