Posts Tagged ‘Long Island City’
various inhabitants
Hooray, it’s Monday!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few odds and ends in today’s post, as a humble narrator is fairly hurting for new stuff to show you. The weather and a few “have to’s” had forced my butt to remain static at HQ last week, and the camera has received little to no exercise outside of the normal rounds here in Astoria. Additionally, something went awry with my left leg in the ankle zone so I spent half of last week with a disturbing bit of “owie” going on. Often I’ll describe my physical woes as being due to the presence of the “pain squirrel” which alights on different branches of my body randomly, in much the same way as the Norse myths describe the squirrel Ratatoskr running about on the world tree Yggdrasil. Ratatoskr would chew on various branches of Yggdrasil, which caused earthquakes and volcanic activity to manifest. The pain squirrel, instead, causes one to merely exclaim “what the hell did I do to myself now?”
The older you get, the more hypochondriacal you get. Eventually, you get to the point where the impact of sunlight on your skin is felt, and hurts. Pictured above is a gas station on Northern Blvd. in LIC. Have you noticed that the real estate people have been devouring gas stations recently, along with supermarkets? Anything with a big enough footprint, I guess.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is in the process of becoming diurnal again, after long months of activity in the dark of night. Transitioning between the two results in a feeling akin to jet lag, with drowsy intervals occurring in the afternoon. Given that one has more or less been surrendering to the embrace of Morpheus just before sunrise for a few months, this rather jarring process will likely take all week. I’m not abandoning the night shooting, not by a long shot, but a biological need to experience the rise and fall of the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself in the wan winter sky is upon me.
Don’t want to start growing a patch of mushrooms on my back.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Additionally, I haven’t caused any real trouble for a bit, and there’s probably battles I should be fighting.
It’s also marginally warmer during the days, I seem to recall.
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nothing unprecedented
Just another day in paradise, yo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sculptor who designed the plastic pink lawn flamingo was Donald Featherstone, a task he accomplished in 1957 for a company he ended up running until his retirement in 2000 A.D., called Union Products Inc. I had a dream once where Featherstone’s Flamingoes were chasing me and fell out of bed. Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is quite rare and only regularly affects about 4% of adult humans. Sleepwalking episodes typically last anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes, and there are sleepwalkers who have actually left their homes for a sleep drive in their cars while dreaming. There are sleep eaters, and sleep “shtuppers” who engage in sexual coitus (sexsomnia) while totally asleep. There are several legal proceedings in which a sleepwalker has actually murdered someone, wherein the somnambulist was pronounced not guilty. That’s a slippery slope.
As a child, I became convinced that quicksand, which is a fascinating soil condition caused by a particular ratio of sand and water that forms a “shear thinning non Newtownian fluid” was something you needed to be prepared for as an adult. Stress the sand/water mix – say by stepping on it – and the sand and liquid will seperate and you’ll sink right in. The physics of it all are fascinating, and removing yourself from the quicksand is difficult and complicated. Trying to just pull yourself straight out would require titanic amounts of force. Your best bet, I’m told, is to slowly work your self into a position where you’re facing the sky and your limbs are spread out as far as you can manage (which is the same advice offered for those caught in avalanches of snow). Then you sort of wiggle and wriggle your body towards the solid ground direction that you came from. Contrary to popular belief, due to the relative material density of the quicksand and of your body, you likely won’t sink in past your waste even if you do panic and struggle. Those who die in quicksand do so due to hypothermia and or the arrival of carnivores. I don’t know if Flamingoes qualify as carnivores, and don’t want to find out.
As a note, quicksand has not turned out to be the ubiquitous problem when “adulting” that I thought it would be.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s likely that you’ve experienced, when laying down to sleep, feeling your arms or legs suddenly twitch or jerk for no reason. That’s called a hypnic or “myoclonic jerk” by sleep specialists. It’s pretty normal, but the league of doctors aren’t of a single mind as to causation for the phenomena. On the other side of things, that period of 15-30 minutes when you first wake up and are experiencing both cognitive difficulty and motor skill impairment is called “Sleep Inertia.” Part of ir is caused by the presence of a certain chemical, and you’ve got a series of receptor cells in your brain for this chemical called “Adenosine,” which is abundant in the noodle when you’re sleep deprived – which most of us are. Caffeine is a blocker for these Adenosine receptors, and that’s why if you haven’t had enough sleep a “cuppa Joe” will help snap you out of the sleep inertia. Saying that, it’s still pretty normal to be a bit groggy when you wake up, since your body has been in an anabolic state and busy cleaning up the mess you made of it the day before. The natural process of waking up involves a spike in cortisol levels in your blood, wherein the adrenal glands can manufacture an average of more than fifty percent more cortisol than when asleep. Ultimately, Cortisol levels are the difference between “morning people” and “evening people,” which is thought to be related to individual “cortisol awakening response.”
