Project Firebox 45
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Appearing suddenly, in the manner of some disemboweled hollywood revenant, this soldier of the realm stands proudly at the border between residential and industrial sectors in eastern Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
certain villagers
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent business brought me to the Greenpoint section of infinite Brooklyn, which offered your humble narrator an opportunity to get high.
Pop cultural references aside, what that meant was a trip to the roof of the so called Pencil Factory, and the chance to slide my lens around the unobstructed vista of the alluvial plane which lies between Newtown Creek, the former Bushwick Creek, and the East River.
from wikipedia
An alluvial plain is a largely flat landform created by the deposition of sediment over a long period of time by one or more rivers coming from highland regions, from which alluvial soil forms. A floodplain is part of the process, being the smaller area over which the rivers flood at a particular period of time, whereas the alluvial plain is the larger area representing the region over which the floodplains have shifted over geological time.
As the highlands erode due to weathering and water flow, the sediment from the hills is transported to the lower plain. Various creeks will carry the water further to a river, lake, bay, or ocean. As the sediments are deposited during flood conditions in the floodplain of a creek, the elevation of the floodplain will be raised. As this reduces the channel floodwater capacity, the creek will, over time, seek new, lower paths, forming a meander (a curving sinuous path). The leftover higher locations, typically natural levees at the margins of the flood channel, will themselves be eroded by lateral stream erosion and from local rainfall and possibly wind transport if the climate is arid and does not support soil-holding grasses. These processes, over geologic time, will form the plain, a region with little relief (local changes in elevation), yet with a constant but small slope.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The pencil factory of the Eberhard Faber company, recently converted to luxury apartments, from above. Often has it occurred to me that this most be how the elites of Manhattan perceive the North Brooklyn and Western Queens communities, as if from above and with the perspective of Olympians.
from nycgovparks.org
The native Keshaechqueren originally inhabited this part of Brooklyn. Dutch mercantilists and farmers, arriving in 1638, rapidly developed it into a hub of seafaring commerce. In the 1850s, the community swelled with new residents, of primarily Irish and English descent, when two ferry lines began regularly scheduled runs from the Greenpoint coastline to Manhattan’s East Side. With the almost simultaneous addition of big businesses like the shipbuilding firm Continental Iron Works and fuel provider Astral Oil Works, Greenpoint began to compete on a national level with older naval foundries in Boston and Norfolk.
From the decades following the Civil War through the 20th century, Greenpoint’s population has steadily grown. In the early 1950s, the community began to suffer strain as several waves of immigration met with limited economic opportunities in the neighborhood.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The red building in the right of the shot, for instance, houses one of my favorite saloons in this section- also known as the “Pencil Factory”. They serve hard cider in a pint glass with ice during the summer, and that’s what’s known as “local knowledge”. Can’t see that from up here.
Of course, this angle of view precludes one from understanding the truth of these places, the life and cultural norms of the street, and reduces the population housed therein to statistical groups with the status of mere tenants (from a macro historical and sociological point of view) in a “district”. This isn’t a district, this is a neighborhood.
Hmmm, I guess these Eberhard Faber folks must have been a big deal.
from nyc.gov
The company first opened a factory in Manhattan near 42nd Street and the East River in 1861 as the U.S. branch of Germany’s A.W. Faber Company, a pencil manufacturing company dating to the mid-18th century. In 1872, Eberhard Faber, the great grandson of the company’s founder, moved the operation to Brooklyn after the Manhattan plant – the first pencil manufacturer in the United States — was destroyed by fire.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shapes on the far horizon in the shot above are all in Queens, and the dark dome of vegetation are those trees fed by the morbid nutritions of Calvary Cemetery. The reason why this part of Greenpoint Avenue is so wide is that it was built to accommodate the street car lines going to and from Calvary, which met the ferry docks not too far from where the so called “transmitter park” is found today.
from “A history of the city of Brooklyn By Henry Reed Stiles” courtesy google books
The Green-point Ferries are from the foot of Green-Point Avenue, Brooklyn, E. D., to the foot of East Tenth and East Twenty-Third streets, New York. The first named route was established in 1852 (lease dated 1850), by the efforts of Mr. Neziah Bliss, of Green-Point; and was soon transferred to Mr. Shepard Knapp, being now held by G. Lee Knapp. The Twenty-Third street route was established in 1857, and held by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, per G. Lee Knapp. Rent of the Tenth street ferry, $1,300, and of the Twenty-Third street, $600 per annum, both expiring in 1874.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Remains of the Greenpoint Terminal Market, immolated just a few years ago, persist on the riverfront. They await the application of venture capital and the blade of earth moving equipment, and will begin a conversion to towers of steel and glass.
