Posts Tagged ‘kosciuszko bridge’
split fingernails
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
November 15th also marked the last time I would be visiting DUKBO in Maspeth, an area found along the fabulous Newtown Creek’s Queens side. At the time of these photo’s captures, I thought it would be my second to last visit, but as it turns out…
I set up the tripod, and all the special camera gear and tools which I’ve mentioned to you over the years. It was nice, but there was a melancholy resonance to this, doing what was a very normal thing for me to be doing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This post is being written on Monday the 12th of December, while sitting in my favorite Irish bar in Astoria – also for the last time. By the time you’ve received it, I’ll solidly be living in Pittsburgh.
There’s a pint of Guinness on my right hand, and the iPad is glowing in front of me. This is not an unfamiliar image to my bartender. I’ve always loved sitting down in a bar by myself and doing some writing. Also, since there is no wifi in my old apartment right now as I’ve returned the equipment to the cable people, my only connection other than a cell phone is here… in fact, the movers have just come this morning, and took all my stuff with them to Pittsburgh – so beyond the wifi the apartment is empty – there’s just an inflatable bed and a couple of knapsacks in my crib. I’m leaving in the morning, on Tuesday the 13th. An all day drive awaits.
One has been living out a suitcase for a couple of weeks now, surviving on high fat and overly caloric foods. A regular sleeping schedule is something I can only hope for, right now. It hasn’t been uncommon for me to fall dead asleep as early as 9 p.m. in the last couple of weeks, out of sheer exhaustion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One way or the other, the part of my life that includes DUPBO, DUGABO, or DUKBO is all over by the time you’re reading this. Hopefully, I’m unpacking on the other side with Our Lady of the Pentacle and can resume some sort of normal life in a day or two before the madness resumes, around a different set of subjects.
Goodbye, DUKBO.
“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.
tenement blocks
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described yesterday, on the 27th of September my friend Carter Craft offered to shuttle me around Newtown Creek onboard his boat. These photos are from that excursion, which is likely my penultimate trip on the Creek. That’s the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge pictured above, and the POV looks westwards along the creek towards LIC. This spot is 1.37 miles from the East River.
The NYC DOT, whose 1987 vintage double bascule drawbridge this is, also refers to the thing as the J.J. Byrne Memorial Bridge. A former saloon singer and later a Commissioner of Public Works for Brooklyn, Byrne became Borough President in 1925, succeeding the previous BP – Joseph A. Guider – who died while in office. As to why the rather unremarkable Byrne ended up in the top spot, look no further than his Brother in Law – John H. McCooey – the political boss of Brooklyn who was known as “their man in Brooklyn, Uncle John” to the Tammany Hall players over in Manhattan. Byrne would also die in office, and just to show you how long the lines of political patronage in NYC government are – Michael Bloomberg is the Mayor who presided over adding the “J.J. Byrne” moniker to the bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We continued eastwards along the Newtown Creek, past the spectacle of the Green Asphalt outfit filling a barge with their product. A single maritime barge carries the equivalent cargo of 38 heavy trucks. The only hope NYC has to survive the next century without filling every single street, all the time, with heavy trucking is maritime in nature. What have we done with our waterfronts, accordingly? Luxury apartment buildings and eradicating ship to shore infrastructure and industrial centers… but, alas… nothing matters and nobody cares.
Green Asphalt, and companies like it, sprung into existence after the 2010 Solid Waste Management Act was rammed into existence by the Bloomberg people. Prior, when a roadway was milled, the asphalt surfacing that was dug up out of the roadbed would be sent to landfills. Green Asphalt receives this material nowadays from the NYC DOT road crews and contractors who maintain our streets. It’s heated up using steam, and a bit of fresh material is introduced into the stuff, which is then sent back out to be reapplied to the roadbed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We floated past the Queens side site of the first large scale petroleum refinery in the United States – the remnants of the 1854 vintage “North American Kerosene Gas Light Company” of Abraham Gesner. Later acquired by Charles Pratt (Standard Oil Company of New York), Mobil Oil would inherit the site and operate an industrial lubricant manufacturing plant here until the second half of the 20th century.
One of the petroleum enforcement actions which ExxonMobil has had to oblige on Newtown Creek started one day in 2011 when I was tagging along on one of Riverkeeper’s patrols of Newtown Creek and when I noticed that oil was migrating out of the bulkheads in this area. That’s the day that the story of the “Blissville Seep” began. The Riverkeeper folks shortly got the “official” ball rolling with the regulatory agency – NYS Department of Environmental Conservation. ExxonMobil admitted a modern day culpability for the deeds of their long ago corporate brethren, and deployed their environmental contractors (under the supervision of NYS DEC) who are busily installing all sorts of equipment in these industrial quarters to handle the situation.
This POV is on the water side of Review Avenue, behind the line of factory and warehouse buildings – and the LIRR tracks – opposite First Calvary Cemetery.
