so inquisitive
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So… I was in a quasi “ok” place for these, after a handshake with the property manager who handles this particular location on Dutch Kills. Nothing in writing, mind you, but a handshake. Still, I felt like I was doing something naughty. It was a Saturday night, after all. Wasn’t exactly the “naughty” of illegal street racing for pink slips on Fountain Avenue during the 1980’s, but there you are.
This one looks towards the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge, and a different view of that Tree of Paradise growing up from under a factory eave which has been the focus of so many shots over the years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary was canalized at the start of the 20th century, a “T” shape was built into its terminus which is meant to act as a “turning basin” for maritime traffic. This created a stagnant dead end, which has had horrific effects on the environment. Somebody abandoned two oil barges here sometime in the dim past. They’ve been here since I showed up around fifteen years ago, and my buddy Bernie Ente told me that the two barges had been in this spot for twenty years before that. So, approximately 35 years… leave your car double parked for 5 minutes and you get a ticket, but abandon oil barges in an industrial canal? Nada.
I showed up at Dutch Kills on the 30th with a light kit bag, and then got busy with the camera with an ND filter and the tripod.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One arrived at this spot about twenty minutes prior to sunset. By “light kit,” I mean that I was carrying the two lenses – a 35mm and an 85mm – which I usually use for night photography. Full kit involves a second bag with a couple of longer reach zoom lenses in it. Sometimes I like to travel light, especially when it’s warm out.
I made it a point of really taking my time with these.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The point of the ND filter, which is basically a sunglass for the camera, is to “slow” the shot down and allow for longer exposures in daylight condition. I use this sort of filter a lot for these kind of shots. It’s why the water attains that mirror surface, as all of the distracting ripples and movement get smoothed out over the 15-30 seconds of an individual exposure.
The technical issues introduced by the filter include the color cast of the filter glass itself. You can spend a thousand bucks on one of these filters and you still get a color cast, so instead I spent about fifty bucks on one and then I figured out a set of settings for the development process in photoshop which neutralize it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the collapsing bulkhead associated with Long Island City’s 29th street which all of the recent hullabaloo is about. When the canal was created a hundred years ago, state of the art for “land reclamation” involved building a latticework of timber boxes whose structure was formed by dock piles driven into the saturated soil and mud of wetlands. Once you had the wooden framing done, you filled the “box” with rock and soil.
At the start of the 20th century, massive amounts of money and labor filtered through Western Queens in pursuit of this sort of land reclamation. More than one Queens Borough President was convicted on corruption charges because of these efforts, and much of the land we walk on today – which is between six and ten feet higher than the tidal zone – was created using the reclamation technique described above. One of Dutch Kills’ tendrils used to snake all the way to 31st street at Northern Blvd. for instance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The term I’ve encountered time and again in late 19th and early 20th century reports and literature about this section of Long Island City is “waste meadows.” This refers to grassy tidal lowlands which would flood with the East River tidal cycle. Depending on where you’re talking about, these waste meadows were either swamps or marshes or even Juniper tree lined waterways. Every account I’ve read speaks about lots and lots of deer, waterfowl, shellfish, and the sort of critters who make their living in this sort of environment. In fact, when the Dutch arrived in the 1640’s, they talked about problems arising from an abundance of wolves.
That’s pretty interesting, actually. According to the “wolf people,” an adult wolf of breeding age needs a minimum of nearly 4 pounds of meat a day to survive. That’s a minimum, and whereas Wolves don’t necessarily eat everyday, a breeding age wolf prefers about 10 pounds of meat a day. If you’ve got a “wolf problem,” which indicates a large population of these top predators, you’ve got to do the math on this, regarding the prey animals that fed them. Ten wolves – 100 pounds of meat, 100 wolves – 1,000 pounds, etc. Wolf problem? That’s a whole lot of meat.
This used to be a highly productive ecosystem, these waste meadows.
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quickly anyhow
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 30th of July offered a brief climatological break from the bake of mid summer in NYC, a season which is affectionately referred to as “swamp ass” by we aficionados of the local milieu. Accordingly, one set out for a walk to take advantage of the pleasant atmospherics.
