Posts Tagged ‘newtown creek’
guilty agony
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Reeling from the implications of those utterances which- I must have imagined- were experienced in DUPBO, I scuttled fiercely away, hoping to reorient myself toward pursuits and thought patterns more comfortable, wholesome, and safe…
I headed for the long corridor that will connect to the Hunters Point South development, along that industrial roadway which begins at the old Vernon Avenue Bridge and which is defined by those ancient rail yards of the LIRR which lie just beyond the fences.
Along the way, Al Smith’s monument served as a polestar of navigation and material consistency throughout the swirling of my thoughts, as I drifted along numbly imagining that my name was being called from the direction of the Newtown Creek.
from wikipedia
The Cotard delusion or Cotard’s syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold a delusional belief that they are dead (either figuratively or literally), do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Visible from storied Greenpoint, a group of small boats illegally utilize the former bridge landing as an ad hoc marina, and there was a group of men climbing over the crumbling cement to access one of them. Their presence disturbed me, and I wondered if their party’s appearance was not accidental, but rather something covert.
Oh, why did I open that letter, the one whose dire message will forever rob me of peaceful sleep and whose implications have penetrated even into my dreams?
Seldom does good news arrive by postal missive, in my experience.
Deciding that these otherwise innocent characters might be a threat to me due to my gentle habits and extraordinary physical cowardice, I scuttled on.
from wikipedia
Cowardice, in general terms, is the perceived failure to demonstrate sufficient robustness in the face of a challenging situation. The term describes a personality trait which is viewed as a negative characteristic and has been frowned upon (see norms) within most, if not all global cultures, while courage, typically viewed as its direct opposite, is generally rewarded and encouraged.
Cowards are usually seen to have avoided or refused to engage in a confrontation or struggle which has been deemed good or righteous by the wider culture in which they live. On a more mundane level, the label may be applied to those who are regarded as too frightened or overwhelmed to defend their rights or those of others from aggressors in their lives.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As one moves from 54th avenue to 53rd, a pleasant enough scene awaits one observant to the ecstasies of old Long Island City’s low declination and squamously set building stock. Enormous in footprint, but small in height, the vast oceanic skies of the metropolitan archipelago peel open in the manner of some vast scroll framed by brick and fence.
The horizon becomes a three point perspective lesson, with a Shining City rising and occludes the horizon, over a River of Sound.
from wikipedia
In psychology, confabulation is the spontaneous narrative report of events that never happened. It consists of the creation of false memories, perceptions, or beliefs about the self or the environment usually as a result of neurological or psychological dysfunction. When it is a matter of memory, confabulation is the confusion of imagination with memory, or the confused application of true memories. Confabulations are difficult to differentiate from delusions and from lying. With respect to memory, wild confabulations about one’s past are rare in the absence of organic causes (e.g., brain damage), and the term “confabulation” is often restricted to these types of distortions. In contrast, even neurologically intact people are susceptible to memory errors or confusions due to psychological causes (see false memory).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Vast agglutiations of warehouse, distribution point, and industry can be observed here- best on a weekend as the place is quite busy and well populated during the week.
On weekend mornings, the curious indications of habitation by wandering mendicants are observed- bits of food, a worn shoe, or a soggy collection of windblown rags bearing an impression that suggests the shape of something very like a man. During winter months, the unremarked but obvious effects of camp fire upon ice is seen around discarded oil drums and other cast off containers.
from wikipedia
The core symptom of depersonalization disorder is the subjective experience of unreality, and as such there are no clinical signs. Common descriptions are: watching oneself from a distance; out-of-body experiences; a sense of just going through the motions; feeling as though one is in a dream or movie; not feeling in control of one’s speech or physical movements; and feeling detached from one’s own thoughts or emotions. Individuals with the disorder commonly describe a feeling as though time is ‘passing’ them by and they are not in the notion of the present. These experiences may cause a person to feel uneasy or anxious since they strike at the core of a person’s identity and consciousness.
Some of the more common factors that exacerbate dissociative symptoms are negative effects, stress, subjective threatening social interaction, and unfamiliar environments. Factors that tend to diminish symptoms are comforting interpersonal interactions, intense physical or emotional stimulation, and relaxation. Factors identified as relieving symptom severity such as diet, exercise, alcohol and fatigue, are listed by others as worsening symptoms.
