Posts Tagged ‘New York City’
rolled down
Down with the night, yo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As opined yesterday, the wrought iron fence posts of First Calvary Cemetery are just the right size to stick a camera lens through. In that prior post wherein my keen observational prowess was offered, focus was given to the estimable Kosciuszcko Bridge project, while today’s set of images are a few night shots of the cemetery itself. Unless you are an absolute fanatical maniac on the subject of eating carrots or half Kryptonian, these shots are just a smidge broader than the perceptual range of human vision. The light sources are environmental, incidentally.
All I saw, with the naked eye as it were, was a silhouette of the cemetery against the skyline of the Shining City to the west.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There were a few examples of the long exposures one returned to HQ with, wherein the camera’s sensitivity to light was enhanced in different ways, which rendered out as sort of cartoonish, and overexposed the lit up Manhattan skyline into a white blob. Saying that, I was able to reclaim an excruciating amount of detail from the shadowed areas but the images were in “the uncanny valley,” meaning that they looked utterly fake and overtly “digital.”
You can’t put a landscape picture of Calvary Cemetery up on the web without some recognizable part of the skyline in it, as a note.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On Laurel Hill Blvd., here at the angle between Industrial Maspeth and Blissville, however – if you “go wide” the section of Manhattan between the Battery and 57th street can all be captured in one shot.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
gleaming dome
The “A” in MTA is for “Adventure.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Inhuman and hideous, claustrophobic and filth ridden, the nest of Mammon and Asmodeus, home sweet hell. To say that one bears a certain disdain for Manhattan in his old age would indicate that an understatement is being offered. Manhattan? That’s not where you’ll find the solution, instead Manhattan is the problem. Vainglorious pride blinds.
These days, nobody you ask would say they “want to go” to the island of Manhattan from the other four boroughs, instead they’ll say “I HAVE TO go to Manhattan.” That’s usually when the MTA comes up.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One such as myself gets around a lot. There isn’t a standard commute these days, rather it’s a series of odd destinations which are often set against a patchwork of neighborhoods and places unfamiliar. How do you get from Maspeth to Red Hook, or Richmond Terrace to Elmhurst? Broadway Junction connects to which trains, and are there any that near Astoria? Best transit route from Rockaway to Greenpoint, or the Bronx Zoo?
These are the sort of questions which one asks himself regularly, but last Saturday morning my problem was a simple one – get from HQ in Astoria to Lower Manhattan to do a tour on a NYC Ferry for the NY Transit Museum. As mentioned, the “A” in MTA is for “adventure,” particularly on the weekends.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An obvious path to Pier 11 would be taking the Astoria Ferry from Hallets Cove. Unfortunately, they were operating on a winter and weekend schedule, and I would have arrived at the pier for the tour nearly an hour earlier than my customary arrival (a half hour in advance of a tour) time. I also would have to have to factor in the mile long walk to the waterfront, meaning that my journey would entail me leaving HQ something like three hours in advance of arrival if I also wanted to get breakfast, and I did want breakfast.
I decided on chancing it with the MTA, and taking the train. Realization that the Subway is now the daily gamble set in.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I boarded an R at Steinway Street, which became an F in the tunnel. It let me off at the 63rd street station, where I had to leave the system and execute a walking transfer to get to the Lexington Avenue line’s 4/5/6 platform. There, I discovered that I had to take a 6 to 42nd street to then transfer to a 5. Luckily, the 5 got me to Fulton Street where the unpleasant miasmas of the Financial District were pulsing about in a bit of fog.
What the hell is it about Lower Manhattan with the garbage and the rats and the stink and those puddles of yellow/green bubbling water everywhere. What’s that greasy black stuff all over the sidewalks, or that liquid which just dripped on me from high above, and… blech… if you say the Newtown Creek is bad… try Fulton Street and lower Manhattan in general.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If ever there was an area in which I’d like to set the Real Estate Industrial Complex absolutely loose, it’s a peninsular section of the Shining City just south of City Hall and north of Battery Park. Imagine it, all that filthy lucre to be made, and the developers could take turns bulldozing landmarks. The bike people could drive protected bicycling lanes right through the lobbies of buildings… What a time they’d have.
