Posts Tagged ‘Long Island City’
slipping and stumbling
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The letter arrived just the other day, a demand from certain agencies of the government, demanding a tithe be paid to them. The billing they submitted was accurate and fair, as the error in calculation and omission of a particular document to the bureaucratic process was the fault of my own sloth and sloppy record keeping, and perhaps treasonous given the foreign wars being fought by our nation.
This debt and obligation was not what unbalanced my thoughts, as “into each life a little rain must fall” and your humble narrator is no stranger to poverty and privation. No, it was the hand written note that was attached to the official missive that set my mind ablaze, and torments me when I think about it.
I found myself wandering about the Newtown Pentacle, and was soon in a place of titan architecture defined by those sky flung monuments and cyclopean aspirations called Tower Town.
from wikipedia
Humans attempt to consciously conceal aspects of themselves from others due to shame, or from fear of violence, rejection, harrassment, loss of acceptance, or loss of employment. On a deeper level, humans attempt to conceal aspects of their own self which they are not capable of incorporating psychologically into their conscious being. Families sometimes maintain “family secrets”, obliging family members never discuss disagreeable issues concerning the family, either with those outside the family and sometimes even within the family. Many “family secrets” are maintained by using a mutually agreed-upon construct (an official family story) when speaking with outside members. Agreement to maintain the secret is often coerced through “shaming” and reference to family honor. The information may even be something as trivial as a recipe.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Vast and sterile, Tower Town is erected along the so called Center Blvd. in Long Island City, and houses thousands of nervous but otherwise wholesome citizens. Their community treasure is the great littoral parkland that surround their homes, a former industrialized rail terminal on the East River called Gantry Plaza State Park.
A tenuous sense of change and dangerous possibility hangs about, but this clear eyed population of homesteaders remain steadfast in their commitment to this place, and desire a flowering of urban community to arrive. For many years, this has been described as the “next big thing” by Real Estate interests, a sound investment and ground floor investment in New York’s newest residential neighborhood. With the arrival of the second phase of Tower Town and its attendant industry of noisome construction, a disquieting ripple of apprehension affects the lucky few whose economic might has enabled the first wave.
“LeCorbusier’s United Nations building now faces out on the grandest realization of his vision” was what I was thinking when I heard that horrible croaking voice again, the hallucination that something was calling my name… Addled by my paranoid fantasies about the enigmatic notation on that official post I received and the imaginings they had spawned, I became light headed, and found myself staggering away from their facade.
from wikipedia
Once the psychopath has identified a victim, the manipulation phase begins. During the manipulation phase, a psychopath may create a persona or mask, specifically designed to ‘work’ for his or her target. A psychopath will lie to gain the trust of their victim. Psychopaths’ lack of empathy and guilt allows them to lie with impunity; they don’t see the value of telling the truth unless it will help get them what they want.
As interaction with the victim proceeds, the psychopath carefully assesses the victim’s persona. The victim’s persona gives the psychopath a picture of the traits and characteristics valued in the victim. The victim’s persona may also reveal, to an astute observer, insecurities or weaknesses the victim wishes to minimize or hide from view. As an ardent student of human behavior, the psychopath will then gently test the inner strengths and needs that are part of the victim’s private self and eventually build a personal relationship with the victim.
The persona of the psychopath – the “personality” the victim is bonding with – does not really exist. It is built on lies, carefully woven together to entrap the victim. It is a mask, one of many, custom-made by the psychopath to fit the victim’s particular psychological needs and expectations. The victimization is predatory in nature; it often leads to severe financial, physical or emotional harm for the individual. Healthy, real relationships are built on mutual respect and trust; they are based on sharing honest thoughts and feelings. The victim’s mistaken belief that the psychopathic bond has any of these characteristics is the reason it is so successful.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dragging my feet, I adjusted the iPhone playlist that I was listening to at the beginning of this shambling pedestrian journey, and chose a more upbeat soundtrack. Triggering a live recording of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane from Carnegie Hall, but it just made me slip further away. Instead, the option for a playlist heavy on metal was called on. In that withered bladder which beats within my chest, something akin to a fluttering spark was felt, an unfamiliar emotional thing called a feeling.