Fears of going crazy, brain damage, and losing control are common complaints. Individuals report occupational impairments as they feel they are working below their ability, and interpersonal troubles since they have an emotional disconnection from those they care about. Neuropsychological testing has shown deficits in attention, short-term memory and spatial-temporal reasoning. Depersonalization disorder is associated with cognitive disruptions in early perceptual and attentional processes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Curious, the idiom of the place is purely functional, with vast sheets of cement and steel rebar flung about. Everywhere, slanted planes designed to accommodate trucking descend from the sidewalk into scummy puddles which collect at the bottom of the ramps. Fantastic machines which serve the cinema and television industries show just part of their arcane mechanisms over those great gates which occlude them.
from wikipedia
Akathisia may range in intensity from a mild sense of disquiet or anxiety, to a total inability to sit still, accompanied by overwhelming anxiety, malaise, and severe dysphoria (manifesting as an almost indescribable sense of terror and doom). The condition is difficult for the patient to describe and is often misdiagnosed. When misdiagnosis occurs in antipsychotic neuroleptic-induced akathisia, more antipsychotic neuroleptics may be prescribed, potentially worsening the symptoms. High-functioning patients have described the feeling as a sense of inner tension and torment or chemical torture.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking south down second street, toward the mouth of the Newtown Creek where it congeals and mixes with the East River, and where the Hunters Point South project is in its earliest stages.
To the right is Water Taxi Beach’s new home, and the left looks nearly all the way back to the intersection of 54th and 53rd avenues. Behind me lies the beginnings of Tower Town, and the vast new constructions just beginning at 51st avenue.
This point, far from the Newtown Creek, is where I stopped imagining that gurgling auditory murmur that seemed to be repeating my name over and over.
from wikipedia
Emotional detachment in the first sense above often arises from psychological trauma and is a component in many anxiety and stress disorders. The person, while physically present, moves elsewhere in the mind, and in a sense is “not entirely present”, making them sometimes be seen as preoccupied or distracted. In other cases, the person may seem fully present but operate merely intellectually when emotional connection would be appropriate. This may present an extreme difficulty in giving or receiving empathy and can be related to the spectrum of narcissistic personality disorder.
Thus, such detachment is often not as outwardly obvious as other psychiatric symptoms; people with this problem often have emotional systems that are in overdrive. They have a hard time being a loving family member. They avoid activities, places, and people associated with any traumatic events they have experienced. The dissociation can also lead to lack of attention and, hence, to memory problems and in extreme cases, amnesia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Crossing 2nd street, I began to feel safer, and convinced myself that the vocalizations were mere hallucination. Often it is easier to consider oneself mad, than to confront the existential realities of the Newtown Pentacle head on. Sometimes it is better to just believe that you’re just crazy… that is what I was thinking as I headed for Tower Town, but I’m all ‘effed up.
Would that I had never opened that letter… nay… that it was ever delivered…
from Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human at wikisource
ART DANGEROUS TO THE ARTIST.— When art seizes violently on an individual it draws him back to the conceptions of those ages in which art flourished most mightily, and then it effects a retrogression in him. The artist acquires increasing reverence for sudden excitations, believes in gods and demons, instills a soul into nature, hates the sciences, becomes changeable of mood as were the men of antiquity and longs for an overthrowing of everything unfavorable to art, and he does this with all the vehemence and unreasonableness of a child. The artist is in himself already a retarded being, inasmuch as he has halted at games that pertain to youth and childhood: to this there is now added his gradual retrogression to earlier times. Thus there at last arises a violent antagonism between him and the men of his period, of his own age, and his end is gloomy; just as, according to the tales told in antiquity, Homer and Aeschylus at last lived and died in melancholia.
isolated phenomena
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Would that I never opened that hated letter. Oh, unhappy act.
