Posts Tagged ‘Car’
ecstasies and horrors
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– photo by Mitch Waxman
Peculiar shapes framing the opalescent moon- no doubt due to a dynamic weather system, rather than some external force, intelligence, or madness inducing entity of supra normal scope which can exist only in the imaginings of a madman- caught my attention while returning to Astoria from the hoary lanes of Greenpoint. It seems sometimes that one spends most of his time occupied in perambulating between the two communities and those happy neighborhoods which adjoin the two.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Trying to ignore the shining parallelogram of clouds which lent our world’s largest satellite a menacing cast, your humble narrator elected to continue working on the whole “night photography” thing, and began fumbling about with camera settings and nervously whispering to myself. Skillman Avenue, normally a well traveled and busy thoroughfare in Western Queens which adjoins the Sunnyside Rail Yard, is a ghost town at night, although there is a feeling of being watched.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was not being paranoid either, as dozens of security cameras actually were watching me. Whether someone is ultimately watching the camera feed is another matter, of course, but the machines notice all things. They especially notice a weirdo in a black raincoat waving a camera around in near total darkness. Such thinking kept my mind off the menace of the lunar threat, and the curious way that the parallelogram in the sky unsettled me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One supposes that he is just too fragile for this world, a stunted flower straining out from the cracks which mar a post industrial field of pavement. Perhaps it is fated that I follow my ancestors into convalescence and begin the search for an institution of charitable design which might house and insulate me from the terrible possibilities which lurk at the edge of sanity- for if one finds himself a selenophobic, may he not be accused of being a lunatic?
habitual secretiveness
– photo by Mitch Waxman
DUKBO, on the Brooklyn side of that parable laden river of urban neglect called the Newtown Creek, is an industrial zone which most New Yorkers wouldn’t want to acknowledge ownership of. The particular stretch which is focused on today is not long for this world, as the replacement of the Kosciuszko Bridge will obliterate these streets from the map when construction begins in 2014.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Owing to the impermanence of this area, and the certain doom it will enjoy, your humble narrator has been making it a point to divert my path into its shadowed corridors and record what might exist here. As mentioned to many, one of the goals of this- your Newtown Pentacle- is to leave behind some sort of record of what the Creeklands were before the massive changes wrought by Superfund, the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement, and all the other mega projects planned for the area begin.
It is, in my opinion, important to have the realities of this place reported on by a source not affiliated with commercial or governmental interests, and to allow some future researcher to witness the inheritances of the past as they were at the start of this century. The paucity of documentation about Newtown Creek at the start of the 20th century are a major impediment to studying its history.
That’s my “elevator speech”, by the way.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Of course, the specific focus of today’s posting has little to do with history, rather it’s the utter immolation suffered by this vehicle (refer to a Newtown Pentacle post of January 4, 2012 titled “Old School 2” for context). It seems that DUKBO continues to be a great place to ditch an unwanted vehicle, and the complete destruction of this automobile speaks to a considerable interval between ignition and the intervention of the NYFD.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s an assumption, by the way, based on the absolute destruction of the vehicle interior. The absence of doors, engine hood, and other usual amenities found on modern cars (not present lying in some heap on the sidewalk) suggests that the vehicle was probably stripped, abandoned, and torched- but that is another assumption. Both of these are wide interpretations born of having grown up in South Brooklyn during the 1980’s, a time when an epidemic of car thefts and vehicular arson ran rampant and vehicles in similar condition would regularly be encountered along the Belt Parkway and its service roads.
Kids in my neighborhood became very familiar with the difference between “an accident” and an “on purpose”.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Can’t blame NYFD for not getting to it in time for anything else than extinguishing the husk, as this is the middle of nowhere and residential housing is quite distant in any direction. At night, this a ghost town, with shuttered businesses and truck lots, and little or no traffic. Who can guess what transpires here, in the dead of night amidst the darkness of DUKBO?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If you’re missing what looks like a mid size SUV or perhaps a minivan, this corner in DUKBO seems to be a great place to start looking for what remains of it.
The Newtown Pentacle 