Posts Tagged ‘newtown creek’
tireless and continuing
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Missives regarding the Newtown Creek reach my desk all the time, mostly describing activist causes and far reaching governmental plans, but a particular message from the United States Coast Guard seemed to be the sort of thing which will likely affect the communities (on both sides and upon the water) which are nearby the troubled waterway so I decided to share it with you.
The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge is going to receiving attention, this summer, from NYC DOT bridge painting crews.
from federalregister.gov
The Commander, First Coast Guard District, has issued a temporary deviation from the regulation governing the operation of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge across Newtown Creek, mile 1.3, at New York City, New York. The deviation is necessary to facilitate bridge painting operations. Under this temporary deviation, the bridge may remain in the closed position for various times up to six days at a time during a four month period.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the sound of it, the main inconvenience will be felt by the maritime community, as the bridge repair will render the drawbridge static for as long as six days at a pop between May and September.
For drivers, and this is an incredibly busy span, one suspects that there will be traffic tie ups and lane closures but this is conjecture based solely on the behavioral and occupational patterns exhibited and displayed by DOT crews and their contractors on other projects around the City.
One suspects that the four day windows when the draw bridge is open for “business as usual” shall also witness a higher than normal number of bridge openings, which is good for me, of course as lots and lots of tugboats will be lined up along the Creek.
also from federalregister.gov
The bridge owner, New York City Department of Transportation, requested multiple six day closure periods between May 1, 2013 and September 30, 2013, to facilitate bridge painting operation at the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge. Each six day closure period will be followed with four days of normal bridge operations. The exact time and dates of each six day closure period will be announced in the Local Notice to Mariners and also with a Broadcast Notice to Mariners at least two weeks in advance of each closure period. This temporary deviation will be in effect from May 1, 2013 through September 30, 2013.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
C’est la vie, life in the big city, and what can you do about it anyway?
Such maintenance is a necessary inconvenience to keep the structure from rotting away into a corroded heap. The waters of the Newtown Creek, just like the East River, are brackish. Salt is the natural enemy of steel and no one wishes to see a traffic mess like the one created by the 1987 rebuild of the bridge occur anytime soon.
Additionally, although I imagine that the Public Art Commission will approve the continued usage of “Aluminum Green” paints for the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, I would suggest that using “Pulaski Red” all the way back to the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge would visually unite and “Brand” the Bridges of Newtown Creek.
from nyc.gov
The first bridge on this site, a drawbridge known as the Blissville, was built in the 1850’s. It was succeeded by three other bridges before a new one was completed in March 1900 at a cost of $58,519. That bridge received extensive repairs after a fire in 1919 damaged parts of the center pier fender, the southerly abutment, and the superstructure. Until that time, the bridge had also carried tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. The current bridge was built in 1987.
Also: Upcoming Tours!
13 Steps around Dutch Kills– Saturday, May 4, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
Parks and Petroleum- Sunday, May 12, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Newtown Creek Alliance, tickets now on sale.
The Insalubrious Valley- Saturday, May 25, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets on sale soon.
Hidden Harbor: Newtown Creek tour with Mitch Waxman – Sunday, May 26,2013
Boat tour presented by the Working Harbor Committee,
Limited seating available, order advance tickets now. Group rates available.
chill void
follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Shortly after leaving the East River Ferry at 2nd street in Long Island City the other day, and having found a convenient and quite well hidden spot to urinate upon (scent marking my territory should another photo blogger happen by), a general flurry of photography was undertaken.
My practice these days is to limit myself to just two or three shots of any particular subject, randomly encountered, yet despite this rule- so many interesting things were happening all around me on the walk back to Astoria that I ended up cracking out nearly 300 shots in just a couple of miles. One in three ended up making it into the permanent collection, and around half of those ended up at my Flickr account.
It was down in DUPBO, Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp, that I first noticed something out of the ordinary.
from wikipedia
Scent marking (also known as spraying or territorial marking) is behavior used by animals to identify their territory. Most commonly, this is accomplished by depositing strong-smelling substances, sometimes by urinating on prominent objects within the territory. Often the scent contains carrier proteins, such as the major urinary proteins, to stabilize the odours and maintain them for longer.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These shots will look a bit rough, as I was armed only with short lens, rather than the sort of telescopic unit which would provide for a longer optical reach. Normally these wouldn’t pass the QC test and be presented to you lords and ladies, but on this particular day in early April- a pair of Swans were plying the waters of the Nations most polluted and highly industrial waterway.
