Posts Tagged ‘Long Island City’
plague borne
That’s twice, in as many months now, that I have become infected.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator often likes to opine that due to constant proximity to the Newtown Creek, and the immune system’s response to the many bacterial and viral pathogens encountered, that he seldom gets sick. The statement continues that “when I do come down with something, it’s a whopper.”
So much so, that as I was writing this post, I accidentally hit “publish” before it was done, but that’s the sort of week I’ve had so far. One has been in “high suffer” with some sort of viral infection – not necessarily the flu – but something “flu like” which has interrupted both sleep and regular feeding schedules. For a couple of days there, not more than forty five minutes of sleep at a time occurred, which was punctuated by what I describe as cough syrup hallucinations.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When sleep has occurred, it has been beneath multiple blankets, which have been found to be saturated with perspiration upon awakening. That’s how the shots of laundromats figure into today’s post, if you were wondering. Curiousity wasn’t conquered by this viral onslaught by the way.
According to the NY Times, ca. 1901, the term “blanket” is actually a brand name dating back to 1339 which has become ubiquitous. Thomas Blanket manufactured a revolutionary textile product in England’s Bristol back then, which gathered admiration and protection from the crown.
Back to my personal misery – this virus is “going around” and quite a few people I know have contracted it prior to my own infection. Chills and sweats, a violent cough, and general ennui typify the experience. I’ve actually been lucky inasmuch as I’ve been hosting a later stage version of it than what others have experienced.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For one such as myself, the worst part of the experience was missing out on the three or four days of spring like warmth and that night of heavy fog which one had been planning on exploiting fully for photographic pursuits.
All I want to do is play in traffic, after all.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
all opposition
When you’re in a dark place, that’s what you should embrace.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent opportunity resulted in one needing to head over to Greenpoint for a reading by my friend Geoff Cobb from his new book about the Havemeyers of North Brooklyn – “The Rise and Fall of the Sugar King.” Owing to all of my recent sloth, when tying up all the layers of clothing to my sclerotic body, discovery of an uncomfortable level of tightness in the waistband of my pants acted as a chide and it was decided to walk rather than catch the train to Greenpoint from Astoria.
My path would take me past to that particular spot where Jackson Avenue transmogrifies into Northen Blvd. That’s one block north east of the historic pathway of the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, which still flows below the street in masonry sewerage tunnels, and as we all know – running water acts as a barrier for vampires. That’s whey we don’t have any Nosferatu in Astoria (we are fairly lousy with a specie of hirsute Greek goblin called the Kalikantzaros around these parts, as well as the Strigoi of the South Slavs, but that’s another story). I only know one vampire in Astoria, and his name is Matty.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above is the actual corner that Dutch Kills once ran to, and as late as the American Civil War, the United States Coast Guard listed this area as being navigable. From this spot on, my eyes kept darting up into the rafters of the elevated subway tracks overhead, scanning the ebon clad steel for morbid habitations.
Legend has it that a few of these Vampires attempted to form a hip hop group back in the 90’s. “NWV” was thought to be highly derivative, however, and few people bought their debut singles “Straight outta Queens Plaza” or “Look in mah eyes.” Members of the trio are reported to be part of the nightly assaults on the fortress like NY Blood Center on Vernon Avenue in LIC. In general, the population of the vampires are said to be fairly representative of the surrounding human population, with a recent influx of Asian and Latino members, but there are a few ancients amongst them who can only speak in an archaic form of the Dutch Language. The demographics are cloudy.
Thing is, once you’re a Vampire, that’s all that you are evermore.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Losing sight of the worth inherent, or causally dismissing, the stories of addicts, inebriates, or madmen is a bad habit of our modern times. Several members of the aforementioned classes have reported to me that the vampires hidden in the steel above wrap ropes around their waists, securing one end of the line high above. They spiral down from perches above on the ad hoc cables, snatching at the unwary on the sidewalks below, and then both vampire and victim are quickly pulled up by an undead cohort of fellow sanguinarians still in the rafters. One junkie told it me it looked to him like a yo yo made out of people.
I’m not kidding, lords and ladies, stay alert along the stretch of Jackson Avenue between Queens Plaza and 31st street.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This fellow pictured above, innocently waiting for the arrival of a bus which will never arrive, something those of us who live in Queens inherently know. He’s fresh meat to those who dwell above, he’s an easy meal, a free dinner. One has always wondered about the complicity of municipal officialdom in the presence of these cullers of the human herd in this area.
Every wonder why there aren’t any street lights focused on the pedestrian lane hereabouts? Take out your rectangular glass computational device in this spot, and see if its GPS can accurately define your position. Where did all the street signs go?
Who can guess, all there is, that might be hidden up there?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Heading west/south west along Jackson Avenue, and into a dystopian vision of the Real Estate Industrial Complex’s that men once called Queens Plaza, one wonders how the new population of tower dwellers will fare against the undead. When the Vampires begin to climb and skitter along the mirror glass of the new towers like bloated ticks, seeking the finely curated blood of the affluent, will acknowledgment of the presence of these ancestral monsters finally be acknowledged?
As a side note, is it racially prejudicial to hate and loathe Vampires? Are they part of the whole “diversity thing”?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Luckily, once you pass through the crucible of Queens Plaza – having survived the predatory legion above and the vehicular traffic below – you’re pretty much ok. It’s about as safe in LIC as most places in NYC, y’know… except for the endemic environmental pollution, noise, heavy traffic, and roving bands of teenagers.
