Posts Tagged ‘New York City’
wholesome pursuits
Checking in on the Kosciuszko Bridge project, in Today’s Post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Several progress reports have been offered on the NYS DOT’s Kosciuszko Bridge replacement project. I seem to be the only person In New York paying any attention to the project, and there’s been a series of prior posts on the bridge presented at this – your Newtown Pentacle – chronicling the project.
To start – this 2012 post tells you everything you could want to know about Robert Moses, Fiorella LaGuardia, and the origins of the 1939 model Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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 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.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the end of 2015, I got to visit the work site in Brooklyn with the DOT folks, as described in this post, and this one. I also walked the Queens side back in December. Today’s post contains images from the last weekend of February in 2016, and takes a look at the Queens side, at the border of Blissville and West Maspeth.
In the first shot, I’m exiting an arch at 43rd street which leads to Laurel Hill Blvd., which leads to the spot shown in the second. If these shots look similar to the ones which have been embedded into prior posts, btw, it is quite intentional.
Construction equipment is everywhere at this point. Part of the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement project involves the redesign of the cloverleaf exchange with the Long Island Expressway, and since the bridge plus it’s approaches involve an astounding 2.1 miles of structure – this is one of the biggest capital projects in NYC that’s happened in my lifetime, and certainly a huge moment in the history of my beloved Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The odd spiral walkway over the highway which allows pedestrian and bicycle access (and which is surprisingly well used) is going to be rebuilt as a part of the project as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Down on Laurel Hill Blvd., heading south towards Review Avenue and Newtown Creek. Calvary Cemetery is on the right, or west, side of the street. The red brick approach structures on the left are going to be demolished when traffic is rerouted onto the new span.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking east along 54th avenue, which has been closed to traffic.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking south along Laurel Hill Blvd., towards Brooklyn and Newtown Creek, at 54th road.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Poking the lens through a hole in the fence under the current Kosciuszko Bridge, at what used to be the NYPD’s towing impound lot for Queens, but is now the staging area and offices of the DOT. .
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over on “used to be 43rd street,” and looking in a southwestern direction, you can see the new bridge’s roadway rising alongside the 1939 model.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking west towards Manhattan and Calvary Cemetery at 55th avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There was a lot of activity underway while these shots were captured, with construction workers and union guys moving heavy equipment around and doing all sorts of stuff. Welding, moving cranes about, working with concrete – that sort of thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Closer to the Newtown Creek, and looking over the former site of the Phelps Dodge company – a multi acre property deemed too toxic to be used as a parking lot for trucks. An early chemical factory – Nichols, later General Chemical, predated the Phelps Dodge copper refining operation which was once here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A better view of the Queens side ramp under construction.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking across the Newtown Creek to Brooklyn, where the roadway ramp is nearly finished and the concrete towers which the cable stays that will support the span over the water will be tied up to are practically complete.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back on Review Avenue/56th road, looking south towards Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Same spot, but looking north towards Sunnyside and Astoria from Review Avenue/56th road.
As a note – this stretch of road, which begins at Borden Avenue – is Review Avenue until the K Bridge, then it becomes 56th road until meeting 56th street whereupon it becomes Rust Street, which it remains until its terminus at Flushing Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whatever you want to call it, the engineers of the NYS DOT have spanned the street with a new roadway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The DOT plan focused attention on the Brooklyn side first, given how densely packed that section of DUKBO was, and how much more work that entailed. The Queens side, which has a lot more “elbow room” was always meant to be handled several months behind it on their schedule.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking back east, from the intersection of Laurel Hill Blvd. and Review Avenue, at the border of LIC’s Blissville and West Maspeth (or Berlin) in Queens’s DUKBO at the fabulous Newtown Creek.
The term “House of Moses” keeps on going through my head whenever I think about this project, incidentally. Every living New Yorker lives in the house that Robert Moses built, after all, and a big chunk of his early work is getting replaced. Luckily, I’m there to get shots of the show.