Such an occurrence requires some comment.
from wikipedia
Many of the cultural aspects refer to the Mute Swan of Europe. Perhaps the best known story about a swan is The Ugly Duckling fairytale. The story centres on a duckling that is mistreated until it becomes evident he is a swan and is accepted into the habitat. He was mistreated because real ducklings are, according to many, more attractive than a cygnet, yet cygnets become swans, which are very attractive creatures. Swans are often a symbol of love or fidelity because of their long-lasting, apparently monogamous relationships. See the famous swan-related operas Lohengrin and Parsifal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Extreme cropping, Swans.
The surprising diversity of life found along this waterway, which certain Government officials have referred to (in person, to me) as a “dead sea.” They’re joining the Cormorants, Great Blue Herons, Night Herons, Snowy Egrets, Ospreys, and dozens of other exotic species which have been witnessed here. Swans.
also from wikipedia
The swans are the largest members of the waterfowl family Anatidae, and are among the largest flying birds. The largest species, including the mute swan, trumpeter swan, and whooper swan, can reach length of over 1.5 m (60 inches) and weigh over 15 kg (33 pounds). Their wingspans can be almost 3 m (10 ft). Compared to the closely related geese, they are much larger in size and have proportionally larger feet and necks.[2] They also have a patch of unfeathered skin between the eyes and bill in adults. The sexes are alike in plumage, but males are generally bigger and heavier than females.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Stunned by the sighting, I wasn’t paying attention when a flash of movement from within this ancient sewer caught my attention. Can’t tell you what it was, but it was big and shaggy. A raccoon perhaps, or an enormous rat, but an eerie sense of presence seemed to permeate the aperture. I’m probably just being paranoid, but… what if?
Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
from wikipedia
The worms can survive with little oxygen by waving hemoglobin-rich tail ends to exploit all available oxygen, and can exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen through their thin skins, in a manner similar to frogs. They can also survive in areas heavily polluted with organic matter that almost no other species can endure. By forming a protective cyst and lowering its metabolic rate, T. tubifex can survive drought and food shortage. Encystment may also function in the dispersal of the worm. They usually inhabit the bottom sediments of lakes, rivers, and occasionally sewer lines and outlets.
Also: Upcoming Tours!
A free event, “Watch Wildlife on Maspeth Creek with NCA and DEC!” – Friday, April 26
Meetup at Maspeth Creek at 1 p.m., for more information visit newtowncreekalliance.org.
13 Steps around Dutch Kills– Saturday, May 4, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
Parks and Petroleum- Sunday, May 12, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Newtown Creek Alliance, tickets on sale soon.
The Insalubrious Valley- Saturday, May 25, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets on sale soon.
Hidden Harbor: Newtown Creek tour with Mitch Waxman – Sunday, May 26,2013
Boat tour presented by the Working Harbor Committee,
Limited seating available, order advance tickets now. Group rates available.
shimmers weirdly
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
note: I’m moving around the time at which NP posts will arrive, and will be for the next couple of weeks. Daily updates are still coming, just not at the predictable 12:15 a.m. There’s a lot of “under the hood” reasons for this, and necessary, sorry for the inconvenience. Best bet is to subscribe to the blog in the box at the upper right hand corner of the page. No spam, I promise.
Lost as always in self referential spirals of shame and sorrow, your humble narrator has found himself drawn into and subjected to Manhattan over and over during the course of the last several months (which has been referred to a few times in recent postings).
Nepenthe has been found in using the East River Ferry to translocate between boroughs, rather than suffering within the sweating concrete and tiled corridors of an underground light rail system, powered by electrical means, which is simply referred to as the “Subway” whose best quality is discovered when one encounters its exit.
That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I’ve never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window – no, I don’t feel how small I am – but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
– from The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand (1943)
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Truly, I should never leave this place. When l’m near, the fires of a thousand suns ignite in my heart, whose timorous action quickens in response. Even the Megalith of Long Island City, and that unspeakable thing which cannot possibly exist in its cupola, stirs a warm sense of nostalgic yearning and a feeling of familial homecoming within me. What can I say, other than that the only place where a creature like me seems to make any sense is within the confines of the Newtown Pentacle?
The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?.
– from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, by Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1882.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For one such as myself, the only place one can actually hope to call home might be the lamentable and oft commented upon tributary of a river which is not a river called the Newtown Creek, a place which is neither good nor bad but rather just “is.” This is where I belong.
The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me, for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author’s perspective. There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression. I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. Like the late Mr. Wilde, “I live in terror of not being misunderstood.”
– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Defence Remains Open!” (April 1921), published in “Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 53.”
Also: Upcoming Tours!
13 Steps around Dutch Kills– Saturday, May 4, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
Parks and Petroleum- Sunday, May 12, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Newtown Creek Alliance, tickets on sale soon.
The Insalubrious Valley- Saturday, May 25, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets on sale soon.