Soon, one will not be able to see the spectacle of the Shining City of Manhattan from Greenpoint, except via regulated and officially decided “sight lines” or “visual corridors” offered by gaps between high rise apartment buildings- or if you happen to live in one of them.
Just like in Long Island City.
from the “DIGEST OF SPECIAL STATUTES By THE CITY OF NEW YORK” courtesy google books
1865: This act incorporates the Green Point and Calvary Railroad Company, and authorizes the construction of a railroad, to be operated by horse power only, from at or near the Green Point and Tenth street ferry, at the foot of Green Point avenue, in the city of Brooklyn, thence along Green Point avenue to Green Point avenue plank road, across the bridge over Newtown creek; thence easterly along said road to the easterly side of Calvary cemetery at or near the point where the, said road intersects the main road leading from Calvary cemetery to Hunter’s Point; thence to Central avenue; thence along Central avenue and Commercial street to Franklin avenue, to Freeman street, to Washington street, to the place of beginning.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One view which will remain unoccluded for the foreseeable future, of course, is that which is enjoyed by some hideous thing which cannot possibly exist or lurk within the cupola of a Sapphire Megalith in Long Island City.
Such an entity- with its singular and unblinking eye casting about rapaciously, a global army of loyal acolytes and fanatic employees, and a desire to devour all the wealth that there is, was, or ever will be- this hungry and impossible thing which would be “too big to fail”- were it not entirely mythical- what perspectives on the transformations of North Brooklyn could it offer from atop its hildskjalf?
Of course, such paranoid wonderings often occur, when one spends his time getting high in Greenpoint.
from nyc.gov
Greenpoint is generally defined as the district bounded by North 7 Street on the south, the East River on the West, Newton Creek on the north and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the east, corresponding approximately to the area of ward 17 in the 19 century. th
Once also known as Cherry Point, Greenpoint, got its name from the eponymous spit of grassy land that extended into the East River near the foot of what later became Freeman Street. The name came to designate all of the 17 ward when Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Williamsburg were joined to Brooklyn in 1854. At that time, the 17 ward was home to approximately 15,000 inhabitants. A sandy bluff, over one hundred feet high in some parts, overlooked the shoreline between Java and Milton Streets, but it was leveled before the middle of the 19 century for use as building material and landfill both in New York and locally. The original Greenpoint spit disappeared between 1855 and 1868 when the western half of the blocks along the once white sandy shoreline west of West Street were created by landfilling. During this period, the blocks west of Commerce Street between Ash and Eagle Streets were also created or in the process of being filled.
breakers lacerated
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last Saturday, after conducting a walking tour of Dutch Kills for a group of enthusiasts, your humble narrator found himself walking up 35th street, and upon arriving at the street’s intersections with both 38th avenue and Northern Blvd.- I was moving past the titan Packard building.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Engaged in conversation with Our Lady of the Pentacle, who helped out with the tour, I suddenly felt as if someone might be throwing crumpled up bits of paper at my back. Spinning around to confront my attacker, this swarm of bees was observed.
It had been bees bouncing off my back!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things I’ve learned about Queens is this- if something “should be done or said”, no one is going to do it, so you’d better do it yourself. Our Lady of the Pentacle sighed at this point and walked up the block to find a shady spot to sit down while I crossed the street and yelled “BEEs” at anyone who approached this spot.
After many years of marriage to one such as myself, she knew that the following would take a while and she might as well get comfortable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I called 911, and told the operator that there were a lot of bees swarming on the same corner as a subway stop, and was told that that’s not an emergency and that I should call 311. With a hearty “yes ma’am” I hung up and called 311.