Thing is, whatever feeding frenzy might happen here will be limited evermore. Without reliable and predictable transit to carry people into Manhattan, the folks in outer boroughs might have to find other places to work that aren’t so disgusting.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
blossoming orchards
Down under the Long Island Expressway, or DULIE, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So, after shlepping my tripod setup around Dutch Kills last weekend, I decided that I just wasn’t done yet. Heading east alongst the venerable avenue of Borden, a humble narrator found a few interesting spots to do a “setup” and get clicking. It was DULIE which captured my attention on this leg of the walk.
As mentioned in an earlier post, the LIE and Queens Midtown Tunnel opened for business in November of 1940. The LIE, where it crosses the sediment choked waters of Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary here in Long Island City, rises one hundred and six feet above the water. This means a lot of steel supports, and an empty corridor found beneath it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is obsessed with this section of LIC, as so much has happened here. The General Electric Vehicle Company complex was just a block away, so were a couple of steel factories. A fossilized rail spur can still be found here and there, winding it way around and between the factories, but the locomotive city is long gone. It’s all about the internal combustion engine in modernity – the automobile city.
The principal proponent of the latter didn’t begin the Queens Midtown Tunnel, he just took it over towards the end of the project and made sure the LIE would be his baby. I’m speaking of Robert Moses, of course.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sewer grates up on the LIE connect to long vertical pipes, which just empty out onto the ground, and their flow carries all sorts of “yuck” down into LIC from the expressway high above. There’s meant to be a little concrete spillway which would carry the liquid and solute “spill” into a second grate, one which basically empties into Dutch Kills, but the build up of “crapola” around the pipe creates sickly mounds of toxic soil like the one pictured above.
Hey, I’m not judging, I love places like this.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As a note, whenever I’m describing an encounter with the Gendarmes or some zealous security guard, I always go on about “there being no law forbidding…” and “if you can see it from the sidewalk…”.
In the case of the other night however – picture this: some weird looking bearded old man standing in pitch darkness on a Sunday night with a camera tripod under the LIE, wearing a reflective vest over a filthy black raincoat – I was ready to converse with somebody wearing a badge about what I was up to. You’d just figure that, right?
The cops though, three cruiser units worth spaced out over the evening, just drove on by me. I mean… I felt suspicious looking. The reflective vest is very good camouflage. Instead of being high visibility as promised, it’s a near invisibility prophylactic against “why are you taking pickchas of dat?”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One was growing fatigued by this point, it was well after ten, and a humble narrator embraced an ideation about starting out for home. One last long exposure shot from DULIE was executed, and thereupon the tripod kit was folded up into its traveling configuration and a lens swap occurred.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lens I’ve been using for the series of night shots recently has been a Sigma 18-300 – which is by definition a “daylight lens, given that at full zoom it’s aperture is only f6.3. Tripod shots, like the ones I’ve recently been producing, make the usage of extremely narrow apertures possible – which in turn allows for a deep field of focus. Impossible for handheld usage in low light, however, this lens is. It’s singular virtue is the zoom range, ultimately. I’ve got better lenses, including a different Sigma, but this particular specimen allows me to carry just one lens.
I’ve always got a “nifty fifty” lens in my bag, however, which allows me to open up the aperture to f1.8, allowing a lot more light in. That’s the one I snapped onto the camera, which coincidentally lightened the gizmo by about a pound and a half. Lotta glass inside that Sigma, but you don’t really feel the weight of it when it’s in the bag.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
long miles
Borden Avenue Bridge and environs, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There have been three Borden Avenue Bridges, the first being a wooden draw bridge that opened when Borden Avenue was created in 1868. It was replaced by an iron swing bridge which was demolished in 1906, and the modern day retractile bridge was opened on the 25th of March in 1908. It cost $157, 606 to build in 1908. That would be $4,365,073 in modern money, adjusted for inflation.