Shortly after leaving HQ, one encountered a fairly traffic free Broadway here in Astoria, which is actually noteworthy in its own right, and the maneuvering of an MTA Q104 line bus. Couldn’t resist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My destination for the evening was Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary, and the area surrounding it. This was a Saturday evening, and since I desired solitude and an extended period of time during which I was not involved in conversation with anyone about anything, I went to where no one else would be.
To get from “here” to “there,” the pathway leads through an area known as the Degnon Terminal. The large brick building on the left side of the shot is a prison (different units inside offer varying levels of security, but it’s classified as a minimum security facility by Corrections Dept.) known as the Queensboro Correctional Facility. It opened in 1975, is designed to house 424 inmates, and is found on the corner of Van Dam Street and 47th Avenue. It’s an “intake and processing” center, I’m told, wherein convicted inmates are classified and categorized on the way to whatever upstate hellhole they’re permanently headed to for the duration of their sentences. Except for the barbed wire and constantly swiveling security cameras, you’d barely notice the place as being a jailhouse.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Degnon Terminal was constructed in more or less the same time period as the nearby Sunnyside Yards. It offered rail connections, and barge to rail connections at Dutch Kills, and to Pennsylvania Rail Road/Long Island Railroad trackage infrastructure at Sunnyside Yards. Built by a company headed by Michael Degnon, the terminal had its own railroad system – the Degnon Terminal Railway. Said railway ended up being folded into the MTA property portfolio when that agency was created.
I’m told that rail companies seldom allow their unused tracks to be dug out of the ground as they’d never be able to reacquire the precious “right of way.” Even if the tracks haven’t been used in 50 years, they still pay tax on it to the Federal rail authorities to maintain the right of way. You see these relict tracks everywhere in this area.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The buildings which composed the Degnon Terminal, despite long 20th century decades of degeneracy, have been coming back to life in recent years. The elimination of hundreds of square acres of industrial space in the name of “affordable housing” in recent decades has reversed a trend that began shortly after the Second World War which saw heavy industrial or “M1” zoned space devalued because there was so much of it laying fallow and empty. Rezonings in East New York, South Brooklyn, Greenpoint, and even here in Long Island City have allowed for the razing of the old factories and for their replacement with tower apartment buildings.
The operative period for the creation of Sunnsyide Yards and the Degnon Terminal developments is during the first 20-30 years of the 20th century. That’s also when the United States Army Corps of Engineers oversaw the canalization of Newtown Creek’s tributaries, and land reclamation efforts that eliminated their wetlands, into what we see today.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of Dutch Kills, here I am at 29th street again. The red, white, and blue self storage warehouse – and the television studio next door – used to be the factory HQ of an outfit that called itself “U.S. Cranes.” You can guess what their line of business was, I imagine.
Both the TV Studio and the Storage warehouse are situated on a pier, which sits on stout concrete and steel columns driven down into the Newtown Creek mud. Tracks of the Degnon Terminal Railway are visible on 29th street, which is technically classified as a “railroad access road” and MTA property – which is why MTA is holding the modern bag for the collapsing bulkhead along Dutch Kills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Like a vampire, I need to be invited in before I do my work. This is the standard line I offer if I’m ever accused of illegal trespassing. After that press conference I told you about a couple of weeks backs, I’ve actually got a handshake agreement regarding one of those invitations I require.
I mention this in advance of what I’m going to show you over the next couple of posts, so stay tuned.
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sinking moon
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To start – I am very nearly caught up, in terms of calendrical verisimilitude, between these posts and the backlog of photos which necessitated the six image posts you’ve been seeing for the last few months. To wit – the shots in todays post were captured on a short scuttle betwixt Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section and the rolling hills of almond eyed Astoria on the 26th of July.
