Posts Tagged ‘Highway’
Frogger
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A decidedly nice Spring afternoon drew me out for a walk in another section of Pittsburgh which I hadn’t been to yet on foot. This route found me leaving the car at home and taking the T Light Rail into town. I’ve mentioned my fascination with the arcs and massing shapes formed by the interstate highways which snake through Pittsburgh before, and wanted to get a closer look at them when I’m not moving at high speed while operating a vehicle.
This area is on the central peninsular section of Pittsburgh where ‘Downtown’ and most of the large office buildings are found, but it’s eastward of that. I had figured out a path that I wanted to walk which would culminate in seeing something I’ve been desirous of witnessing up close since my first solo Amtrak based trip here back in 2021.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Interstate 579 or “Crosstown Boulevard” pictured above, looking towards Mount Washington, which the high speed road carries motorists and bicyclists or pedestrians to after crossing the Monongahela River via the Liberty Bridge.
This particular area has a controversial history, which includes Pittsburgh having made a colossal and costly mistake, one with serious racial undertones, and there seems to be quite a bit of new construction either fairly recently opened in this zone or is still underway. This section is all about ‘the car,’ and moving cars through it. The street grid crossing the highway is similarly all about ‘the car,’ and not the pedestrian. To analogize back to NYC, this is more or less what Robert Moses wanted to do to Manhattan’s 59th street back in the late 40’s.
I used to enjoy playing a video game called Frogger back in high school. It was the kind of game you played for a quarter, and the housing for the thing was a stand alone cabinet which was adorned with cigarette burns that – in my case – was found in a plywood shack set up on a patch of frozen mud on Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn at a mob owned news stand which also sold porn magazines, candy, and potato chips.
The point of the game was to guide your frog back and forth across a busy road without getting squished by traffic. I thought of Frogger a lot while walking along this path with its enormous and exposed intersections. There’s also a couple of spots where you cross the street at a highway off ramp. Scary pants.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Where I was heading would end up involving Duquesne University and a couple of interesting churches, but that’s next week’s series of posts. The good news I can report is that I managed to walk for a several hours across a corduroy terrain – up and down hills, in other words – and got there and back using mass transit. The other bit of good news is that I only had to check my phone once to double check I was heading in the right direction. I’m actually starting to learn my way around!
More tomorrow at this, your Newtown Pentacle. Also, please like and or share this post if you dig it, as that sort of thing really helps me out.
“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.
stole timid
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You want to know what heavy traffic is like? When the driver of a car on a highway has the time and opportunity to stick a camera through his car’s moon roof and take night photos, that’s what heavy traffic is like. After our all day drive from Pittsburgh to NYC which moved at 70-75 mph for hundreds of miles, we ground down into the evertraffic leading to the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey. I had crossed half of the state of New Jersey in the time it took me to go the last ten miles on my way to that bridge. Uggh.
These pinch points leading to the landform of Long Island, with Brooklyn and Queens on its western edge, are the strategic weak points of NYC. The real estate people have managed to cut off all of the water access for freight traffic on the Hudson and East River frontages because “affordable housing,” so it’s up to trucks to feed and supply the millions who live on a very Long Island.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Port Elizabeth Newark is thankfully growing by about 5-7% per year, and the port is the largest single driver of the regional economy of the NYC Metropolitan Area, after Wall Street. Unlike Wall Street, the port is constrained in its growth by the fact of these pinch points. All of that commercial activity has to flow into and across NYC to reach first Brooklyn and Queens, and then continue on to Nassau and Suffolk via either the Verrazzano Bridge on the south or the combination of the George Washington and Triborough Bridges on the north. These trucks sit and idle on neighborhood streets during their transit, painting the City with diesel soot.
Bike lanes ain’t gonna save ya, NYC. It ain’t Uber or AirBNB or any of the other entities which the politicians and activists like to blame that’s causing the traffic. It’s last mile delivery services like FedEx, Amazon, and UPS on the small scale and semi tractor trailers on the large. As the local economy expands, so does truck traffic, unless something changes.
Annoyingly, something like 40% of the truck traffic required to feed these growing local economies of NYC’s urban and suburban zones thereby travels through Northern Manhattan with the rest moving through Staten Island and Brooklyn. Think about that one, and mention it to either Mayor “YIMBY Swagger,” or Governor “Spread the Money Around to make the Building Trade Council happy” and ask them about it when you’re graced with their august presence.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s funny, the way that the internet works. Writing critiques about the policy situation in NYC, and the endemic political corruption of this new Tammany Hall system, has algorithmically caused Google and other services to read that as a cue to feed me Republican propaganda. Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, and other noxious voices from that side of the aisle populate my feeds these days. That’s annoying, and illustrates how the internet breeds political polarization.
I’m not a Fascist sympathizer or “on the right,” rather I’m what I’ve always been – a centrist liberal not afraid enough of the “L” word to say “Progressive.” You know who was a progressive? Robert Moses. Nelson Rockefeller too.