The operator listened to my description of the situation, and asked me if I had contacted the property owner about the situation.
Attempting to explain that I was attempting to report a dangerous situation here on the streets of Queens, she interrupted me and chided that “I wasn’t letting her talk”. There no way, of course, that this situation would have been dealt with differently if I was calling about such a situation in say… Manhattan.
She continued that “bees are part of nature and that the City of New York doesn’t mess with nature”.
swept chill
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Laurel Hill Blvd. slouches roughly as it descends toward Review Avenue, where the Penny Bridge once stood and the Long Island Railroad once maintained a station and the Roman Catholic funeral ferries docked. Thrice damned, the Kosciuszko Bridge occupies the shallow valley between the so called Laurel Hill and an easterly elevation known as Berlin Hill. The whole zone was called Maspeth, or “bad water place”, by an aboriginal Lenape tribe called the Maespetche who are said to have coined this term for the marshy wetlands that lay between Sunswick and Newtown Creeks.
Native Americans as a people, it should be remembered, are famed for an ironic and well developed sense of humor, and these Maespetche just might have been having some sardonic fun at the expense of the naive Europeans who had just paid them a fortune for an insect infested swamp.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lonely and desolate, one such as myself can only feel succor in this kind of place. A hinterland not too far from the geographic center of a megalopolis whose tendrils stretch out hundreds of miles in every direction called New York City, this is one of the least walked stretches of pavement in the entire metropolitan zone. It’s where the Alsops, Brutnells, and Wandells chose to locate their farming operations and just up the hill from where a few hundred British soldiers were garrisoned during the revolutionary war.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To the west lies Calvary, First Calvary, where Dagger John consecrated the soil of Protestant Newtown for the use of the Roman Catholic church. The elevation of Laurel Hill is quite apparent, here, as the 9 story General Electric Vehicle Company factory’s roofline is at eye level, and it is found at Borden Avenue and Starr- only a few blocks away. The hill was once a bit higher, but the construction of the cemetery in the 19th century removed a few hundred million tons of topsoil from it (the subject of a lawsuit in state court, wherein the farmers of Newtown sued the RC church, as the topsoil was shipped by to Jamaica Queens for use on the catholic plantations there).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Turning widdershin, the first aperture available for transit into the most literal interpretation of the term “DUKBO”, literally “Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp” is 54th avenue. Not unlike the sensation experienced on the spiral footbridge examined in the two postings preceding this one- “maddeningly untransmissable” and “danger-widespread“- the inveterate pedestrian feels as if a corridor of transition has been arrived at. One world exists at the entrance and something totally different will be found on the other side.
A titanic vibration is sensed rather than heard here, no doubt due to the pulsating waves of vehicular traffic crossing overhead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nondescript and strictly utilitarian, there is nevertheless something quite unnerving about this overpass unrelated to any measurable stimuli. An odd sensation of loathing and imminent danger, as if some cackling, untoward, and quite unimaginable fiend was about to swing down from the overhead steelwork and claw at passerby. Despite this discernible and distasteful atmosphere of paranoid wondering, however, there is virtually nothing to see under here. The cement slab on the left of the shot is a sort of water catchment device.
Like all parts of DUKBO, there are businesses which operate in the underpinnings of the bridge, or in the shadow over the creek which has been cast from it since the 1930’s.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Behind these oddly sinister gates are a couple of trucks and what appears to be a few “storage cubes” or small shacks, but nothing out of the ordinary or in any way noteworthy. Oddly enough, this street is routinely crossed by a city bus, which has a stop on the next corner. Speculation would be served if one was to postulate that this might have been the pathway which workers from Sunnyside or Woodside would have taken enroute to shift work at Phelps Dodge or Alloco, down by the Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The continuation of 43rd street, which was last tread on the other side of the highway in Celtic Park, begins at this point, after the cloverleaf onramps which provide the singular intersection of the Long Island Expressway and Brooklyn Queens Expressway complete themselves. This stretch of 43rd street will someday be the new DUKBO, and easement purchases for the new bridge have already seen nearby homes and business buildings shuttered and demolished.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Reason and logic seldom count for much in the neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek, but one assumes that there exists an ancient municipal regulation which designates or zones this area as “the Crane district”.
