Archive for the ‘Subway’ Category
and dauntless
Things I’ve been lucky enough to see, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That Working Harbor Committee Students tour I mentioned the other day? One of the cool things I got to see while onboard was the FDNY’s Fireboat Three Forty Three doing some kind of exercise. There seemed to be a heck of a security presence, more so than usual, in Lower Manhattan and on the water last week.
They were probably performing security sweeps in preparation for Fleet Week, I imagine.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The thrilling moment when your train arrives, which signals that the moment when the ordeal of standing on the platform is over, and that the ordeal of riding the train is about to begin. For some reason, the Lexington Avenue tunnels seem to be lit theatrically, which always lends the appearance of the 4 or 5 into 59th Street a certain dramatic flair.
Hey, @MTA – maybe that’s the answer to all your problems – theatrical lighting!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not sure if the shot above has been presented before, but when you’re talking about lighting, Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights does not disappoint.
Sorry for the short post today, but I’ve got to go get my notes ready for tonight’s Working Harbor “Brooklyn Waterfront: Past and Present” boat tour.
Upcoming Events and Tours
TONIGHT – Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
Saturday, June 4, 11:00 a.m. -1:30 p.m. –
DUPBO: Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp,
with Brooklyn Brainery. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
gleaming vividly over
Damnation isn’t a mass market kind of product, it’s personalized and tailored to fit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It has long been my assertion, when discussing subjects involving the occult and or supranatural, that there is no “one size fits all” sort of thing to describe hell. Demons are geniuses, in the Greek sense of the word, and hell doesn’t have specific zip codes for specific sins. For one such as myself, the legendary torments of Gehenna would take the form of either a never ending subway trip or waiting for train to arrive whilst needing to urinate. If you’ve been at the 34th street IND station during the summer months while needing to piss, I’m sure you’ll agree with me.
It is my firm belief, in fact, that many of the characters you meet down in the transit labyrinth are in fact damned souls – which would actually explain a lot of things – the running water, that weird smell, why it’s so warm down there. Aquinas and Origen both described hell as the absence and tacit abandonment of God itself, and if there’s any place that you can be assured that God has abandoned you – it’s the 42nd street subway complex.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The guy selling candy bars and magazines who spends his days and nights in a concrete box on the NQR platform? I’ll allow you to speculate what he did while alive to deserve this afterlife.
I get in trouble with some of you occasionally for referring to “God” as an “it.” I’m all for anthromorphising non human extra-dimensional intelligences and all, but should this entity actually exist – it’s an “it” and not a he or a she. Agnosticism has always served me best, and there are philosophical currents in Buddhism which advise that spending too much of your life pondering spiritual matters is not what the universe – or “it” – intended when they incarnated you into the meatspace which back me up on this idea. If there is an afterlife, I’ll have to pay my check when I leave the table, but in the meantime I intend to continue eating and drinking heartily until the bad news comes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned in a prior post, for some reason I’ve begun to mentally refer to Manhattan as “Manchuquo” which is coincidentally similar to the name which the Japanese Empire assigned to its holdings in Manchuria during the 1930’s and 40’s. At any rate, while standing on a platform in what I believe to be the first circle of hell – The NYC Subway system – in Manchuquo, it occurred to me that’s it’s been a while since I read Aquinas, or Marcus Aurelius. Have to find and download some audiobooks for those two – simply for the reason that I can win rhetorical arguments with the NYC EDC by quoting them.
Hell, I need to listen to something intelligent while wandering around the City of Greater New York… Do you suppose that if the Subway is – as asserted – the first circle of hell, that Manhattan might just be purgatory?
It certainly does feel like it.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, May 21st at 3:30 p.m. –
A Return to The Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek,
with Atlas Obscura, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
rotarian path
Burnt, literally and figuratively.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator feels a bit swollen in the brain today, a sensation which is coupled with a mild case of sunburn. Yesterday found me onboard a boat for the Waterfront Alliance’s annual conference, and one took advantage of the fantastic weather as much as possible by being out on deck after I had captured the photos which the WA asked me to get. Accordingly, my skinvelope is exhibiting the characteristic radiation burns one might expect after exposure to the emanations of the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned in earlier posts, a sudden flurry of activity has occurred in the last few weeks, which has been quite a distraction.