A cloak of comfortable ignorance would still drape your humble narrator, and this existential terror would not subsume every moment of my days. In no uncertain terms, a large and shadowy cabal has taken notice of this- your Newtown Pentacle- and focused their attentions upon me. Vast machinations, whose byzantine splendor indicates a guiding master hand, closes about my throat. Proof of it arrived just the other day…
I’m all ‘effed up.
from wikipedia
Schizophrenia is often described in terms of positive and negative (or deficit) symptoms. The term positive symptoms refers to symptoms that most individuals do not normally experience but are present in schizophrenia. They include delusions, auditory hallucinations, and thought disorder, and are typically regarded as manifestations of psychosis. Negative symptoms are things that are not present in schizophrenic persons but are normally found in healthy persons, that is, symptoms that reflect the loss or absence of normal traits or abilities. Common negative symptoms include flat or blunted affect and emotion, poverty of speech (alogia), inability to experience pleasure (anhedonia), lack of desire to form relationships (asociality), and lack of motivation (avolition). Research suggests that negative symptoms contribute more to poor quality of life, functional disability, and the burden on others than do positive symptoms.
A third symptom grouping, the disorganization syndrome, is sometimes described, and includes chaotic speech, thought, and behavior. There is evidence for a number of other symptom classifications.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Upon receipt of that malign missive, delivered by a sturdy Postal Employee who claims his name is “Mr. Lee”, a fugue state came over me and solace was sought in sanguine familiarity.
Often, when subsumed by malignity in my thought process, your humble narrator seeks out the familiar- something quantifiable, knowable, and grand. Strapping on my camera, and setting my iPhone to a playlist heavy on early Patti Smith, I descended from the densely populated hills of Astoria and set off for the Newtown Creek.
By the time that my playlist had cycled through the first 20 songs, and hit the Mountain Goats song “Lovecraft in Brooklyn“, I was in DUPBO (Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp).
from wikipedia
Persecutory delusions, also known as querulant delusions, are the most common type of delusions.
The affected person believes they are being persecuted. Specifically, they have been defined as containing two central elements:
– The individual thinks that harm is occurring, or is going to occur,
– The individual thinks that the persecutor has the intention to cause harm.
– The perceived persecution may involve the theme of being followed, harassed, cheated, poisoned or drugged, conspired against, spied on, attacked, or obstructed in the pursuit of goals.
Sometimes the delusion is isolated and fragmented, but sometimes are well-organized belief systems involving a complex set of delusions (“systematized delusions”). People with a set of persecutory delusions may believe, for example, they are being followed by government organizations because the “persecuted” person has been falsely identified as a spy. These systems of beliefs can be so broad and complex that they can explain everything that happens to the person.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The roaring silence of the place, which normally enhances the wonders observed in this forgotten and lonely angle between Long Island City and Greenpoint, did not comfort me. Suddenly, I was pulling the ear buds from my sense organs, as I perceived an antiphonal muttering that sounded like the hebraic ritual name assigned to me by prelates at the coming of age ceremonies well known to even Gentile readers.
Of course, it was just the coincidence of aural background sounds, the vast traffic flow and heavy infrastructure all around DUPBO causes everything around to vibrate slightly creating a sustained field of infrasound that is just beyond the limits of human auditory capabilities. I’m sure an Elephant or Cetacean could tell us what it sounds like, if only we could understand their languages.
from wikipedia
The ancient world viewed hallucinations as it did most of the natural world, with awe and superstition. As such, it was viewed as either a gift or curse by God, or the gods (depending on the specific culture). The oracles of ancient Greece were known to experience auditory hallucinations while breathing in certain neurologically active vapors, while the more pervasive delusions and symptomology were often viewed as possession by demonic forces as punishment for misdeeds.
Treatments
Treatment in the ancient world is ill documented, but there are some cases of therapeutics being used to attempt treatment, while the common treatment was sacrifice and prayer in an attempt to placate the gods. The Dark Ages saw the most horrific accounts where the suffered of auditory hallucinations were subjected to trepanning or trial as a witch. In other cases of extreme symptomology individuals were seen as being reduced to animals by a curse, these individuals were either left on the streets or imprisoned in insane asylums. It was the latter response that eventually led to modern psychiatric hospitals.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking around me, only the poetry of the street stood, and I experienced goose bumps despite the sultry climes suffered by all New Yorkers that day. I imagined that… it must have been an imagining… a mind fever brought on by dehydration or thermal exhaustion… I imagined, damn it- imagined- that I heard a heavy splash in the waters of Newtown Creek, just over the wall separating DUPBO from its waterline…
I will not admit to it, running, except to say that I scuttled away… quickly, and set my iPhone to periodically email my location to Our Lady of the Pentacle should the need arise for her to attempt to find my remains.
from wikipedia
Hypervigilance is an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hypervigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion. Other symptoms include: abnormally increased arousal, a high responsiveness to stimuli and a constant scanning of the environment for threats. Hypervigilance can be a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder and various types of anxiety disorder. It is distinguished from paranoia. Paranoid states, such as those in schizophrenia can seem superficially similar, but are in fact characteristically different.