Often, the music of one’s youth fills the mind of old men with memories. In my case, I was always a miserable cur and socially backward miscreant, a sweat slicked and corpulent pariah convinced that the world had given him a raw deal. From an adult perspective and what I now know of the world, that child should have dropped to the ground and thanked heaven that he was born an American in the 20th century. Nevertheless, the powerful narrative of the songs in this playlist awaken a part of your humble narrator that is not lukewarm and which has been long thought dead.
Violent fantasies and elaborate lists of prior enemies began to manifest, and I day dreamed the destruction of my pursuers as I lead a Napoleonic army of American Peasantry toward capturing some modern bastille, ignoring the fact that sometimes I can’t even convince my dog to follow me.
from wikipedia
Grandiose delusions or delusions of grandeur are principally a subtype of delusional disorder but could possibly feature as a symptom of schizophrenia and manic episodes of bipolar disorder. Grandiose delusions are characterized by fantastical beliefs that one is famous, omnipotent, or otherwise very powerful. The delusions are generally fantastic, often with a supernatural, science-fictional, or religious bent (for example, belief that one is an incarnation of Jesus Christ).
Grandiose delusions are distinct from grandiosity, in that the sufferer does not have insight into his loss of touch with reality.
In colloquial usage, one who is said to have ‘delusions of grandeur’ is considered to be one who overestimates one’s own abilities, talents or situation. This is generally due to excessive pride, rather than any actual delusions.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Along Borden Avenue, I retreated from the Newtown Creek and Tower town, back past the Pulaski Bridge and LIRR tracks, stumbling a few times on the shattered cement of these industrial streets. Unfamiliar sensations were brought forward by the litany of defiance and anger I was utilizing to deafen myself to that insistent gurgling voice which always sounded as if it was just over my shoulder. No matter how loud I set the volume, however, I still perceived its presence.
from wikipedia
Anger is an emotion. The physical effects of anger include increased heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline.[1] Some view anger as part of the fight or flight brain response to the perceived threat of harm. Anger becomes the predominant feeling behaviorally, cognitively, and physiologically when a person makes the conscious choice to take action to immediately stop the threatening behavior of another outside force. The English term originally comes from the term anger of Old Norse language. Anger can have many physical and mental consequences.
The external expression of anger can be found in facial expressions, body language, physiological responses, and at times in public acts of aggression. Humans and non-human animals for example make loud sounds, attempt to look physically larger, bare their teeth, and stare. Anger is a behavioral pattern designed to warn aggressors to stop their threatening behavior. Rarely does a physical altercation occur without the prior expression of anger by at least one of the participants. While most of those who experience anger explain its arousal as a result of “what has happened to them,” psychologists point out that an angry person can be very well mistaken because anger causes a loss in self-monitoring capacity and objective observability.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The note on the letter, you see, warned me about particular investigations in the neighborhoods surrounding the Newtown Creek, and that I not delve too deeply into certain things, lest I attract more unwanted attention upon myself and draw the ire of that which might exist down here.
It’s receipt made me first believe it to be a prank or mistake, but investigation revealed it to be legitimate. In typical fashion, I retreated into denial and isolation- as detailed here, and here. Several hours on, all I knew was rage and a helpless resignation was setting in, and I would need to strike a bargain with it if ever solace would find a home in my thoughts again.
Perhaps there was something I could have done to avert this, been more careful, or just never noticed the thrice damned Newtown Creek.
from grief.com
Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this?
guilty agony
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Reeling from the implications of those utterances which- I must have imagined- were experienced in DUPBO, I scuttled fiercely away, hoping to reorient myself toward pursuits and thought patterns more comfortable, wholesome, and safe…
I headed for the long corridor that will connect to the Hunters Point South development, along that industrial roadway which begins at the old Vernon Avenue Bridge and which is defined by those ancient rail yards of the LIRR which lie just beyond the fences.