I believe that if something isn’t hurting somebody else it should be legal, and that if an existing law or set of policies is restricting somebody else’s freedoms we should get rid of those laws. More freedom is better than less. I also believe that it’s often best to do nothing at all, from a Governmental point of view. I will opine that the Government of New York City is bought and paid for by “big real estate” and that the shit flies which populate that industrial sector will move on to the next turd as soon as NYC has been destroyed by them, when the Politicians they fund are no longer offering them tax breaks which create 30-40% margins for new construction. All of the crap the “electeds” spout to the press falls apart behind the curtain, and they consort with characters whom they would publicly castigate.
Really, ask your Councilmember what it’s like working with Jared Kushner, or Larry Silverstein, or Donald Trump on “affordable housing” real estate projects, and then watch them run away from you while talking about systemic something or some sort of justice thingie.
“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.
Flushing River 1
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just outside of the Newtown Pentacle’s north-eastern extant at LaGuardia Airport, beyond the feral Brother Islands and the caustic shores of Rikers Island, is found Flushing Bay.
Following the waters as they flow beneath the Whitestone Expressway, one will realize they are upon the Flushing River (or creek, depending on your source, but it’s actually a salt marsh). Like the nearby Newtown Creek, Flushing Creek is a heavily industrialized waterway with a long history of epic pollution and municipal abuse.
from wikipedia
The town of Flushing was first settled in 1645 under charter of the Dutch West India Company and was named after the port of Vlissingen, in the southwestern Netherlands. It is said that the name Vlissingen means “salt meadow,” given as a nod to the tidal waters of Flushing Meadows. As the English version of the name of the Dutch town is “Flushing”, the same English version was used by the town’s English-speaking inhabitants. During his presidency, George Washington arrived to Flushing by ferry across. The first road crossing, a drawbridge at Northern Boulevard, was built in the early 19th century.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A vast morass of clinging mud and knife edged grass, Salt Marshes are nevertheless exemplars of biological activity. The stinking mud, bubbling with sulfur and methane, digests organic filth surrendered to it by ocean wave, and provides purchase for tenacious carpets of grasses. This tough vegetable armoring of the shoreline allows more accretion of mud, and in this lilliput of the waves, hordes of multitudinous and loathsomely tentacled carnivores hunt those which are squirming and soft bodied, which form colonies or don shells in self defense. Above the fray, the lords of life and death in this environment truly are the vertebrates, especially those which fly.
from wikipedia
By the 1850s, a second crossing, Strong’s Causeway was built near the present-day Long Island Expressway, extending Corona Avenue towards Flushing. This crossing was located near the confluence of Horse Brook and Flushing Creek. In the mid-19th Century, the growing city of Brooklyn acquired the land around the creek and gave it for use to the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, which turned the salt marshes into landfill. The pollution was chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, where Nick Carraway observed the “valley of ashes” on his train ride between Manhattan and Long Island.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Quiet tides and low rates of erosion allow mile after mile of boggy wetland to feed off the nutrient rich salt water, which becomes increasingly brackish as it mixes with fresh water flowing off and through the upland. In the case of the modern Flushing Creek, that fresh water is a combination of industrial runoff and cso’s (combined sewer outfall), along with whatever rain water manages to drip off the highways bridging it.
from wikipedia
In 1936, Robert Moses proposed closing the ash landfill and transforming it into a park through its use as a World’s Fair site. With the exception of the Willets Point triangle, the landfill was leveled, the creek bed was straightened, and the southern part of the creek was deepened to form the Meadow and Willow lakes. At its northern section, a tidal gate bridge was built to keep the East River tide from flooding into the park. By then, Horse Brook was long gone, covered by the future Long Island Expressway. Ireland Creek was also filled in for use as parkland to prevent flooding in the surrounding neighborhoods. Dammed and reduced in size, the creek became navigable only up to Roosevelt Avenue. Barges still docked on the river, bringing sand and gravel. At its southern end, the Jamaica subway yard reduced some of the flow coming from the headwaters.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Of course, such modern interpretations of what was- until “just yesterday”- considered wasteland, would have been rejected by our progress minded antecedents. An elegant cocktail of petroleum distillates, industrial waste, and municipal sewage were freely combined and dumped directly into the water here for centuries.
When the highway pilings were driven, the fate of Flushing Creek was sealed for half a century, and the community that had symptomatically formed around and because of the waterway lost access to it.
Forgotten-NY, which of course has been everywhere, did a great and in-depth piece on the Flushing Creek (or River, depending)– check it out here.
from wikipedia
Citi Field is a stadium located in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in the New York City borough of Queens. Completed in 2009, it is the home baseball park of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets. Citi Field was built as a replacement for the adjacent Shea Stadium, which was constructed in 1964 next to the site of the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. Citi Field was designed by Populous (formerly HOK Sport), and is named after Citigroup, a financial services company based in New York that purchased the naming rights. The $850 million baseball park is being funded by the sale of New York City municipal bonds which are to be repaid by the Mets plus interest. The payments will offset property taxes for the lifetime of the park.
The Newtown Pentacle 