A humble narrator has always been the latter, a “night owl” as it’s called. I’ve never been a Flamingo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The section of the East River pictured above varies in depth from about twenty five to fifty one feet, which you can visualize by thinking about submerging a series of buildings which range from two to five stories. If the Empire State Building ever found itself sitting in the middle of the East River, and hey… climate change, amiright?… it would still rise some ninety seven to one hundred stories into the sky. A couple of years ago, somebody asked me to do a boat tour of shipwrecks in New York Harbor, but it seems that wrecks are cleared out in an expeditious fashion as they’d otherwise be a hazard to navigation and commerce. So, I believe, are flamingoes.
Hope you enjoyed today’s completely random trivia, back on Monday with something completely different, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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less than
Another day, another bridge across Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are five bridges crossing the Dutch Kills tributary of that lugubrious ribbon of urban delight called the Newtown Creek, here in Long Island City. You’ve got two movable railroad bridges, the retractile Borden Avenue Bridge, the high flying truss which carries the Long Island Expressway and then slopes down into the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and the good old Hunters Point Avenue Bridge. There’s been a bridge of one kind or another here since about ten to twenty years after the Civil War, with one notable span made of wood whose opening and closing was powered by ropes and a donkey. The current bridge was installed in 1910, when Michael Degnon was building his industrial terminal around Dutch Kills, and the Pennsylvania Railroad was finishing up their construction of the Sunnyside Yards.The Hunters Point Avenue Bridge was originally a double bascule drawbridge, but back in the 1980’s, the City rebuilt the roadway and replaced the mechanism with a single bascule version, which is the one featured in today’s post.
Apparently, Hurricane Sandy did quite a job in the electrical equipment that operates the thing, and since the City is required by the United States Coast Guard to maintain the HPA Bridge as a movable structure there’s been folks working “down below” in the gears and gizmos of the thing. It’s on one of my main routes when I’m out for a walk.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The other night, Dutch Kills was frozen into a giant plate of ice. This isn’t surprising, since the hydrology of the canal displays very little in the way of laminar or horizontal flow. The water rises and falls with the tide, obviously, but the shapes and angles of the bulkheads in addition to zero sources of flowing water at its terminus other than a couple of open sewers cause the waters of Dutch Kills to mimic the behaviors of a stagnant lake rather than a flowing creek.
A few years ago, I started reading up on hydrology and talked to some of the powers that be about using “shaped” concrete forms to cause zones of compression and expansion which would passively move the water around a bit, but nothing really came of it. I still think this sort of engineering is the way to go, however. As I understand the concept, rounded shapes act as “brakes” in fluid systems, whereas narrowing the width and obliquing the angle of channel walls causes water to flow (think river rapids). Essentially, large bodies of water can’t rise that much above the level of surrounding water bodies they’re connected to, so when the volume hits a point of compression it gets “squeezed” and pressurized which causes it to begin moving towards a point where it can expand again. As an example, the same water pressure in your kitchen faucet is what feeds into your garden hose, with the only difference between the wildly dissimilar behavior of the same water pressure being that the stuff in the hose has been compressed all the way through the nozzle and the sink faucet flow can just expand into the basin.
Design in enough points of compression and expansion, you’ve got “flow.” Or at least, that’s my theory. What do I know, I’m a schmuck with a camera, not an engineer.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another hypothesis I can offer is that the Newtown Creek is far more biologically active at night than it is during the daytime. All the time I’ve spent around the waterway in the last year at night has revealed an otherwise hidden world that comes out in the dark. There’s higher mammals, both feral cats and raccoons, which are occupying the predator and scavenger niches. You can see and hear vast numbers of fish splashing around in the water, and there’s all sorts of critters crashing around at the littoral edges and along the bulkheads.
The shots in today’s post were exposures of about thirty seconds, so you won’t see what I saw when shooting them unless it held stock still for that interval of time. What I saw was a big fat raccoon foraging around at the water’s edge, scooping up shell fish and other horrible wriggly things to eat for dinner. Actually, it was probably for breakfast, as the trash pandas are nocturnal – just like me.
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hoarsely explained
Checking in on the Kosciuszko Bridge project.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent endeavor has found me wandering around the fencelines of the Kosciuszko Bridge project site again, and causing their security guys all sorts of worry. As always and as a rule, one does not trespass, preferring instead the peripheries.