One scuttled off to Greenpoint, to the reading of Geoff Cobb’s new Sugar King book.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
byzantine mechanisms
Can I ask everyone to stand still and just look right at the camera, please?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The little snatches of reality which I like to capture with the camera are often occluded by the omnipresent presence of the humans who infest New York City. A particular annoyance often encountered is when I’m about to click the shutter for a shot such as the one above when some bipedal creature staring into his or her glowing rectangle of glass steps directly in front of me. Often I think that they’re doing it on purpose, but that would indicate the presence of both thought and intent in a probably bestial and non self aware thing. Also, pull up your pants, you look ridiculous. Gahhh… how I hate all of you.
The problem with humanity is all the people.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You remember that Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith, the one where there’s a nuclear war and he’s the only survivor who now has all the time in the world to read but then he breaks his glasses? Up until the glasses bit, the whole solitude on a shattered earth thing doesn’t sound too bad. I certainly wouldn’t need to worry about updating the blog, and my biggest problems would simply revolve around food and water. It would suck not having anybody to complain to – my parents and family used to refer to me as the “complaint department” when I was a young but already humble narrator.
In a thousand years, future archeologists would find a skeletal mass in a filthy black raincoat holding a camera memory card amongst the ruins of NYC, and they’d have some concretized idea what the first months after the apocalypse looked like. Even in the end of the world, you need to stay useful, I believe.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I really need to take a vacation. Somewhere isolated and unpopulated where I can do long exposures of an empty horizon.
More and more, I think about that old Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft movie “the prisoner of second avenue.”
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
cannot give
Another set of shots from the Newtown Creek frozone.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week I showed you what it looks like when Brooklyn’s English Kills freezes over, today it’s the polar paradise which Dutch Kills in LIC became after that recent spell of super cold weather that’s in focus. Both waterways are tributaries of the fabulous Newtown Creek, and the “kills” bit is Old Dutch for “creek.” The English and Dutch parts of the names are meant to indicate where the various ethnicities of European settlers sited themselves.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dutch Kills, as we know it today, is a canalized post industrial waterway surrounded by stout factory and warehouse structures and crossed by multiple bridges, with the current shape of things dating back to the creation of the surrounding Degnon Terminal in the late nineteen-teens. It attained its modern characteristics by 1921, and the last big addition to Dutch Kills was the installation of the Midtown Tunnel and Long Island Expressway way back in 1940.
That’s the LIE, or at least the Queens Midtown Expressway section of the it, pictured above. Close to 90,000 vehicle trips a day pass over the water here, yet most people you meet say they have never heard of the Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Like English Kills in Bushwick, Dutch Kills here in LIC was contained nearly completely by a layer of plate ice when I visited it last Wednesday. The ice was already “rotting” as the air temperatures returned to seasonal norms, and the weak tidal action witnessed in Dutch Kills was breaking it into distinct floes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just like English Kills, certain areas which have been observed as being highly biologically active due to the presence of sewage sediment mounds during warmer climes were fully melted and flowing. The status of those unknown things which slither and slide and slop about in the bottom sediments during these unfrozen times remains a mystery.
There are some things you really do not want to know, after all.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over on the Borden Avenue Bridge, just to the south of the vantage point in the previous shots – which is offered by the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge – the rot of the ice was a bit more pronounced. An analogous appearance vaguely reminiscent of an otherwise wholesome slice of Swiss Cheese came to mind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The structure pictured in the first shot of today’s post, as well as in the last one presented above, is called a “dolphin.” It’s rooted deeply in the substrata of Dutch Kills and constructed of creosoted lumber piles. The purpose of these things is to protect the movable bridges they adjoin from an allision, accidental contact with passing maritime traffic. If both the boat and bridge were moving it be a collision, allision is if a moving object strikes a stationary one.
For me, they provide essential design elements and focal points for the framing of photos at a frozen superfund site, hidden at the very center of New York City.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
almost snatched
Project Queens is a work in progress, and always has been.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It often seems as if everyplace I find my heels clicking upon the sidewalks of Western Queens is a construction zone. This one got my attention the other day when I noticed a shaft of sunlight while riding a train, somewhere between the 46th Street and Steinway Street stops on the venerable R line tracks. After returning to the ancient village from points west and south, a brief investigatory wander revealed it to be a crew from the MTA construction division hard at work on Astoria’s Broadway. I walked up on the end of this process, but it seemed that they had cut a hole in the street in order to deliver bundles of lumber and other heavy materials to the sweating concrete bunkers below the street.
I know, that sounds ridiculous, cutting a hole in the street. Why go to such lengths and expense, inconveniencing an entire neighborhood, when you could just use a work train to transport materials to the job site… but… I did say “MTA” didn’t I?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Can you imagine the sort of existential horror that would ensue if the current Mayor of NYC’s mad plan to deck over the Sunnyside Yards happened? Often have I contemplated the nightmare scenario of materials laden heavy trucks criss crossing through Woodside, Astoria, Dutch Kills, Hunters Point, and Sunnyside while carrying tonnages of construction equipment and materials. The noise alone…
It would be less instructive, IMHO, if they were to just extend the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek a couple of blocks to the north and bring it all in via a maritime shipping channel. That is, in a scenario in which this Queens killing abomination actually happens, of course.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whilst marching about on Skillman Avenue nearby Queens Plaza, a work train crew was spotted on the overhead tracks. Presumptively, these folks were working on the long overdue CBTC signals project on the 7 line. This project, which seems like its been going on for decades (it has been) and must be millions over budget (it is) will allow the estimable scions of the MTA the opportunity to run one extra train per hour on the 7 line. Will the perfidy displayed by Jay Street ever end?
One of the military industrial complex concepts, which I wish the MTA would adopt in planning and spending, is the “resource to kill ratio.” In layman’s terms, that call that “bang for the buck.” You don’t use a million dollar missile to kill a guy on a camel, essentially. You use a sniper instead.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 