Hidden Harbor: Newtown Creek tour with Mitch Waxman – Sunday, May 26,2013
Boat tour presented by the Working Harbor Committee,
Limited seating available, order advance tickets now. Group rates available.
cold flame
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Does a humble narrator ever leave Queens or Brooklyn? Not if one can help it, but of late, Manhattan’s demands have been omnipresent. Forth and back has one hurtled, to experience the litany of errors which rule the once proud center of the Megalopolis, all the time dreaming of the majesties of that harmonic convergence of ill fortune known as the Newtown Creek. Oh to gambol along the banks of sun drenched Maspeth Creek, or to stagger in awed silence along Dutch Kills, rather than to endure the incompetent malaise of Manhattan.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It used to be fun, like some of my relatives, but the City has become a theme park of sorts. There are popular rides with long lines, but everywhere there is falseness and facade. Here in Queens, along this tributary of forgotten memory, is found a true place. A place of power and ambition, where hyper capitalism ran amok, creating a toxic wasteland amidst the concrete devastations which it called “progress.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Weird chemical and biological processes are always at work in the sediments of Dutch Kills, and often will plumes of some unknowable composition billow about in those waters found beneath the tension of the surface. It is easy to believe the wild accusations of area wags, regarding this place, when they refer to it as cursed and cancerous. What do they know, these sisyphean dwarves, sitting in their ivory towers of thwarted ambition and thinking only of darkness and revenge?
Also: Upcoming Tours!
Glittering Realms– Saturday, April 20, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
13 Steps around Dutch Kills– Saturday, May 4, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
Parks and Petroleum- Sunday, May 12, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Newtown Creek Alliance, tickets on sale soon.
The Insalubrious Valley- Saturday, May 25, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets on sale soon.
Hidden Harbor: Newtown Creek tour with Mitch Waxman – Sunday, May 26,2013
Boat tour presented by the Working Harbor Committee,
Limited seating available, order advance tickets now. Group rates available.
crawl circuitously
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just last week, as a dramatic downpour doused New York City, your humble narrator was at a Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee meeting at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint debating the finer points of some signage which the DEP wants to hang on their fence line at the plant and for which they were seeking community input. When the clouds burst, however, and rain began to lash at the windows- one grabbed for the camera and headed to the door. If you’re at the largest sewer plant in New York City during a cloudburst, you take some pictures.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A quarter inch of rain, citywide, becomes a raging river of one billion gallons surging through the combined sewer system. Combined sewers, a term indicating that storm and sanitary sewers share the same pipes, are one of the City’s “original sins.” This billion gallon per quarter inch torrent has no where to go except for sewers, which when added to the regular sewage flow, “outfalls” into those waterways which distinguish and define our little archipelago.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The system of waste water treatment plants which are maintained by the DEP can handle some of this flow, using ingenious systems of weirs and diversion tunnels to slow down and store it for treatment, but a lot of the water hurtling through their network of sometimes centuries old pipe ends up going directly into the environment untreated. This is the problem which most afflicts my beloved Newtown Creek, but its also a big part of what’s wrong with the East and Hudson Rivers as well as all the smaller waterways found all around the harbor. This is also the reason why advisories are issued not to swim at area beaches following a storm.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Unfortunately, there’s little that can be practically done about it. If we who are taxed asked those who are elected to spend our money to remedy the situation, the astronomical bill incurred would bankrupt the Municipal, State, and quite possibly the Federal governments. It would involve opening up every street in New York City, remapping the gravity driven sewer system which has grown in spurts over the last 300 years, and begin building a brand new dual system. This would be catastrophically expensive, disruptive to every facet of the community, and take decades.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A simple thing each of us can do, based on an old adage- don’t waste a gallon of water on a pint of piss- is simply to not flush the toilet unnecessarily when its raining. By not adding your “constituents” to the flow during rain events, and I mean number one not two, you can help alleviate a significant amount of stress on the system and ensure that sewage does not wash out into the harbor with the storm water. This may seem “gross,” but here’s the question- can you tolerate leaving a bit of urine in the toilet for an hour or two until it stops raining or would you rather swim or boat in your own piss tomorrow?
Also: Upcoming Tours!
Glittering Realms– Saturday, April 20, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
13 Steps around Dutch Kills– Saturday, May 4, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets now on sale.
Parks and Petroleum- Sunday, May 12, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Newtown Creek Alliance, tickets on sale soon.
The Insalubrious Valley- Saturday, May 25, 2013
Newtown Creek walking tour with Mitch Waxman and Atlas Obscura, tickets on sale soon.
Hidden Harbor: Newtown Creek tour with Mitch Waxman – Sunday, May 26,2013
Boat tour presented by the Working Harbor Committee,
Limited seating available, order advance tickets now. Group rates available.
The Newtown Pentacle 