Along the way, Al Smith’s monument served as a polestar of navigation and material consistency throughout the swirling of my thoughts, as I drifted along numbly imagining that my name was being called from the direction of the Newtown Creek.
from wikipedia
The Cotard delusion or Cotard’s syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold a delusional belief that they are dead (either figuratively or literally), do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Visible from storied Greenpoint, a group of small boats illegally utilize the former bridge landing as an ad hoc marina, and there was a group of men climbing over the crumbling cement to access one of them. Their presence disturbed me, and I wondered if their party’s appearance was not accidental, but rather something covert.
Oh, why did I open that letter, the one whose dire message will forever rob me of peaceful sleep and whose implications have penetrated even into my dreams?
Seldom does good news arrive by postal missive, in my experience.
Deciding that these otherwise innocent characters might be a threat to me due to my gentle habits and extraordinary physical cowardice, I scuttled on.
from wikipedia
Cowardice, in general terms, is the perceived failure to demonstrate sufficient robustness in the face of a challenging situation. The term describes a personality trait which is viewed as a negative characteristic and has been frowned upon (see norms) within most, if not all global cultures, while courage, typically viewed as its direct opposite, is generally rewarded and encouraged.
Cowards are usually seen to have avoided or refused to engage in a confrontation or struggle which has been deemed good or righteous by the wider culture in which they live. On a more mundane level, the label may be applied to those who are regarded as too frightened or overwhelmed to defend their rights or those of others from aggressors in their lives.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As one moves from 54th avenue to 53rd, a pleasant enough scene awaits one observant to the ecstasies of old Long Island City’s low declination and squamously set building stock. Enormous in footprint, but small in height, the vast oceanic skies of the metropolitan archipelago peel open in the manner of some vast scroll framed by brick and fence.
The horizon becomes a three point perspective lesson, with a Shining City rising and occludes the horizon, over a River of Sound.
from wikipedia
In psychology, confabulation is the spontaneous narrative report of events that never happened. It consists of the creation of false memories, perceptions, or beliefs about the self or the environment usually as a result of neurological or psychological dysfunction. When it is a matter of memory, confabulation is the confusion of imagination with memory, or the confused application of true memories. Confabulations are difficult to differentiate from delusions and from lying. With respect to memory, wild confabulations about one’s past are rare in the absence of organic causes (e.g., brain damage), and the term “confabulation” is often restricted to these types of distortions. In contrast, even neurologically intact people are susceptible to memory errors or confusions due to psychological causes (see false memory).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Vast agglutiations of warehouse, distribution point, and industry can be observed here- best on a weekend as the place is quite busy and well populated during the week.
On weekend mornings, the curious indications of habitation by wandering mendicants are observed- bits of food, a worn shoe, or a soggy collection of windblown rags bearing an impression that suggests the shape of something very like a man. During winter months, the unremarked but obvious effects of camp fire upon ice is seen around discarded oil drums and other cast off containers.
from wikipedia
The core symptom of depersonalization disorder is the subjective experience of unreality, and as such there are no clinical signs. Common descriptions are: watching oneself from a distance; out-of-body experiences; a sense of just going through the motions; feeling as though one is in a dream or movie; not feeling in control of one’s speech or physical movements; and feeling detached from one’s own thoughts or emotions. Individuals with the disorder commonly describe a feeling as though time is ‘passing’ them by and they are not in the notion of the present. These experiences may cause a person to feel uneasy or anxious since they strike at the core of a person’s identity and consciousness.
Some of the more common factors that exacerbate dissociative symptoms are negative effects, stress, subjective threatening social interaction, and unfamiliar environments. Factors that tend to diminish symptoms are comforting interpersonal interactions, intense physical or emotional stimulation, and relaxation. Factors identified as relieving symptom severity such as diet, exercise, alcohol and fatigue, are listed by others as worsening symptoms.
