Posts Tagged ‘Maspeth’
curious delvings
Slowing it down at the Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last Sunday night, after waiting through an interminably hot afternoon for the light to get right, a humble narrator packed up “the bag” and headed over to my happy place in industrial Maspeth. Given the ridiculous heat and humidity, I took a cab rather than walk from Astoria, and the Maspeth Plank Road was a fairly novel spot to be dropped off according to the driver. The look on his face when I headed into the bushes towards the waters of Newtown Creek… I tell ya.
This was a fairly demanding bit of shooting due to the “hot” and sun exposure. The “Maspeth Heat Island Effect” was in effect, and whereas the rest of NYC was in the low ninety degree range, it was closer to one hundred where I was. Nevertheless, the tripod was set up, camera arranged, and busy I got.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These are long exposure shots, if you’re wondering about the dreamy “look and feel” of them. I had a ten stop ND filter attached to my lens, which was set to a ridiculously narrow f22 aperture. The burning thermonuclear eye of God itself was heading down towards the horizon, but it looked (and felt) as if it was located literally in Greenpoint just across the water.
The Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site has been mentioned time and again at this – your Newtown Pentacle. It’s a former crossing of the Newtown Creek, which was opened in 1836, and last spanned the water during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant in 1875. It connected Furman’s Island with the Greenpoint Bushwick industrial borderlands. Notable industrial facilities once found on the Brooklyn side include Martin Kalbfleisch’s Chemical Works, Conrad Wissell’s Dead Animal and Night Soil Wharf, and Peter Cooper’s “pestilential” glue factory. The Queens side included fertilizer mills and other lovely 19th century industries like bone blackers, acid factories, and fat renderers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shoreline surrounding the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site on the Queens side is fairly feral. There’s all manner of critters I’ve spotted ambling along the self seeded vegetation here; rodents and cats, raccoon and opossum, birds of all stripes. My colleagues at Newtown Creek Alliance have expended no small amount of effort in making the Plank Road publicly accessible, and we’ve even erected some signage there. Saying that, the NYC DEP has a bit of sewer infrastructure here which has seen recent maintenance and construction activity, and they’ve really torn the ground up something fierce.
If you make a mess, isn’t it incumbent upon you to clean up after yourself? Manners maketh man, and all that?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
silent laboratory
A few more shots from industrial Maspeth, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a section of Maspeth which one refers to as the “crane district,” which is distinct from the hammock district. Actually, there no hammock district, just cranes. Whenever I’m waving the camera around at the sort of thing pictured above, I set it to a fairly narrow aperture and slightly overexpose the shot. The goal is to get a super saturated set of colors and to have every screw, lug, and rivet render in sharp relief. For those of you who have asked, that’s the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. The former is when you say “hey look at that” and the latter involves a visualized goal and thought process about how to achieve what you want the final product to look like.
Ultimately, I wanted the crane truck to look a bit like a kids die cast metal toy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There is a stunning amount of litter in industrial Maspeth. A lot of it is quite dangerous, as in the case of the tempered glass windows I encountered that someone had the good sense to shatter when they were abandoning them. Illegal dumping is a city wide phenomena, but it seems that the industrial zones are particularly good places to abandon unwanted items. The comedy of it all is that Maspeth is the destination point for a significant amount of commercial and municipal waste by statute, and the folks handling said cargo are pretty responsible as far as how they handle the stuff.
Saying that, there’s shattered and powderized glass everywhere you look around these parts.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m hardly a saint in this category, but a humble narrator is the sort of fellow who pockets his personal waste products while moving around the great urban hive, carrying them until a proper receptacle is discovered. You don’t have to look too long, in my experience, before a municipal waste basket or a dumpster will appear. Others, it seems, are less patient than a humble narrator.