Depicted above, the scene observed on the Long Island City side of Newtown Creek’s DUPBO – Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp – wherein the ever reliable afternoon machinations of the Long Island Railroad were observed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had just conducted a walking tour for a group of academic fellows who are going to be working with the estimable Newtown Creek Alliance during a coming interval. We started on the Queens side of things, at 43rd street and Queens Blvd., and then looped over the Kosciuszcko Bridge into Brooklyn. We walked through “oil country” and then concluded our “walk and talk” at NCA HQ. Afterwards, a humble narrator scuttled forth over the Pulaski Bridge and paid the MTA its due for a ride on the 7 Line.
Have I mentioned that I’m loving the new OHNY fare control system? Not having to worry about “how much” I am carrying on a Metrocard anymore is awesome. Additionally, the credit instrument I’ve assigned to transit use on my phone pays “benefit” points into the account for frequent use, and have thereby managed to recapture some valuation out of the process.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 7 Line connects across the platform to the N/W lines at Queens Plaza (that’s the “upstairs” one) where you can accomplish a transfer between the two lines. In my capacity as Transportation Chair of the local community board, I’ve been actively advocating for MTA to enact a “walking transfer” between the upstairs “Queens Plaza” station and the downstairs “Queensboro Plaza” one. It’s actually quite in tune for the hidebound transit authority to have not instituted this in the past, here in Queens, but there’s prior art for them to follow in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. The OHNY system makes it simple. ERRATA: It’s the inverse, sorry, screwed up – Queens Plaza is upstairs, Queensboro Plaza is downstairs.
A walking transfer is when you leave a station and then enter a nearby one that serves a different line within a certain timed interval, all on the one fare. They do this on the Lexington Line (4/5/6) and the Broadway Line R/N etc. nearby Bloomingdale’s. There’s another one nearby the Barclay Center in Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For me, this walking transfer would have meant not have to walk about ten blocks down Broadway in Astoria to get back to HQ, and I could have instead transferred to the downstairs R/M service instead of taking the N or W upstairs.
Of course, downstairs would have meant I couldn’t take yet another stab at the impossible photo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s a bit of bother, and rushed effort, to get myself ready to try and get the impossible shot. I have to get that homemade foam collar affixed to the lens, and find a window that isn’t graffiti clad or just plain filthy.
I set the lens to a small aperture – f8 or so – and twist the ISO sensitivity up high so that I can have a shutter speed of at least 1/400th of a second to freeze the scene. All of this has to happen in less than 30 seconds. I literally do this everytime I ride the N or W out of Queens Plaza.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s a not so great version of the “impossible shot” above, overlooking Queens Plaza from the high steel of the N as it twists out over Jackson Avenue on its way to the 31st street corridor in Astoria.
Back next week with more folderol.
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dropped despairingly
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator seems to have spent most of the Obama administration walking back and forth over the Pulaski Bridge. For the last five years or so, it’s been Greenpoint Avenue Bridge. Causation? Correlation? I don’t know, I just walk where I’m going and “then” is different than “now.”
At any rate, I was walking over the Pulaski Bridge, between Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section and Queens’ Long Island City, at dusk.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All the familiar places… every time I go somewhere or do something these days, it’s potentially the last time. I’ll be gone at the end of this year, living in a different place. When and if I come back to NYC for visits or work, I’ll be driving a car.
Everybody asks, so I’ll just state it plain and simple…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First, I can’t afford to live here anymore. Taxes are a big part of it, as are the ambitions of the political class to offer ever more tax incentives to the real estate people to dig that tax hole a bit deeper. I don’t mind the idea of incentivizing an industry which needs a little push, but do the real estate people really need your money more than you do? What about schools, or hospitals? Do they need the experience of the Governor’s embrace more than the Related Company’s do?
Second… Our Lady of the Pentacle and I want something different for Act 3.
I was an infant here, a public school student here, I went to college in Manhattan. I have lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens for nearly six decades. I have gotten to do things in NYC, and see things here, which most New Yorkers don’t even suspect exist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When I start talking about those things, people always think I’m bragging. It’s not bragging if you did these things, I always say, and then ask them if they’ve ever been a NYC Parade Marshal who had to separate two warring Chinese marching bands from fighting with each other, without a working knowledge of any dialect of Chinese. I’ve narrated on the CircleLine, gotten to know people in high elected office, and once found a missing lamp post of the Queensboro Bridge.