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base pairs
The veritable cusp of opportunity, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As is often opined, winter is a hellish interval for one such as myself. Extreme vulnerability to cold both effects and affects, and the forced climactic isolation within the walls of HQ during this period is just depressing. I’ve become an “outside” person in the last decade, and a day without a long walk is hardly worth waking up for.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s all about the photos for me, ultimately. Wandering about, seeing what I can see, recording but not interacting with the environment – that’s what a humble narrator likes. It’s not too much to ask for, I think. Luckily, Spring is on its way into town, and hopefully this year the season wont be two weeks long as it was last year when it seemed to go from freezing cold to high summer overnight.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is truly desirous of an end to the grays and browns, and a return to the blues and greens is welcome. Time to get back on the horse, roll my feet along the pavement, and get back to it. There’s a big beautiful world out there to complain about, and I’ve been stuck inside for too long.
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mortal assurances
Did you feel that? Did a truck just go by?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The geology of Western Queens is fairly fascinating. A humble narrator is interested in all things, and one of them is the very ground beneath his feet. Historically speaking, the zone which modernity calls Queens Plaza and Court Square in Long Island City were wetlands. There is rock down there somewhere, but the “craton” which underlies this section of a very Long Island was deposited by the glacial retreat at an odd angle which slopes downward as you head south. A craton is essentially a giant boulder, and that underground slab of rock which is found in LIC’s neck of the woods is buried beneath layers of naturally occurring clay and sand, and a loosely packed 20-30 foot thick layer of anthropogenic landfill material sits atop it. True geologic bedrock doesn’t appear until you get to Maspeth, where the terminal moraine of Long Island begins.
Municipal landfill began to reduce the wetlands and swamps of LIC beginning in the early 19th century, which buried many of the now lost tributaries of both Newtown and Sunswick Creeks which flowed through these parts. Once, you could sail from Newtown Creek all the way to Northern Blvd. at 31st street, and by once I mean 1881. The desire to stamp out typhus and cholera in LIC, Dutch Kills, and Astoria during the “sanitary era” is part of what provided impetus for the landfill process.
The construction of the Queensboro Bridge and the Sunnyside Yards in the first decade of the 20th century finished the job of reclaiming what was – by all accounts – a pestilential swamp. Modernity has forgotten all about that, just ask the East Side Access guys who accidentally found one of those buried waterways – a catastrophic discovery which delayed their progress and added billions of dollars onto the cost of the project.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now, I’m not much of anything, let alone an engineer or a geologist. What I am, however, is a guy with a collection of old maps and a series of books which describe what things were like in the area surrounding Jane Street Queens Plaza from the colonial period to the start of the 20th century. The engineers who worked on Sunnyside Yards described some pretty esoteric conditions at the corner of Skillman and Thompson – for instance – including mud that would form 18 feet high waves spontaneously as the tidal action from surrounding waters transmitted through it. The Ravenswood houses are built on a tidal pond/marsh/swamp formed by Sunswick Creek, and the area around the present day LaGuardia Community college was known as the “waste meadows” until Michael Degnon got ahold of them in the 1910’s and filled the wetland swamps in with rock tailings harvested from the subway tunnels which his company was working on.
I’m also a guy who understands that even the stoutest limb will crack if it’s made to bear weight beyond its tolerance. Now, it’s pretty unlikely that a craton, which is a boloid of rock the size of an asteroid that is miles across and thousands of feet thick, would crack. It could sink, however, into the glacial till which it rests upon. This fills me with real concern, given the whole climate change/sea level thing that the Republicans claim isn’t happening. How much crap can you pile in one place before something “gives”?
The firmament is literally shaking in LIC these days, what with all the high rise construction going on, and the truck loads of structural steel and concrete rolling through.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My buddies in construction tell me that once you find solid footing – driving steel and concrete down until it meets that rock craton – you can pretty much build as big as you want. The piles sit on the rock, then you create a concrete slab which provides for a stable surface that spreads weight load out over a large area, and you build. Engineers calculated wind sheer, vibration, soil solidity and a thousand other factors years before the first shovelful of earth was turned. An elaborate bureaucracy of planners and building specialists have scoured the plans, looked for any possible error or issue, and made corrections when warranted. Believe when I tell you, these people won’t allow any single structure to crack the earth open anywhere in NYC.