I mean, you’ve just drank a half gallon of milk, why not just pitch the empty container to the curb?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is one of the many, many municipal solid waste trailers parked in the industrial zone around Newtown Creek (and elsewhere, if you’re anywhere near a sewer plant, you’ll see or scent them) that stink of sewer solids, which the (now) NYC Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection tells me I’m imagining. This particular one has been parked here in industrial Maspeth so long that the steel legs of the thing have begun to bend.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All winter, I was commenting to myself (and I think I even mentioned it here, at your Newtown Pentacle, not long ago) that the abundance of “dead things” normally encountered around the Newtown Creek’s watershed districts had leveled off. That trend has reversed in recent weeks, with an abundance of dead birds encountered on area streets.
Newtown Creek is kind of “death prone.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff you encounter in the crane district of industrial Maspeth, back tomorrow with something entirely different.
Also, check out the tour offers below, they’re both being offered at special low rates. Greenpoint and the 520 Kingsland Green Roof this Friday, and a Skillman Avenue walk with Access Queens on Saturday the 30th.
Upcoming Tours and Events
June 22nd – The Birthplace of Mobil Oil: A Walking Tour
– with Newtown Creek Alliance.
Join NCA historian Mitch Waxman and NCA’s project manager Willis Elkins for walk through the birthplace of Mobil Oil, past the DEP’s largest Wastewater Treatment Plant and to the Kingsland Wildflowers green roof. The tour will also visit NCA’s Living Dock on the way; showcasing restoration efforts adjacent to major industrial operations and in the wake of legacies of pollution and neglect.
The tour will end at the 22,000 square foot Kingsland Wildflowers project, with panoramic views of the Newtown Creek and Manhattan skyline at sunset.
Tickets and more details here.
June 30th – The Skillman Avenue Corridor
– with Access Queens.
Starting at the 7 train on Roosevelt Avenue, we will explore this thriving residential and busy commercial thoroughfare, discussing the issues affecting its present and future. Access Queens, 7 Train Blues, Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce, and Newtown Creek Alliance members will be your guides for this roughly two mile walk.
Skillman Avenue begins at the border of residential Sunnyside and Woodside, and ends in Long Island City at 49th avenue, following the southern border of the Sunnyside Yards for much of its path. Once known as Meadow Street, this colonial era thoroughfare transitions from the community of Sunnyside to the post industrial devastations of LIC and the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek.
Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
suggesting question
Canada Goslings in industrial Maspeth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Marching about recently, my path carried the camera past Maspeth Creek, which – as the name would imply – is in industrial Maspeth and is in fact a tributary of that lugubrious cataract of cautionary tales known to all simply as the “Newtown Creek.” Whilst scuttling past the Maspeth Creek waterway’s head waters, which flow out a sewer, these Canadian invaders were shifting from foot to foot in a manner which I did not like.
Geese, in general, are dicks. Canada Geese, in particular, are jerks as well as dicks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The good news, for this dick specie, is that there’s now more of them. “Goslings” are what you call baby geese. While I was shooting this, one of the adults – I’m presuming it was the papa – was ambling towards me while sticking his tongue out. I once had to punch a goose in the face at one of the area cemeteries to ward off an attack. This particular paragon of poultry was intent on killing me for wandering too close to a nest, I guess. For you PETA types out there, one tried every other recourse first including “flight” before “fight” became my only option. That “sumbitch” chased me half way across Calvary Cemetery before I had to vigorously assert my right to be unmolested with a closed fist.
Seriously, Geese are mean dicks, but they’re real cute when they’re babies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The one who was messing with me the other day is the big one, at the back of the group in the shot above. I’m not sure if Maspeth Creek is in the 108th or the 104th precinct, but if anyone recognizes that goose I’d appreciate it if you called the NYPD tips line and let them know. I bet that its name is Claude or Jean or something… pfft… Canada.
Back in conventional reality, rather than within my inner dialogue about rude avian biota, the Canada Goose is one of the many, many birds that arrive at Newtown Creek each and year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Creek, and all of NY Harbor, sits in the migratory Atlantic Flyover zone. Every year you get to see nestlings putting on weight and size all summer long around the creek. Towards mid August and late September, they’ll begin vacating the area for parts unknown, returning in late March and April.