It goes on. Suffice it to say, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere – right?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What I mean by Act 3, of course, is the dramatic end of my story. There’ll be comeuppance, and victories, but we all know how our individual dramaturges are ultimately going to end. Saying that, I’d love not to have my body found floating in New York Harbor after I collapsed on some bulkhead on Newtown Creek. I want it to be quiet, and dark at night, when I go to sleep.
Also, I can have a crap government anywhere I go in this country, so I’m not sure why I’m “paying in” to this particular one. Look at the clown shoes manner in which they’ve handled the three existential crises of the last 20 years – 911, Sandy, Covid.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You’re not going to see one of those “I’m leaving New York” essays, the ones that shit all over the City, from me. This is the place that made me, and every single molecule of me is NYC. I’m loud and brassy, grossly over the top in all senses of the word, get a surprising amount of things done every day, and am impressive from a distance.
Just like NYC, up close inspection reveals cracked foundations, a fragile ego, and an inescapable sense of impending doom which is acknowledged but not meaningfully addressed. If I stay here, I’ll always be the same and will die in the same manner that I lived. The longer I’m here, the shorter my life will be.
In short, something different is needed. NYC won’t miss me.
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
unwonted ripples
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you may recall, most of the country – including NYC – experienced a dramatic heat wave in middle and late July. Here in “home sweet hell,” the humidity and dew point levels were as high as they can go without spontaneous rain showers occurring, and the atmospheric temperatures were in the high 90’s and even hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit once or twice during the interval.
I refer to this kind of weather as a “reverse blizzard.” At least during the cold months you can wear extra layers and still get something done – but during this kind of oppressive summer heat – not so much.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My desire to be out and about, when even at night it’s 90 degrees with tropical humidity, absolutely evaporates. One spent an inordinate amount of time in late July at HQ, in direct proximity to an air conditioner. Occasional forays to the porch revealed a torrid soup of thunderstorms and other meteorological consequence of “too much” heat swirling around in the heavens. Yuck.
Thereby, there weren’t too many adventures on the table, and the camera sat unused for several days.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On Saturday the 23rd, which was a candidate for “hottest day of the year” until Sunday the 24th rolled through, I had to head over to Brooklyn to show my face at a Newtown Creek Alliance event – the Kingsland Wildflowers Festival. An annual event, this one is produced by NCA in conjunction with Broadway Stages, and Alive Structures, amongst others. There’s games for kids, food, and a bunch of activists doing activist things.
I wandered around a bit, caught up with friends, caroused. Then I scuttled off to wave the camera around a bit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a really warm night, but I was desirous of taking a walk and decided that I’d cross the Newtown Creek via the nearby Pulaski Bridge and catch a train back to Astoria. The camera and I both required a bit of exercise. Self lubricating parts and all that…
At my age, if you don’t use a body part it just withers away and falls off. This especially includes the knees. “Assholes and elbows,” as they say in the military, so off I went.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One cut through the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, at the sewer plant in Greenpoint, to get over to the Pulaski Bridge’s staircases on McGuinness Blvd. nearby Box Street. Since “Phase 3” of the Nature Walk opened last year, it’s really cut down the amount of time that it used to take to get from NCA HQ on Kingsland Avenue to the Pulaski. It’s also a visually interesting spot, in my opinion.
My toes were pointed in the correct direction and then I just leaned into it. Regardless, I was “shvitzing.” The palm of my camera hand was positively moist. As an aside, I’ve learned that use of the word “moist” makes millennials and Gen Z people uncomfortable. Exploration of this weird fact also makes them uncomfortable. The same people will happily drop their pants to show off a new tattoo or piercing, openly display their kinks and fetishes in political rooms, but there’s now a list of proscribed adjectives which are considered “problematic.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It had to be just after 8 p.m. when I set out on this walk, as the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself was already prostrating itself behind New Jersey. How predictable, huh?
Back tomorrow with more.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 