Fears of going crazy, brain damage, and losing control are common complaints. Individuals report occupational impairments as they feel they are working below their ability, and interpersonal troubles since they have an emotional disconnection from those they care about. Neuropsychological testing has shown deficits in attention, short-term memory and spatial-temporal reasoning. Depersonalization disorder is associated with cognitive disruptions in early perceptual and attentional processes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Curious, the idiom of the place is purely functional, with vast sheets of cement and steel rebar flung about. Everywhere, slanted planes designed to accommodate trucking descend from the sidewalk into scummy puddles which collect at the bottom of the ramps. Fantastic machines which serve the cinema and television industries show just part of their arcane mechanisms over those great gates which occlude them.
from wikipedia
Akathisia may range in intensity from a mild sense of disquiet or anxiety, to a total inability to sit still, accompanied by overwhelming anxiety, malaise, and severe dysphoria (manifesting as an almost indescribable sense of terror and doom). The condition is difficult for the patient to describe and is often misdiagnosed. When misdiagnosis occurs in antipsychotic neuroleptic-induced akathisia, more antipsychotic neuroleptics may be prescribed, potentially worsening the symptoms. High-functioning patients have described the feeling as a sense of inner tension and torment or chemical torture.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking south down second street, toward the mouth of the Newtown Creek where it congeals and mixes with the East River, and where the Hunters Point South project is in its earliest stages.
To the right is Water Taxi Beach’s new home, and the left looks nearly all the way back to the intersection of 54th and 53rd avenues. Behind me lies the beginnings of Tower Town, and the vast new constructions just beginning at 51st avenue.
This point, far from the Newtown Creek, is where I stopped imagining that gurgling auditory murmur that seemed to be repeating my name over and over.
from wikipedia
Emotional detachment in the first sense above often arises from psychological trauma and is a component in many anxiety and stress disorders. The person, while physically present, moves elsewhere in the mind, and in a sense is “not entirely present”, making them sometimes be seen as preoccupied or distracted. In other cases, the person may seem fully present but operate merely intellectually when emotional connection would be appropriate. This may present an extreme difficulty in giving or receiving empathy and can be related to the spectrum of narcissistic personality disorder.
Thus, such detachment is often not as outwardly obvious as other psychiatric symptoms; people with this problem often have emotional systems that are in overdrive. They have a hard time being a loving family member. They avoid activities, places, and people associated with any traumatic events they have experienced. The dissociation can also lead to lack of attention and, hence, to memory problems and in extreme cases, amnesia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Crossing 2nd street, I began to feel safer, and convinced myself that the vocalizations were mere hallucination. Often it is easier to consider oneself mad, than to confront the existential realities of the Newtown Pentacle head on. Sometimes it is better to just believe that you’re just crazy… that is what I was thinking as I headed for Tower Town, but I’m all ‘effed up.
Would that I had never opened that letter… nay… that it was ever delivered…
from Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human at wikisource
ART DANGEROUS TO THE ARTIST.— When art seizes violently on an individual it draws him back to the conceptions of those ages in which art flourished most mightily, and then it effects a retrogression in him. The artist acquires increasing reverence for sudden excitations, believes in gods and demons, instills a soul into nature, hates the sciences, becomes changeable of mood as were the men of antiquity and longs for an overthrowing of everything unfavorable to art, and he does this with all the vehemence and unreasonableness of a child. The artist is in himself already a retarded being, inasmuch as he has halted at games that pertain to youth and childhood: to this there is now added his gradual retrogression to earlier times. Thus there at last arises a violent antagonism between him and the men of his period, of his own age, and his end is gloomy; just as, according to the tales told in antiquity, Homer and Aeschylus at last lived and died in melancholia.
isolated phenomena
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Would that I never opened that hated letter. Oh, unhappy act.
A cloak of comfortable ignorance would still drape your humble narrator, and this existential terror would not subsume every moment of my days. In no uncertain terms, a large and shadowy cabal has taken notice of this- your Newtown Pentacle- and focused their attentions upon me. Vast machinations, whose byzantine splendor indicates a guiding master hand, closes about my throat. Proof of it arrived just the other day…
I’m all ‘effed up.
from wikipedia
Schizophrenia is often described in terms of positive and negative (or deficit) symptoms. The term positive symptoms refers to symptoms that most individuals do not normally experience but are present in schizophrenia. They include delusions, auditory hallucinations, and thought disorder, and are typically regarded as manifestations of psychosis. Negative symptoms are things that are not present in schizophrenic persons but are normally found in healthy persons, that is, symptoms that reflect the loss or absence of normal traits or abilities. Common negative symptoms include flat or blunted affect and emotion, poverty of speech (alogia), inability to experience pleasure (anhedonia), lack of desire to form relationships (asociality), and lack of motivation (avolition). Research suggests that negative symptoms contribute more to poor quality of life, functional disability, and the burden on others than do positive symptoms.