Only oil spill I ever got to help discover, at least. This was also the beginning of my whole “Citizen Waxman” shtick.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When the project to replace the Kosciuszcko Bridge suddenly received an Andy Cuomo sized shoe up its keister, I had already been cataloguing the DUKBO section of Newtown Creek for a few years. Anything collected or written about, in this area, received that particular tag. Just as this project was kicking into gear is when what I was doing on Newtown Creek got noticed by a whole big bunch of people, including The NY Times.
That’s when Citizen Waxman was invited to join the Kosciuszcko Bridge Stakeholders Advisory Committee, and that put me right in the center of the whole rebuilding and replacement project. All of a sudden, I was in the same room as Congressmen and City Council people regularly. That’s also right about when I started working for Atlas Obscura and others, doing Newtown Creek walking and vehicle tours nearly every weekend during the summer months for several years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For one of these tours, my buddy Joey and I transported a bunch of wooden palettes from his job site at a haulage company to a weed choked mud hole along the creek in Maspeth. We laid the palettes down on top of the Poison Ivy and dodged the clouds of flying insects which we’d disturbed. Formerly, you had to just bust your way through thorns and vines to get down to the water. I’ve always been big on safety for people that came on my walks, so Joey and I created a plank road of palettes at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site. Eventually, after talking about its potential endlessly, I managed to “put something on the map.” Today – people actually come here as a destination, and they hang out by the water. Artists, musicians.
To each and every one of my friends, whom I’ve convinced to do utterly illogical and over the top things with me over the years along the creek… thank you. This is why.
The Plank Road has since received historic signage, and Newtown Creek Alliance has undertaken a stewardship program at the place. The ground has received some landscaping as well. It’s a site which will also be preserved through the superfund process, which is another feather I can point to in my cap.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My pal Carter turned the boat into English Kills, which is technically a tributary, but it seems like it’s just the bitter end of Newtown Creek.
This is one of the most environmentally damaged sections of the waterway, as a note. Also – “Kills” is ye olde Dutch for Creek. This spot is about 3 miles back from the East River, and it’s right at the turn out from the main channel. The Grand Street Bridge is nearby, and in accordance with my zone system acronyms – this area is tagged with DUGSBO, or Down Under the Grand Street Bridge Onramp.
More next week, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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.
times amidst
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A long walk continues! From Astoria to LIC’s Blissville, and then looping around and through Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section, on the 23rd of September of 2022. “Every time might be the last time…”
Scuttling along the hoary asphalt, which armors the oil choked loam of this ancient outpost of the decadent Dutch, a humble narrator suddenly realized that both altitude AND declination were warping, as he had blindly wandered onto those entirely euclidian angles which are offered by the New York State Department of Transportation via the bicycle and pedestrian pathway of the Kosciuszcko Bridge which said agency maintains.
Thoroughly modern in both function and design, the Kosciuszcko Bridge(s) nevertheless are visually pleasing to me – a barren creature, broken and bruised, bereft, bankrupt and often beleaguered – your always humble narrator. The Kosciuszcko Bridge carries, in addition to the path one scuttled atop, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and its teeming multitudes of automotive wanderers, high over the iridescent waveforms of an aqueous ribbon of urban neglect which is known, to modernity, as the Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The burning thermonuclear eye of God itself was descending behind New Jersey, just as the monocular of the camera was being moved into position high over the jellies and tepid currents of said waterway. One actuated the shutter button again and again while shuffling along…
It has been years since one has spoken to you, lords and ladies, in this sort of way. Colloquial verbiage and easy conversational voicing has been my intent in recent intervals. Nearing the end of all things, and the shadowy beginnings of a new chapter, one instead feels a deep desire to revisit the past. To plumb the depths.
Always have I been an outsider, attracted to things ancient and unloved.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Who can guess, thereby, all that might be buried down there – beneath the waters buoying that tugboat? What foul truth might lurk, concealed in the black mayonnaise which sits patiently along the bottom of the glacier carved ancestral valley that Newtown Creek floods and calls its bed?
The “bad water place” is what one of the Lenape words for the Newtown Creek is said to translate into English as. That, and those, who are rumored to dwell in the broken stone floor of the nearby Hells Gate section of the East River, might know other words. Perhaps, and perhaps not. I’ve likely said too much.
Let’s change the subject… how about that sports ball team hereabouts? Might this be finally the year of affirmation for our civic and mutual worth, displayed to the globe by champion status in sports ball?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The locale of the forbidden colony of New Arnheim, detested and personally destroyed by the Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant, is not too far away from this spot, just east and towards the Brooklyn side. So too is the forgotten Blissvillian tributary of Wolf Creek, and the overwhelming necropolis called Calvary Cemetery.
The latter hosts its own storm sewer and drainage systems, whose horrifying outflows into the Newtown Creek are not just splendiferous in coffin varnish, adipocere, and formaldehyde. The black mayonnaise underlying the waters here are rich with acrylonitrile concentrations – according to environmental scientists. Toxic, certain groupings of this type of organic chemicals are commonly referred to as “cadaverine” and “putrescine.” This and many other reasons underlie the presence of signage around this waterway adjuring the citizenry against consuming fish or crabs captured from its volume.