The second phase of the construction project began shortly after clearing the rubble left behind by the “energetic felling” of the 1939 era Kosciuszko Bridge, and this is the first post of 2019 that delves deeply into the subject.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The overpasses carrying the Brooklyn Queens Expressway over the streets of Maspeth are nearing completion, and the crews from NYS DOT’s contractor – Granite – seem to be heavily involved with installation of various sorts of pipe. Some of these pipes will presumptively carry water down and away from the roadway, while others will be conduits for electrical cabling, or at least that’s what it looks like to this layman’s eyes.
There’s still all sorts of disruption to the local street traffic occurring here on the border between LIC’s Blissville and Industrial Maspeth. That’s the intersection of Laurel Hill Blvd. and 54th avenue, for the morbidly curious amongst you.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Documenting this project has been a long standing project of mine – this 2012 post tells you everything you could want to know about Robert Moses, Fiorella LaGuardia, and the origins of the 1939 model Kosciuszcko Bridge. Just before construction started, I swept through both the Brooklyn and Queens sides of Newtown Creek in the area I call “DUKBO” – Down Under the Kosciuszcko Bridge Onramp. Here’s a 2014 post, and another, showing what things used to look like on the Brooklyn side, and one dating back to 2010, and from 2012 discussing the Queens side – this. Construction started, and this 2014 post offers a look at things. There’s shots from the water of Newtown Creek, in this June 2015 post, and in this September 2015 post, which shows the bridge support towers rising. Additionally, this post from March of 2016 detailed the action on the Queens side. Most recently, here’s one from May of 2016, and one from June of the same year. Here’s one from August of 2016, the December 2016 one, one from March of 2017 which discusses the demolition of the 1939 bridge.
Here’s a post showing what I saw during a pre opening walk through in early April of 2017, and the fanfare surrounding the opening of half of the new bridge in April of 2017, a walk through of the Brooklyn side job site in June of 2017. Here’s some night shots from early July of 2017. A series of posts focused in on the removal of the central truss of the 1939 bridge from the summer of 2017 – a timelapse, some stills, and the barging out of the truss.
More recently, in late September of 2017, a final series of shots of the old bridge were captured in this post. Acquisition of a souvenir chunk of steel from the 1939 bridge was described in this post, and a video of the “energetic felling” of the approaches on October 1st was offered in this one. Still shots and views of the aftermath from the waters of Newtown Creek from later in the day on Oct. 1 are found in this posting, and the aftermath of the demolition as seen from Calvary Cemetery in LIC’s Blissville section in this post from October 5th. This post from December of 2017 closed out an event filled year in DUKBO, and a visit to the site at night is described in this March of 2018 post. Another progress report was offered in June of 2018. A nocturnal visit occurred in December of 2018, and here’s a short post from January of 2019.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over on 43rd street, the first phase of the project which has been carrying traffic since April of 2017 is visible, with the two new concrete towers of the second phase also in sight. The first phase towers (which are in Brooklyn) are the ones that are garishly lit with cartoonish LED lighting, and the unlit ones are the second phase which are anchored into Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
43rd street remains a barren industrial path, populated by heavy trucking, warehousing, welding supply, and crane companies. Set into a severe incline, 43rd street crosses Maspeth’s 56th road (which is called Review Avenue on the LIC side of the Bridge project) and continues southward towards the former premises of the Phelps Dodge company towards Newtown Creek. There’s an “at grade” rail crossing at its end, and a street called 57th avenue which is occasionally referred to as “Galasso Place.”
There’s a huge FedEx shipping hub down there, and the Restaurant Depot company, both of which sit on former Phelps Dodge properties.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A main thoroughfare for industrial traffic, 56th road is one of those fairly terrifying street crossings you find around Newtown Creek which was definitely designed with little thought to pedestrians. As is my habit in areas like this, and particularly at night, a high visibility “safety vest” is pulled over the shoulders of my filthy black raincoat.
Given the amount of night shooting I’ve been doing over the last year, that vest has become a standard part of my camera bag kit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking through the fences at the heart of the project, southwards towards Brooklyn, from Review Avenue/56th road.
Intentionally, I went down to the site on a Sunday night when no work was going on so as to not get in the way. While you were watching the Super Bowl, I was shooting this.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the waterfront of Newtown Creek, looking westwards towards Manhattan, whose skyline you can just see peeking out behind Blissville’s Calvary Cemetery. The Brooklyn side is on the left, is nearby the tail or northern end of Meeker Avenue. I call both areas “DUKBO” or Down Under the Kosciuszcko Bridge Onramp.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking eastwards from Review Avenue in LIC’s Blissville section, along the Lower Montauk tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. According to people in the know whom I’ve asked, the new bridge is due to open in either Q2 or early Q3 of this year. It all depends on the severity of winter weather.