A third symptom grouping, the disorganization syndrome, is sometimes described, and includes chaotic speech, thought, and behavior. There is evidence for a number of other symptom classifications.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Upon receipt of that malign missive, delivered by a sturdy Postal Employee who claims his name is “Mr. Lee”, a fugue state came over me and solace was sought in sanguine familiarity.
Often, when subsumed by malignity in my thought process, your humble narrator seeks out the familiar- something quantifiable, knowable, and grand. Strapping on my camera, and setting my iPhone to a playlist heavy on early Patti Smith, I descended from the densely populated hills of Astoria and set off for the Newtown Creek.
By the time that my playlist had cycled through the first 20 songs, and hit the Mountain Goats song “Lovecraft in Brooklyn“, I was in DUPBO (Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp).
from wikipedia
Persecutory delusions, also known as querulant delusions, are the most common type of delusions.
The affected person believes they are being persecuted. Specifically, they have been defined as containing two central elements:
– The individual thinks that harm is occurring, or is going to occur,
– The individual thinks that the persecutor has the intention to cause harm.
– The perceived persecution may involve the theme of being followed, harassed, cheated, poisoned or drugged, conspired against, spied on, attacked, or obstructed in the pursuit of goals.
Sometimes the delusion is isolated and fragmented, but sometimes are well-organized belief systems involving a complex set of delusions (“systematized delusions”). People with a set of persecutory delusions may believe, for example, they are being followed by government organizations because the “persecuted” person has been falsely identified as a spy. These systems of beliefs can be so broad and complex that they can explain everything that happens to the person.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The roaring silence of the place, which normally enhances the wonders observed in this forgotten and lonely angle between Long Island City and Greenpoint, did not comfort me. Suddenly, I was pulling the ear buds from my sense organs, as I perceived an antiphonal muttering that sounded like the hebraic ritual name assigned to me by prelates at the coming of age ceremonies well known to even Gentile readers.
Of course, it was just the coincidence of aural background sounds, the vast traffic flow and heavy infrastructure all around DUPBO causes everything around to vibrate slightly creating a sustained field of infrasound that is just beyond the limits of human auditory capabilities. I’m sure an Elephant or Cetacean could tell us what it sounds like, if only we could understand their languages.
from wikipedia
The ancient world viewed hallucinations as it did most of the natural world, with awe and superstition. As such, it was viewed as either a gift or curse by God, or the gods (depending on the specific culture). The oracles of ancient Greece were known to experience auditory hallucinations while breathing in certain neurologically active vapors, while the more pervasive delusions and symptomology were often viewed as possession by demonic forces as punishment for misdeeds.
Treatments
Treatment in the ancient world is ill documented, but there are some cases of therapeutics being used to attempt treatment, while the common treatment was sacrifice and prayer in an attempt to placate the gods. The Dark Ages saw the most horrific accounts where the suffered of auditory hallucinations were subjected to trepanning or trial as a witch. In other cases of extreme symptomology individuals were seen as being reduced to animals by a curse, these individuals were either left on the streets or imprisoned in insane asylums. It was the latter response that eventually led to modern psychiatric hospitals.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking around me, only the poetry of the street stood, and I experienced goose bumps despite the sultry climes suffered by all New Yorkers that day. I imagined that… it must have been an imagining… a mind fever brought on by dehydration or thermal exhaustion… I imagined, damn it- imagined- that I heard a heavy splash in the waters of Newtown Creek, just over the wall separating DUPBO from its waterline…
I will not admit to it, running, except to say that I scuttled away… quickly, and set my iPhone to periodically email my location to Our Lady of the Pentacle should the need arise for her to attempt to find my remains.
from wikipedia
Hypervigilance is an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hypervigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion. Other symptoms include: abnormally increased arousal, a high responsiveness to stimuli and a constant scanning of the environment for threats. Hypervigilance can be a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder and various types of anxiety disorder. It is distinguished from paranoia. Paranoid states, such as those in schizophrenia can seem superficially similar, but are in fact characteristically different.