There’s a bunch of them wallowing around in the toxic sediments of Maspeth Creek, in the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of what I look out for as a hazard around the Newtown Creek are trucks rather than birds, and while making my way home, one marveled at all the different kinds. Semis, packers, roll on and roll offs, panel, box, wreckers, concrete… I even saw a couple of crane trucks. Industrial Maspeth is lousy with that sort of thing. There’s trains, too.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Leaving the Maspeth area via 48th street, you cross under and over the Long Island Expressway while heading north into Sunnyside. I like to use this steel and concrete landmark, a corridor of the House of Moses, to mentally signal that I’ve left the Creeklands and reentered the world as it’s meant to be.
As in, if an aggressive goose showed his face around south Sunnyside, he’d soon find himself cooked.
Upcoming Tours and Events
June 22nd – The Birthplace of Mobil Oil: A Walking Tour
– with Newtown Creek Alliance.
Join NCA historian Mitch Waxman and NCA’s project manager Willis Elkins for walk through the birthplace of Mobil Oil, past the DEP’s largest Wastewater Treatment Plant and to the Kingsland Wildflowers green roof. The tour will also visit NCA’s Living Dock on the way; showcasing restoration efforts adjacent to major industrial operations and in the wake of legacies of pollution and neglect.
The tour will end at the 22,000 square foot Kingsland Wildflowers project, with panoramic views of the Newtown Creek and Manhattan skyline at sunset.
Tickets and more details here.
June 30th – The Skillman Avenue Corridor
– with Access Queens.
Starting at the 7 train on Roosevelt Avenue, we will explore this thriving residential and busy commercial thoroughfare, discussing the issues affecting its present and future. Access Queens, 7 Train Blues, Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce, and Newtown Creek Alliance members will be your guides for this roughly two mile walk.
Skillman Avenue begins at the border of residential Sunnyside and Woodside, and ends in Long Island City at 49th avenue, following the southern border of the Sunnyside Yards for much of its path. Once known as Meadow Street, this colonial era thoroughfare transitions from the community of Sunnyside to the post industrial devastations of LIC and the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek.
Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
abstract malingering
Friday odds and ends.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A sudden explosion of cast off gloves, observed, makes one wonder if the Queens Cobbler has been joined by a new fiend whom I’ve been referring to as the “Queens Gaunter.” The name “Gaunter” is derived from a fairly archaic English, incidentally, and it’s from the same root of the word which “Gauntlet” comes from. In the Industrial Age, the name of the profession became the rather plain “glove maker” in the case of male oriented hand coverings, whereas lady gloves were prepared by milliners. That’s a work glove pictured above, which is unisex, and it was found in Maspeth. Perhaps the “Maspeth Milliner” rather than “Queens Gaunter,” with the latter having a bit more of a salubrious “roll off the tongue” should be used for this recently discovered companion to the Queens Cobbler? You can record your preferences in the comments, Queensicans.
One doubts that this red handed glove is in anyway related to the Ulster based “Red Hand Commandos” of West Belfast, incidentally, but you never know.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Down at my beloved Newtown Creek the other day, one grew fascinated by these derelict piles along the former Phelps Dodge property’s waterfront. One whipped out the tripod, lowered the camera’s ISO and narrowed the lens’s aperture to its absolute in pursuance of “slowing the shot down.” This is the exact moment when I decided that I have to buy an ND filter next time I’m at “beards and hats” over in the city, incidentally. I really, really wanted to turn the water into a milky smear with perfectly glassine reflectivity here.
These piles supported a heavy pier which had rail tracks on it, once. Most of the property which Phelps Dodge used to operate on is fill. There’s a congressional act, whose name escapes me at this writing, which allows for corporate entities to buy underwater property along industrial waterways like Newtown Creek as long as they “improve” it by filling it in. This process was usually accomplished by building heavy timber box frames that were then submerged and loaded up with whatever material the industrial concern wished to use. In the case of Phelps, it was industrial slag from their copper refining operation mixed with rock and soil.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Industrial Maspeth, which one has repeatedly described as being his “happy place,” seldom disappoints the wandering mendicant and itinerant shutterbug. Encountered at the Kosciuszcko Bridge construction site, this array of spent coffee cups embedded in the chain link of a hurricane fence entranced me.