This outflow pipe for the cemetery is found directly below the railroad tracks in the photograph above, which are upon the former site of the Penny Bridge crossing demolished in 1939, and a former Long Island Railroad stop also called Penny Bridge which was eliminated by the MTA under mysterious circumstance in 1998. This is the part of Newtown Creek where hauntings of the Blissville Banshee were oft reported.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Horror lurks everywhere along Newtown Creek. Approximately 170,000 vehicle trips cross the Kosciuszcko daily, as reported by Governmental agencies knowledgable about such statistical data. One wonders… statistically speaking, how many times a day does a murderer cross the bridge? Figure there’s two people in every car… how many murderers are there per hundred thousand New Yorkers?
As above, so below?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One found his way back down to the poison ground, alongside First Calvary Cemetery, and its tomb legions, at the outskirts and border of both Blissville and ancient Maspeth, in Queens. The camera’s functional optics were swapped out, and a quick conversion over to the “night kit” was effected. The “daylight” zoom lenses were stored away, and my next steps considered. Into the darkness, yes, but which pathway?
Ahem… truth be told, my feet were hurting at this point so I just called a cab and headed back to HQ in Astoria. I had another busy couple of days coming up, and…
More tomorrow, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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.
watching for
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a brief epiphany of light, the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself became occluded by atmospheric clouds again, but one kept on shooting the scenes observable along the Newtown Creek, from up on the Kosciuszcko Bridge’s pedestrian walkway.
As a tip – it’s critical to not allow any part of your camera, whether it be lens barrel or tripod leg, to touch the fence of the bridge when you thrust the lens through. The fence is always vibrating due to the traffic passing by on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and said vibration will transmit into the camera and ruin your shots. The concrete “ground” you and the tripod are standing on is vibrating too, of course, but less severely than the metal fence is.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking down at Queens side Penny Bridge, that’s Review Avenue running alongside Calvary Cemetery on the right and the mirror like Newtown Creek on the left.
As above, so below, the occultists will tell you.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One lingered on the walkway as the gloom spread and the sky dimmed. The lights came on in Manhattan’s largely empty office buildings.
My beloved Creek…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Before switching the setup back over to “night time” handheld mode, I cracked out one final exposure focused in on the Kinder Morgan oil terminal at Greenpoint’s Apollo Street. It used to be the BP Amoco oil terminal until just a few years ago, and before that it was part of the campus of the Mobil/Standard Oil Company’s refinery operations. That’s where the oil spill in Brooklyn was discovered by a passing Coast Guard helicopter in the 1970’s.
A tank farm like Kinder Morgan’s operation stores and distributes various flavors of refined petroleum product. The oil terminal gets filled up and supplied with product by maritime barges, and emptied by semi tanker trucks which make local deliveries to homes and gas stations. Generally speaking, the tank farms which supply the barges are found along the Kill Van Kull waterway in New Jersey. There’s also pipelines which feed product into the facility.
Regarding handheld vs. tripod mode, it is extremely annoying carrying the camera when it’s attached to the tripod. It takes two hands, and it looks like I’m carrying a rifle.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve noticed this door before, of course, which sits about thirty to forty feet over the roadway of the BQE. It’s seemingly inaccessible.
I’d like to start a rumor that this is the door to a vault where Andrew Cuomo kept his secret archives.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Behind Cuomo’ s Red Door… that sounds good, huh? Shelly Silver’s sins, Heastie’s haughty pictures, Gianaris’ goof balls… they’re all filed away up there behind the scarlet steel should Cuomo ever find a way to manifest himself again in the flesh. Word has it he’s currently a bodiless consciousness which poltergeists Tish James’ offices.
Who can guess, all there is, that might be hidden behind Cuomo’s Scarlet Steel door, high over the malefic waters of the Newtown Creek?
“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.
seemed older
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
May 4th, in addition to being “Star Wars Day,” offered me one of those 50/50 chances – atmosphere wise – that there would be an interesting sunset. After dealing with my annoying daily round, I packed up my gear and lazily used a cab to carry me over to the entrance of the Kosciuszcko Bridge’s pedestrian ramp in Blissville.
Ok, it really wasn’t that lazy, I just didn’t want to lose an hour of good light scuttling through boring residential neighborhoods, and was desirous of preserving my energy for the shooting and walking home part of the exercise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was humid and misty, with a tepid breeze. As I’ve mentioned in the past, high clouds and mist usually make for interesting sunsets.
One scuttled up the ramp, which took me high up onto the Kosciuszcko Bridge’s crossing of Newtown Creek between Brooklyn and Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m trying to soak in all of this splendor while I still can, before I move out of NYC at the end of the year. You really do not get to see sights like this anywhere else.
Thank god.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A solid deck of clouds had risen out of New Jersey just as I reached the spot I’d decided to shoot from. Regardless, I was committed to the labor and set up the camera for “landscape” modality.
I got busy, a clickin and a whirring.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A sudden break in the cloud cover appeared, and a series of adjustments to composition and camera settings was thereby triggered.
Nimble, quick, ready to jump a candlestick – that’s me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Bam! All of a sudden, NYC was painted in apocalyptic hue. This is the sort of thing which I left Our Lady of the Pentacle at home all by herself for to get out and capture.
More tomorrow – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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 