Hypervigilance is differentiated from dysphoric hyperarousal in that the person remains cogent and aware of his surroundings. In dysphoric hyperarousal the PTSD victim may lose contact with reality and re-experience the traumatic event verbatim. Where there have been multiple traumas, a person may become hypervigilant and suffer severe anxiety attacks intense enough to induce a delusional state where the effect of the traumas overlap: e.g. one remembered firefight may seem too much like another for the person to maintain calm. This can result in the thousand yard stare.
Project Firebox 6
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The monstrous pride of this hold out from an earlier day serves sentinel duty on Vernon Blvd., near that point where the ancient path intersects with 44th avenue and curves south. A seller of ornate garden stones and ceramic artifices sits securely behind its steely gaze, and it was undoubtedly the good natured industry of that facility’s owners that created the decorative sidewalk which lends this Firebox its panache. Surely, it cannot just be the backdrop of the Shining City beyond?
a sea of roots
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Obliviated by exposure to the volatile climate of New York City, this cruciform statue adorns the small chapel found nearby the Johnston Mausoleum in First Calvary Cemetery. Depicting the latin, or suffering Christ, the affectation of its artificer in the choice of wood for its construction is both noted and appreciated. Raised in the Hebrew faith, your humble narrator abstains from ritual and dogma as an adult, and instead prefers to believe that every thing is true if one believes in it hard enough. Thor, Buddha, the Orishas, all true.
Atheism is a religion as well- a cohesive and dogmatic system of belief with absolute truths and undeniable heresies. It’s all magick, this jumping about and chest beating we call religion.
My personal world view and moral compass, of course, is built around the simple question “what would Superman do? or WWSD?” Measuring against this rubric, I must always come up short. Superman would have found Gilman by now, but he has x-ray eyes after all. I’m all ‘effed up.
Note: an interesting counterpoint to the suffering of the Latin Christ is the Hellenic “Christ as Athlete” tradition. This photo is from a Cretan church I visited a while back, it’s in a former fishing village called Kalives- notice the physicality and robust physique of the Eastern Christ in comparison to the mendicant like interpretations of the West. The Byzantine tradition focuses a great deal more on the power of the redeemed and revealed godhead, rather than dwelling on its journey “through the meat” that ends on Golgotha.
from wikipedia
Western crucifixes may show Christ dead or alive, the presence of the spear wound in his ribs traditionally indicating that he is dead. In either case his face very often shows his suffering. In Orthodoxy he has normally been shown as dead since around the end of the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm. Eastern crucifixes have Jesus’ two feet nailed side by side, rather than crossed one above the other, as Western crucifixes have showed them for many centuries. The crown of thorns is also generally absent in Eastern crucifixes, since the emphasis is not on Christ’s suffering, but on his triumph over sin and death. The “S”-shaped position of Jesus’ body on the cross is a Byzantine innovation of the late 10th century, though also found in the German Gero Cross of the same date. Probably more from Byzantine influence, it spread elsewhere in the West, especially to Italy, by the Romanesque period, though it was more usual in painting than sculpted corpuses. Since the Renaissance the “S”-shape is generally much less pronounced. Eastern Christian blessing crosses will often have the Crucifixion depicted on one side, and the Resurrection on the other, illustrating the understanding of Orthodox theology that the Crucifixion and Resurrection are two intimately related aspects of the same act of salvation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whether decided by landscape design or geology, there are a series of steep hills at Calvary. Early maps and 19th century illustrations detail this land as quite hilly even before 1848, when the Rt. Rev. Bishop Hughes solemnly blessed and consecrated this place- formerly part of the Alsop plantation- as Calvary Cemetery on the 27th of July. The Alsops are still here, resting in a narrow plot of Protestant loam fenced off from the rest of the place. The deal that the Catholic Church struck with the family for the land stipulated that the protestant Alsop section must be maintained in perpetuity, and its organs have maintained the ancient agreement- rumor states that this is the only Protestant section to be found in a Catholic cemetery upon the Earth.