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gathered here
Mitch Waxman, working for YOU!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The pathway which will allow access to the bike and pedestrian lane of the new Kosciuszcko Bridge is pictured above, a terrifying “last mile” section which is owned by the City. This is the approach at “Queens Midtown Expressway” or “Borden Avenue” (depending on whose map it is) which you get to via a southward journey along 43rd street in Sunnyside. It’s also the onramp for the BQE, and there’s nothing separating you from traffic other than a three inch curb. If you’re wondering, this is actually a fairly well used foot path between industrial Maspeth and South Sunnyside – so it’s not just me.
Why do I go this particular way? I’ll show you at the end of the post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Inviting, ain’t it?
A humble narrator is ringing the alarm bells here for a fairly simple reason, the Kosciuszcko Bridge construction project is meant to be opening the second and final half of the project up to traffic (of all kinds) by the end of the summer, at the latest. The City, which is supposed to have been redesigning this section of things (they own it), hasn’t been shown to have started any risible progress yet. Supposedly NYC DOT has a design, but where is it? Shovels in the ground, boys?
I’d be happy with a bunch of jersey barriers, truth be told.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For years, literally years, I’ve been keeping an eye on this one.
I cannot tell you how many times in Western Queens that I’ve had the sudden realization that the sidewalk I was scuttling on led onto a highway. One time, after leaving St. Michael’s cemetery, the section of Astoria Blvd. I was walking along suddenly became the shoulder lane of the Grand Central Parkway as the sidewalk just ended.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This path leads to a pedestrian bridge, one that the K Bridge project has recently constructed as a replacement for a far older but similar lane. Friends who grew up on the southern flank of Sunnyside tell me that this path was well familiar to them growing up, and that the road and sidewalk conditions found in the shot above date back to their earliest recollection.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just last week, I was walking through here and spotted the condition above. Hadn’t been through in about a month, so it’s possible this collapsed in sewer grate had been lying in wait for an errant tire to enter it for weeks.
Here’s the “working for you part.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First things first, you document it. That’s me and the camera in the shadow on the left. Second, you report it.
Now, here’s the thing… I often have trouble making 311 or 911 operators understand that Queens has hyphenated addresses. Also, it took several paragraphs of text and a few photos to describe the location and condition of this place to you, my quite savvy and well traveled Lords and Ladies of the Pentacle. Additionally, this was a dangerous situation and I feared somebody could be seriously hurt if their tire entered the hole.
Prior experience with road condition and damaged sewer hatch reporting (yep, lots and lots of prior experience) has taught me that it can take weeks for the City to dispatch somebody to do repairs. They’ll send the cops out to throw down a traffic cone, but otherwise – weeks. I’m “Mitch Waxman” however, so a quick scan of the contact list on my phone allowed me to contact the K Bridge team’s Community Liason’s office, who in turn alerted the NYC DEP, whose sewer it is. DEP dispatched an emergency squad within the hour and they had the thing all fixed and repaired by the next morning. On the repair front, I let my pals at Jimmy Van Bramer’s office know about all the goings on and how great I thought it was how the K Bridge team and DEP handled the situation. That was also in the name of “reporting it” since JVB’s office keeps a list of complaints and problems in his District and since this one wouldn’t come to them via 311 or 911, there you are.
Nobody gets hurt. Street boo boo all better now.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the other side of the “last mile” path, there is a permanently installed concrete separation between you and the onramp of the BQE. Where it slopes down and ends is the demarcation point of NYC and NYS’s property lines, or so I’m told. Want to guess why they’re there?
Yeah, that was me, suggesting it to the Engineering Team at K Bridge sometime back in 2012 or 2013.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My pal “Special” Ed once described his ideal job title as “freelance unsolicited criticism,” which would take the form of waking into a bank and decrying the arrangement of the padded ropes leading to the tellers, whereupon he would then hand them a bill for his services. I don’t charge, but I fear that I’m living out Ed’s dream. Ed used to live downstairs from me in an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one which was packed with high school and college friends. We lived a life disturbingly reminiscent of “Seinfeld,” I’m afraid. Ed had nothing in his refrigerator save for a single glass of water and a spoon, and stored his clothing in the kitchen cabinets. I miss Ed.
Pictured above is the K Bridge from that pedestrian ramp dealie which carries you over the onramps to it from the LIE onto Laurel Hill Blvd. at the border of Maspeth and Blissville, and between the Kosciuszcko Bridge and First Calvary Cemetery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is why I go this particular way. The view.
Just imagine what treasures await, when the ped and bike path is open. That’s presuming you don’t get squished by traffic on your way here, and end up in there.
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The Newtown Pentacle 