Every block or two, it would seem, there is a corporate yard which hosts the sort of enormous building industry derricks commonly seen at work around the city. There’s one or two in Long Island City, of course, but there are a lot of these companies located in this neighborhood once known as Berlin- but now called either Laurel Hill or West Maspeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Bizarre associations are often a curse for your humble narrator, and on the day I was walking through here- entering Berlin- I couldn’t help but notice that the cranes here bore the colors of the tricolor flag of the modern Deutche.
We’re going to leave DUKBO at this corner for the moment, but will continue along this route next week. Remember- the Kosciuszko Bridge project will be starting in 2013- this summer and fall will be your last chance to see this district of the Insalubrious Valley of the Newtown Creek as it is and has been.
August 23rd, 2012 will be likely be the last birthday of the Kosciuszko Bridge.
danger widespread
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Note: For the first section of this walk, click here for the “maddeningly untransmissable” posting of May 3.
As mentioned in prior postings, those principates and potentates who occupy the proletarian palaces of Albany have prescribed that the process of replacing the 1939 vintage Kosciuszko Bridge with a modern design will begin a full year earlier than originally planned. Paramount, concern and attentions have been devoted to recording a pictorial record of the place as it exists today with the hope that future generations will be able to realize the pulsating horror envisaged by use of the acronym “DUKBO” (Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swirling, ever swirling, the steel and concrete of the footbridge which carries pedestrian traffic from the street grid of Celtic Park to the colour stained creekland hosts a resident troll, but also offers egress to the eastern border of venerable Calvary- a street known as Laurel Hill Blvd. Gentle elevation is encountered here, and the motion followed is of a clockwise bent.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A severe fence, composed of tiny chain links, encompasses the walkway and suggests that one has entered a bizarre corridor. Cellular telephone signals seem to drop off on the bridge, isolating one from the omnipresent cloud of telecommunication radiation, but the singular device carried by your humble narrator utilizes the AT&T network so this is not that unusual. Michael Faraday himself could not have imagined a surer form of electromagnetic cage, one suspects.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A rotunda is observed at the masonry abutment which supports the steel truss, which offers a startling view of both Calvary Cemetery and the skyline of that Shining City which lies to the north and west. Careful observers will notice that a hole exists in the mesh at an optimum viewing angle, no doubt due to the labor of some photographer from the wicked past. This is not the work of your humble narrator, it should be pointed out, although this aperture has suffered my exploitation on more than one occasion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Beyond the emerald devastations of Calvary, whose consecrated loam and forbidden secrets lie obfuscated and reveal themselves only to the most dedicated seekers, the wholesome spire of St. Raphael’s and the fearsome Sapphire Megalith of Long Island City struggle for attention with the shield wall of a spectacular entertainment called Manhattan. The elevation enjoyed by Laurel Hill, which is in actuality a foothill of and part of the sloping eastward ascent leading to the Maspeth Plateau, allows one a perspective normally denied to all but roofers and chimney sweeps.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gaudy, modern Manhattan is merely window dressing for the wonders of New York City, a painted temple whore squamously squatting in the harbor which is designed to entertain and enthrall foreign travelers, aspirant bourgeois, and the credulous. To experience the reality of New York, with it’s terrors and tragedies and naked truths and miracles- one must come to the so called “Outer Boroughs”. Here, in places like this DUKBO, there are no flashing neon lights and truth is manifested in cement, marble, and steel.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Tomorrow, we descend into the gentle valleys of DUKBO on the Queens side of the fabled Newtown Creek, and visit a location or two which will be obliterated by the construction of the new bridge, while pondering upon that which what might rise from the ashes. What unknown and unsuspected treasures might the ground imprison here, which has been unturned since 1939? Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there? Timorous and possessed of a weak constitution, your humble narrator nevertheless endures such journeys for the interest of both the prosaic and prurient at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
