Bowery Savings Bank 2010 and 1903
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Bowery Savings Bank in Manhattan during the summer of 2010.
– photo from “King’s views of New York City, A.D.1903” a public domain ebook courtesy Google Books
The Bowery Savings Bank in Manhattan in 1903.
Here’s a stitched panorama of the corner in 2010, just for the “longer” view. Click through to Flickr to see the gargantuan original.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Progress
– photos by Mitch Waxman
The growth of the Tishman Speyer Gotham Center building in the new Queens Plaza, from every corner of the Newtown Pentacle.
History of the Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft
Notes:
- Don’t miss the Hunter’s Point Avenue Bridge Centennial tomorrow, on December 11th, a free event. For more on the HPA Bridge Centennial, click here.
- Also, please consider purchasing a copy of the first Newtown Pentacle book: “Newtown Creek for the Vulgarly Curious” – a fully annotated 68 page, full-color journey from the mouth of Newtown Creek at the East River all the way back to the heart of darkness at English Kills, with photos and text by Mitch Waxman.
Woodside Botanica – photo by Mitch Waxman
History of the Necronomicon
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1927. Published 1938.
Original title Al Azif — azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons.
Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia — the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients — and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told.
He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.
Vanderbilt Study – photo by Mitch Waxman
In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho’ surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice — once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. Spanish) — both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only.
Altar at Mt. Zion cemetery fenceline – photo by Mitch Waxman
The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius’ time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greek copy — which was printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550 — has been reported since the burning of a certain Salem man’s library in 1692.
An English translation made by Dr. Dee was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript. Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also in the library of the University of Buenos Aires.
Numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to form part of the collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer rumour credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R. U. Pickman, who disappeared early in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours of this book (of which relatively few of the general public know) that Robert W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.
Roosevelt island Tram
– photos by Mitch Waxman
Newly reopened, your humble narrator was keen to take a trip across the river via the Tram. Here’s what I saw…
Thrice Damned?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Several emails arrived today inquiring into why, in yesterday’s posting, the Kosciuszko Bridge is referred to as “thrice damned”. We’ll get into that shortly, but first- a certain anomaly of the information age needs to be mentioned…
from nytimes.com
The association, which handles many of the city’s largest projects, pored through an annual report that the New York State Department of Transportation released earlier this year to develop its list. Researchers looked at the city’s bridges and freeways that were given “red flags” — for everything from weak columns to uneven pavement — to compile the list, which included only those operated by the state.
The association announced the following rankings:
-
- Kosciuszko Bridge
- Gowanus Expressway
- Bronx River Parkway over the Amtrak tracks
- Cross Bronx Expressway viaduct over the Amtrak tracks and the Sheridan Expressway
- Bronx Terminal viaduct carrying the Major Deegan Expressway by Yankee Stadium
- Major Deegan Expressway over Sedgwick Avenue and the Metro-North Railroad tracks
- Bruckner Expressway Service road, northbound
- Bruckner Boulevard viaduct1
- 50th Street over the Belt Parkway
- Major Deegan Expressway ramp to 153rd Street/Cromwell Avenue, southbound
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In 1939, during the Great Depression, arguably the most powerful man in New York City was Robert Moses. Moses had a project he was keen on, the Brooklyn Queens Connecting Highway.
The Meeker Avenue Bridge opened on August 23rd, 1939 (renamed in 1940 as The Kosciuszko Bridge) – some 24,855 days ago- and it was the first link in a chain that eventually metastasized into the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. It was promised to allow easy egress to the World’s Fair, and was a showpiece project for the Great Builder.
Yet, it seems not to have any fanfare associated with it according to online sources…
Q- Who designed it? How long was it under construction? Thinking about the chain of supply, where did the steel come from and how did it get here? Where are the City records? Surely this project was reported on, why doesn’t the NY Times or Brooklyn Daily Eagle have multiple stories in archives about it and attendant scandals?
A- Certain terms, called “tags” or “keywords” attached to every web page allow search engines to classify the content of any given web page. A sort of echo effect forms around these tags, a scalar which wipes out all other interpretations of search terms. The Kosciuszko Bridge is caught up in one of these echo effects, which has caused all other results to be crowded out. The echo surrounding “The Kosciuszko Bridge” search term at the Big G is formed by three or four modern sources and swirls about the replacement of it. This is kind of disturbing…
Andrew Carnegie’s American Bridge Company was the contractor, incidentally.
from nytimes.com
The Kosciuszko Bridge in Brooklyn received 20 yellow flags for corrosion and decay of steel beams and small cracks in beams and welds. The bridge also received eight safety flags for problems that included exposed electrical wires and loose concrete.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is mentioned, as it has raised certain misgivings in me about the future of verity and truth. If something like The Kosciuszko Bridge can lose its past and be defined only by its destruction, just how malleable has the historical record become in the age of the Big G? Can a skillful manipulation of Wikipedia or some other major “site of authority” change the past?
Just wondering…
Now- the “thrice damned” part
Damned Once- The Kosciuszko Bridge catches radio frequency emissions from several nearby commercial radio broadcast antennas. A lot of it.
Whatever knows fear burns at The Kosciuszko Bridge’s touch.
Damned Twice- The Kosciuszko Bridge is at extreme risk in the eventuality of a seismic event. The Brooklyn pier actually sits on the Creek bed, some 6 meters below grade, but the Queens side is anchored on piles driven into the mud. The hard soil around Queens Plaza will merely shake, but the land surrounding the Newtown Creek will liquify.
Damned Thrice- The Kosciuszko Bridge once had pedestrian walkways, but they were removed in 1961. Can you imagine what kind of photos would be possible on a pedestrian walkway 124 feet over the Newtown Creek?
from brooklynpaper.com
But the department has bigger fish to fry than the aesthetics — drivers just want the city to get it done. The current bridge is constantly in gridlock, with some 160,000 daily drivers pushing forward — very slowly — at on- and off-ramps, making two impromptu lanes. The new bridge is supposed to cure all these problems.
Luckily, project manager Robert Adams has said that the $1 billion needed to finish construction — which ballooned from $700 million last year due to a longer build-out time — is already lined up through federal funding, and that the tentative completion date is in 2017.