Saying that, they are all largely looking at projects on an individual basis, and not a holistic whole. What will happen when everything scrapes the sky? Will the ground continue to shake, or will LIC just sink?
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abundant melancholy
Yo, you seeing what I’m seeing?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above is representative of how such a scene would appear to a raccoon, a seal, a dolphin or just about any whale. It’s also likely how it appears to a human being who suffers from a condition called Achromatopsia (which there are several different forms of, some congenital and others acquired). Achromatopsia is the lack of any color vision whatsoever, with the entire visual experience of those afflicted rendered in shades of gray. While this can be considered “quite goth” and is somehow poetic – it’s a pretty serious vision disease.
“Normal” human eyes are meant to perceive color. The typical human eye can discern around one million colors, whereas the eye of an Achromatopsiac can only see about a hundred shades of gray.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The neurologist Oliver Sachs once pointed out that whereas there’s a frequency of reflected light which humans will agree upon as being “red,” or “blue,” there is no way to test whether or not we are all actually seeing the exact same thing. Is my “coca cola” red your “coca cola” or is it a little more “fire engine” or “cherry”?
Odds are they’re not, as we aren’t really “seeing” anything. The brain is creating the things we see based on the limited amount of the raw photonic data, as collected by the eyes, which it decides to process. You generally don’t notice how much dust there is in the air unless a shaft of sunlight illuminates, it causing the brain to “notice” the anomaly and render it visually. Essentially, brains compress collected light into a construct which jibes with what the other senses are telling it.
Is that an image of a cormorant? Nope, it’s a capture of the light which was bouncing around one day when a cormorant swam by, which our brains process and interpret using a chemical database of prior observations called memories. Looks like a cormorant, though.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A lot of the information passing through the optic nerve is actually jettisoned by the brain. We don’t perceive the higher and lower frequencies of light – infrared or ultraviolet. Some critters have traded the ability to see the mid range entirely to focus on these spectrums, like the bee. Invisible light isn’t just a song from Sting’s old band “The Police” and it’s always been something a humble narrator is intensely curious about.
There are specialist cameras out there – security and nighttime cameras use a set of near infrared LED emitters to pump out a bright stream of IR light which these cameras can visualize and record. There’s also UV and IR film stocks, as well as esoteric lens filters and all sorts of DIY equipment you can use for the task of seeing the unseeable. Long have I had my eye on a camera kit offered by Nikon which is intended for the use of Police forensics teams, as said device can operate in both IR and UV to aid in the capture of splattered bodily fluids at crime scenes. Unfortunately, the unit is quite expensive and you need to flash credentials when purchasing it.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
squamous litanies
It’s a real migraine out there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s face it, what we New Yorkers actually do is raise a hell of a ruckus wherever we are, but especially so when we’re at home. Personal experience of visiting relatively rural and quiet areas, like Vermont, reveals the effect on my hearing that living in this constant din has wrought. For 24-48 hours after leaving the City, there’s a high pitched phantom tone constantly present. I’ve always thought that the “wheeeeeee” sound, in addition to having a medical definition and name, is my brains attempt to filter out the constant rumble and thunder of city life – cerebral noise cancelling if you will.
All the engines, and generators, exhaust fans, jets, car tires on asphalt, buzzing things on utility poles, everybody talking, the subways, the chattering of millions of birds – the air is polluted not just with toxic gases and sewage bacteria rising on the breeze from out of the harbor – but with noise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s only during power outages and blizzards that you get to hear the City hush up for a while. I’d settle for regular powers like being able to effectively climb a ladder or balance my check book, but a humble narrator has often fantasized about possessing some sort of super power. My first choice would be invulnerability, of course, but a lot of the really interesting choices involve sight and perception. X-Ray vision? I’d worry about giving people cancer just by looking at them. Being able to fly without the invulnerability would actually be kind of dangerous.
What if you could visualize sound?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I know, that’s the sort of thing somebody would ask in a dorm room shortly after passing the bong, but still.
The BQE would probably look like something from Van Gogh, with crashing scalars creating fractal wavefronts which bounce and dance along the road itself and all the brick walls of the buildings which the highway weaves through. The East River would likely be a majestic sight, and would exhibit something akin to a sonic Jackson Pollack painting.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 