A bargain, no?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Borden Avenue Bridge is one of only two retractile bridges in NYC, the other one being the infinestimal Carroll Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal. This specie of movable bridge is actually quite common in other cities, notably Chicago.
Chicago ain’t got a view like the one above though, I’d wager.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To the south of Borden Avenue, one might notice the two railroad bridges spanning Dutch Kills – Cabin M and DB Cabin. The latter carries traffic for the Lower Montauk Branch of the LIRR from the Wheelspur to Blissville Yards, all of which which are mainly used for freight these days. Cabin M connects to the Montauk Cutoff, a now severed connection to the Sunnyside Yards and the LIRR Main Line tracks.
Just beyond the two rail bridges is the main body of Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dutch Kills itself, in this area around the Borden Avenue Bridge, is stagnant and choked with wind blown garbage. A tepid current in the water creates a vertical rather than horizontal flow pattern, which factors into the accretion of sediments on the bottom. These sediment beds, which are found across the entire Newtown Creek watershed and represent a centuries long cross section of industrial and municipal pollution, are the reason that the Creek and its tributaries are a superfund site.
At low tide, mounds of this material become exposed to the air.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For many years, there was a shanty dwelling here, occupied by some unknown entity. Hurricane Sandy ended that tenancy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My chosen path next carried me eastwards on Borden Avenue, away from my beloved Creek and deeper into the post industrial landscape of Long Island City. The concrete devastations were calling to me.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
inimical oddity
Darkness continues.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It rained all day on Sunday, whereupon a non precipitatating mist set itself up in the atmosphere during the evening hours. Given my recent fascination with wandering about the darkened Newtown Creek watershed in such conditions, a humble narrator strapped on the camera kit and debarked HQ for Long Island City. My target for this photo excursion was a section of the waterway found in Long Island City, specifically the Dutch Kills tributary.
Pictured above, looking across Skillman Avenue and the “A section” of the Sunnyside Yards towards Jackson Avenue and the Sapphire Megalith.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A decade ago, one used to refer to this area as “Lonely Island City” since you’d seldom see anything other than a stray or lost human back here. The “zone” around the Degnon Terminal was largely deserted until recent years, when the Real Estate Industrial complex began to construct large dwellings on former industrial land along Jackson Avenue and elsewhere in LIC. All of a sudden, the humans began to appear back here.
Where can a guy go to be alone with his thoughts in Western Queens these days? Always somewhat nocturnal, a humble narrator’s solution to the presence of the human horde has simply been to shift my schedule a bit. This causes loved ones no end of worry, me wandering about in the darkness all by my lonesome.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You’re never unobserved or truly alone in Long Island City, it should be mentioned.
In the cupola of the Sapphire Megalith, there is an impossible thing which cannot exist that is always watching you with an unblinking three lobed burning eye, after all. It hungers for profit and employs an army of acolytes to do its bidding.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Additionally certain precautions are taken, including the usage of a reflective construction worker’s vest which is roughly worn over the filthy black raincoat. Last week, in the comments, somebody asked if I carry a firearm when I’m out at night shooting to protect myself from malign passerby who might want to rough me up in pursuance of stealing my camera or emptying my pockets. I don’t.
Were a stranger to strike me, filth and disease would crawl up their arm causing them to collapse into a pile of mouldering meat and rotting bone. That’s what I’m packing – plague and death are the horsemen I ride with.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Atmospherically, everything was pretty much what I hoped it would be when leaving Astoria for points south and west. The mists and clouds were largely at high altitude, and only ribbons of fog were present at ground level.
My plan for the evening was to spend only a few hours wandering about, but I actually ended up being out for nearly six hours, whereupon I returned to HQ and developed the shots I had captured. One didn’t get to bed until about five in the morning, hence the late post you’re reading right now.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One did not experience any missing time, as a note, I was working the whole time. If I was abducted by a UFO, I’m certain that shots of it would have been on my camera card when I got home. Pictured above is 29th street along the Dutch Kills turning basin, looking back at the gargantuan complex of residential luxury buildings erected within the last decade in the Court Square area of LIC.
The thing in the Megalith has won.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 