from junipercivic.com
The male children of the first Richard Alsop, Thomas, Richard and John, became prominent in the legal profession and mercantile life. The children of the second Richard adhered to the ancestral seat in Newtown and married into the Sacketts, the Brinckerhoffs the Whiteheads, the Fisks, the Woodwards and the Hazzards – names now extinct save as they appear on the tombstones, many of which are sadly neglected. The Alsop Cemetery is within Calvary Cemetery, which absorbed all of the property, and is thus certain of receiving proper care. The owner in trust of the reservation is William Alsop, the only living lineal descendant, who resides in New York at present, but for a great many years had his abode in Florida. The family relics have disappeared almost entirely. The only thing that remains to be cherished is an old clock, which is in the remaining descendant’s possession. The house itself, two centuries and a quarter old, has now disappeared forever.
The yellow fever epidemic of 1798 made havoc in the Alsop household, and two tombstones mark the graves of the victims, one of whom was Elizabeth Fish, the widow of Jonathan Fish. She was the widow of the grandfather of President Grant’s Secretary of State. Several slaves died of the contagion, and one at least called Venus, on account of her remarkable beauty, was buried in the family plot. The graves were made ready before death, and no coffins were used. The bodies were merely wrapped in the infected cloths, saturated with pitch and tar, and hastily interred. The slaves’ graves are not marked by stick or stone, because the custom of that time forbade it. The house at one time occupied by Peter Donohue, near the side entrance of Calvary, at Blissville, was built by Thomas Alsop, the father of William. Eventually, it fell into the hands of Paul Rapelyea. The farm surrounding it was part of the Alsop estate, derived from the marriage of Thomas Wandell with the widow Herrick, who owned it in 1750.
After the death of Richard Alsop in 1790, the property was divided between the sons, John and Thomas. John retained the old homestead, and Thomas received the Blissville section. John Alsop died in April 1837, and his widow sold the property to a corporation, and it now embraced in Calvary. John Alsop left no children. Thomas, his brother, married Catherine Brinckerhoff, the daughter of George, a Revolutionary patriot residing at Dutch Kills. A British officer, Finlay McKay, cut his name on a pane of glass in the old Brinckerhoff house in 1776, and it remains there to this day. The well on the Alsop property, which was sunk at the time the mansion was built, still supplies water to many families in the neighborhood. The house was one hundred feet long, and the first floor was divided into four rooms, with a hallway eighteen feet wide. Two round windows, resembling port holes, were cut in the ends of the building in 1776 by Lord Cornwallis for musket practice, and as lookouts to guard against surprise. The chimney place, around which the slaves need to gather, had the capacity of receiving logs of wood ten feet in length. Rufus King married Mary Alsop. He died at Jamaica in 1827. Of this union came John Alsop King, who was Governor of this state from 1857 to 1859.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Johnston Mausoleum is surely the grandest structure, beyond the ceremonial chapel of the Cemetery itself, to be found here at First Calvary. Smaller tombs and mausolea ring the hillsides, as do vaults whose gated entry points hide tunneled corridors which burrow into the earth to unknown depths. The shot above, for instance, was captured while standing on the earthworks which bury just such a vault. Just as every other form of city, the Necropolis maintains infrastructure. Calvary has its own sewer system, roads, and irrigation channels. A vast buried culvert underlies the place, providing drainage for this formerly swamped valley of the shadow. Who can guess, what it is, that might be buried down there?
from wikisource.org, “How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis”
Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom the doctor’s skill is powerless to save. When the white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odds. Fifty “summer doctors,” especially trained to this work, are then sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with free advice and medicine for the poor. Devoted women follow in their track with care and nursing for the sick. Fresh-air excursions run daily out of New York on land and water; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers in Calvary work over-time, and little coffins are stacked mountains high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners’ boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Disturbing subsidences aside, there is obviously an expensive schedule of groundskeeping kept here, despite the ravages wrought upon the statuary and monuments by the acid rain and corrosive miasma which arises from the nearby Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Newtown Creek’s industrial activity. In all the time I’ve spent here, peaceful rustications of devastating loneliness, not once have I ever noted “the colour” which is both odd and remarkable. The pernicious influence of that otherworldly iridescence does not seem to penetrate the fencelines of Calvary. Perhaps it is hallowed, this ground, and the working invocations of Dagger John still protect this place from that which lies beyond its gates.
from wikipedia
John Joseph Hughes (June 24, 1797—January 3, 1864) was an Irish-born clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church. He was the fourth Bishop and first Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, serving between 1842 and his death in 1864.