A recent event which I attended was here in Astoria – a visioning session conducted by the NYCEDC in pursuance of the BQX Street Car system as proposed by Mayor De Blasio – was actually quite interesting. I’m working on a fairly in depth series of posts exploring the idea, and next week I plan on walking the 16 mile route of the BQX to provide some sort of tangible visual documentation of the plan and route.
More on this one is coming.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Two events which I’m looking forward to will be occurring the weekend and week of the 21st – a walking tour of the Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint with Atlas Obscura, and a boat tour of the Brooklyn waterfront with the Working Harbor Committee on the 26th.
Come with?
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, May 21st at 3:30 p.m. –
A Return to The Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek,
with Atlas Obscura, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
into which
I been everywhere, man.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is fully “back in action” after a long hermitage. In the last seven days – I’ve conducted three walking tours of the Newtown Creek watershed, visited the Kosciuszko Bridge construction project, attended and partcipated in a Working Harbor Committee tour, and have also found myself cathechizing elected officialdom about the dangers of CSO’s (Combined Sewer Outfalls). I also shot and developed a few hundred photos, and you’ll be seeing some of them over the next few days.
I also got to take the most photogenic of NYC’s subway lines the other day, which is the IRT Flushing or 7 line, as evinced by the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Two of my walking tours last week were private affairs, and involved exposing groups of students to LIC. I brought the kids down the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, then along the main stem of the Creek itself, and we eventually ended up along the East River waterfront in Hunters Point.
The counterpoints between “America’s Workshop” and the “Modern Corridor” are jarring, and seeing the post industrial section contrasted with the gentrified residential sections really seemed to hit home with them. I love taking out groups of students, incidentally, as ultimately our world will be theirs someday, and they have to start thinking up the solutions to the colossal mess we’re going to be leaving behind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, what with all the running around, I ended up walking close to forty miles last week as I scuttled around from place to place. This weekend, I’ve got another private group tour on Saturday, but on Sunday there’s a free event I’m helping to conduct with my colleague Will Elkins from Newtown Creek Alliance. Details are found below for attending the “North Henry Street Project,” which will meet up at 11 a.m on the corner of Kingsland and Norman Avenues in Greenpoint.
This one is part of the citywide MAS Janeswalk event, and I’m hoping you can come along and check out the plans NCA has been concocting for the “Unnamed Canal,” a minor tributary of Newtown Creek.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
heavy features
A few shots from NYC’s most photogenic subway line.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week, a post was offered at this – your Newtown Pentacle – describing the 99th anniversary of the opening of the IRT Flushing Line’s Corona Extension. That’s the 11 stops between Queensboro Plaza and what’s now called 103rd Corona Plaza on the 7. My intention for that post was to show you every station, which I did in fact visit and shoot… but you know me… a week late and a dollar short.
Speaking of, I’m running a bit late today.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Large groupings of photos – in the case of the 7 line shots, I came home with something close to a thousand individual captures which have been boiled down to around 200 – create a sort of roadblock for me. They need to be treated as one continuous shoot during the developing process (I shoot in RAW format, so every shot gets a little love and attention). Procedurally, it works like this – an initial pass to cull out over and underexposed or just junk shots, followed by key wording and then cropping. At the end of the procedural stuff I finally get to do the “developing” stage which is the photoshop equivalent of what you film people used to do in the dark room when pulling prints. Once that’s done I can finally start spawning the final incarnations of the things you see, and upload them to the web for dissemination.
When you’re starting with a thousand individual images, this ends up taking a lot of time.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I ended up riding the 7 for several hours last week, between Willets Point and Queensboro Plaza. To me, at least, it was worth the effort.
Speaking of transit, tonight at 6:30 at Riccardos by the Bridge in Astoria, there’s a meeting to plan a centennial celebration for the Hell Gate Bridge which I intend on attending. Come with?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 