Next week, I’ll update y’all on the progress that the NYS DOT is making on phase 2 of the bridge project, so there’s something to live for.
Upcoming Tours and Events
June 9th – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
hyper glycemic
Get off my lawn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oh, industrial Maspeth… the only place these days where a humble narrator can find any peace. Unfortunately, the Real Estate Industrial Complex has noticed the place in recent months, and there’s been series of flurried exchanges of industrial properties taking place thereabouts which have involved eye watering amounts of cash. This is never a good sign for an industrial neighborhood, and it means that City Hall’s officiates must be receiving visits from their paymasters in the banking and bond industries of Manhattan. I’ve always believed industrial Maspeth to be “proofed” against artisanal anything, except for a beat down, but a humble narrator is getting a bit worried about my happy place. When the REIC shit flies begin to gather, it never ends well for any neighborhood.
All the poisons in the mud will hatch out eventually, I presume.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Coca Cola plant on Borden has been bought by Home Depot, I’m told. Additionally, Fed-Ex and UPS continue to acquire properties in the area. A warehouse on the corner of Grand and Rust just changed hands for forty two million buckaroos. Magnification of truck and auto traffic is therefore on the menu for this already busy area and the neighborhoods surrounding it. Nobody is talking about protected bike lanes in industrial Maspeth, yet, as the particular group of busy bodies who push that agenda seem to be currently focused on Sunnyside.
I would offer that there are places in industrial Maspeth where you won’t find sidewalks, and others where the sidewalks are de facto parking lots for semi trucks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A conversation yesterday with a friend who works in officialdom occurred, which was focused on the first of two Blissville homeless shelter protests (yesterday was at Gracie Mansion, today’s will be at City Hall at noon. I’ll be there, and wearing a suit!) and eventually drifted over to definitions of political terminologies. The term “progressive” came up, which is a particular bugbear for a humble narrator. A lot of modern politicos use that one to describe themselves and their stance. I remind them that “progress” was the watchword used by Robert Moses when he was justifying the sacrifices of local communities who needed to get out of the way of his highways. New Yorkers who lived in the age of “progress” saw whole neighborhoods disappear in the name of urban renewal, or slum clearance, and Moses had no ethical problem with digging up graveyards to make way for his roads in its name. Today’s “progressives” call themselves that because the word “liberal” has been so thoroughly and successfully demonized by the other side of the national political argument that it’s become political suicide to describe yourself as such. Their take is that the tax burden should be increased on the well off to aid the less lucky. That isn’t progress, that’s socialism, and under that philosophic approach to things the revenues collected by the state in the name of helping the poor usually end up getting spent on the expansion of the government bureaucracy which administers the process. This was the ultimate failing of the New Deal, which allowed people like Robert Moses to run amok in places like industrial Maspeth. It also gave rise to Barry Goldwater, Reagan, and the modern day conservative movement. Institutional memory is entirely absent in the modern world, I tell you.
I favor the Eleanor Roosevelt definition of progressivism – “We all do better when we’re all doing better.” I interpret that to mean that by setting the stage for all tiers of the economic spectrum to succeed, the “raft” is lifted for all.
Upcoming Tours and Events
June 9th – Exploring Long Island City – with NY Adventure Club.
Long Island City is a tale of two cities; one filled with glittering water-front skyscrapers and manicured parks, and the other, a highly active ground transportation & distribution zone vital to the New York economy — which will prevail?
Tickets and more details here.
May 17th – Port Newark Boat Tour – with Working Harbor Committee.
For an exciting adventure, go behind the scenes of the bustling Port of NY & NJ on our Hidden Harbor Tour® of Port Newark! Get an insider’s view of the 3rd largest port in the nation, where container ships dock and unload their goods from around the world. See how the working harbor really works and learn about what all those ships and tugs do. See giant container terminals, oil docks, dry dock repair, and more! Tickets and more details here.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 