A native of Northern Ireland, Hughes came to the United States in 1817, and became a priest in 1826 and a bishop in 1838. A figure of national prominence, he exercised great moral and social influence, and presided over a period of explosive growth for Catholicism in New York. He was regarded as “the best known, if not exactly the best loved, Catholic bishop in the country.” He also became known as “Dagger John” for his practice of signing his name with a dagger-like cross, as well as for his aggressive personality.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Proverbial, the needle in a haystack your humble narrator seeks is the grave of a certain man, named Gilman. Engendering frustratingly unproductive journeys to dangerously obscure corners of the City of Greater New York in the name of finding a certain document, which might be used as a cypher to decode the ancient graveyards mysteries, my searching for Gilman is frustrated. Your humble narrator has been reduced to performing a visual census, wandering the place looking for his name recorded in stone.
from archny.org
Our Catholic Cemeteries have a history as old as the catacombs. Early in the development of our Catholic tradition, our forefathers in the Faith found the ministry of burial of the dead to be most important. From the catacombs, where early Christians met secretly in prayer and entombed the mortal remains of the early martyrs, to today where the Archdiocesan cemeteries serve the needs of the millions of Catholics located in the greater New York area, our Catholic cemeteries silently bear witness to the respect we give the human body, even in death, because of its status as Temple of the Holy Spirit. Our Catholic cemeteries, filled with artistic expressions of our religious traditions, provide an environment of comfort in times of sorrow and are meant to continually remind us that Jesus Christ promised one day we would all be together in the Eternal Life of Resurrection.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
By 1900, nearly three quarters of a million people were buried here. Today, millions of interments are recorded. Many of these gravesites, according to Catholic tradition, represent a multiplicity of individual burials. Many of the stones and markers which once adorned these family plots are gone- destroyed or misplaced by careless workers, vandals, or in some cases lightning. Whatever records there are, maps and charts of the place, are sealed and vouchsafed by the bishops- who state categorically that the history of Calvary is no one’s business but that of those who are resident there. Frustrated, is my search for Gilman- by the sudden realization that the word “Gilman” was used during the 19th century as a given name- as well as surname.
from wikipedia, another Gilman with no tangible relation to the enigmatic Massachusetts man…
Henry Gilman (May 9, 1893, – November 7, 1986) was an American organic chemist known as the father of organometallic chemistry, the field within which his most notable work was done. He discovered the Gilman reagent, which bears his name…
For a short time after receiving his Ph.D., Henry Gilman worked an associate professor at the University of Illinois after being invited by his former instructor Roger Adams. In 1919, Gilman moved on to become an assistant professor in charge of organic chemistry at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University). At the age of 30, Gilman was given the title of full professor. While at Iowa State College, Gilman met Ruth V. Shaw, a student of his first-year organic chemistry class, and the two were married in 1929.
Gilman had high expectations for his graduate students, and it often took them more than twice as long as the norm to earn their degrees. They were expected to work in the research lab well into the night and on weekends. Gilman was known for frequently visiting the lab during the day and questioning each student as to what they had accomplished since his last visit. Gilman had another common practice for his graduate students. He would not assign a research project for his graduate students, but he would push students to produce a series of preparations. Students would write short publications that would spark ideas about additional experiments to perform, drawing all the material together to form a central thesis.
During his career, Gilman consulted for many companies such as Quaker Oats and DuPont, although he continued as a professor at Iowa State University, as it came to be known. At the usual retirement age of 70, at that time, Gilman chose not to retire from Iowa State University and remained active in research until 1975 when he was 82 years old.
World War II brought new opportunities for Gilman to do research for the government. He took part in the Manhattan Project, which was the code name for the government’s work on the atom bomb. Gilman concentrated on preparing volatile uranium derivatives, mainly dealing with alkoxides.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gilman… where is Gilman?