Hypervigilance is differentiated from dysphoric hyperarousal in that the person remains cogent and aware of his surroundings. In dysphoric hyperarousal the PTSD victim may lose contact with reality and re-experience the traumatic event verbatim. Where there have been multiple traumas, a person may become hypervigilant and suffer severe anxiety attacks intense enough to induce a delusional state where the effect of the traumas overlap: e.g. one remembered firefight may seem too much like another for the person to maintain calm. This can result in the thousand yard stare.
a sea of roots
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Obliviated by exposure to the volatile climate of New York City, this cruciform statue adorns the small chapel found nearby the Johnston Mausoleum in First Calvary Cemetery. Depicting the latin, or suffering Christ, the affectation of its artificer in the choice of wood for its construction is both noted and appreciated. Raised in the Hebrew faith, your humble narrator abstains from ritual and dogma as an adult, and instead prefers to believe that every thing is true if one believes in it hard enough. Thor, Buddha, the Orishas, all true.
Atheism is a religion as well- a cohesive and dogmatic system of belief with absolute truths and undeniable heresies. It’s all magick, this jumping about and chest beating we call religion.
My personal world view and moral compass, of course, is built around the simple question “what would Superman do? or WWSD?” Measuring against this rubric, I must always come up short. Superman would have found Gilman by now, but he has x-ray eyes after all. I’m all ‘effed up.
Note: an interesting counterpoint to the suffering of the Latin Christ is the Hellenic “Christ as Athlete” tradition. This photo is from a Cretan church I visited a while back, it’s in a former fishing village called Kalives- notice the physicality and robust physique of the Eastern Christ in comparison to the mendicant like interpretations of the West. The Byzantine tradition focuses a great deal more on the power of the redeemed and revealed godhead, rather than dwelling on its journey “through the meat” that ends on Golgotha.
from wikipedia
Western crucifixes may show Christ dead or alive, the presence of the spear wound in his ribs traditionally indicating that he is dead. In either case his face very often shows his suffering. In Orthodoxy he has normally been shown as dead since around the end of the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm. Eastern crucifixes have Jesus’ two feet nailed side by side, rather than crossed one above the other, as Western crucifixes have showed them for many centuries. The crown of thorns is also generally absent in Eastern crucifixes, since the emphasis is not on Christ’s suffering, but on his triumph over sin and death. The “S”-shaped position of Jesus’ body on the cross is a Byzantine innovation of the late 10th century, though also found in the German Gero Cross of the same date. Probably more from Byzantine influence, it spread elsewhere in the West, especially to Italy, by the Romanesque period, though it was more usual in painting than sculpted corpuses. Since the Renaissance the “S”-shape is generally much less pronounced. Eastern Christian blessing crosses will often have the Crucifixion depicted on one side, and the Resurrection on the other, illustrating the understanding of Orthodox theology that the Crucifixion and Resurrection are two intimately related aspects of the same act of salvation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whether decided by landscape design or geology, there are a series of steep hills at Calvary. Early maps and 19th century illustrations detail this land as quite hilly even before 1848, when the Rt. Rev. Bishop Hughes solemnly blessed and consecrated this place- formerly part of the Alsop plantation- as Calvary Cemetery on the 27th of July. The Alsops are still here, resting in a narrow plot of Protestant loam fenced off from the rest of the place. The deal that the Catholic Church struck with the family for the land stipulated that the protestant Alsop section must be maintained in perpetuity, and its organs have maintained the ancient agreement- rumor states that this is the only Protestant section to be found in a Catholic cemetery upon the Earth.
from junipercivic.com
The male children of the first Richard Alsop, Thomas, Richard and John, became prominent in the legal profession and mercantile life. The children of the second Richard adhered to the ancestral seat in Newtown and married into the Sacketts, the Brinckerhoffs the Whiteheads, the Fisks, the Woodwards and the Hazzards – names now extinct save as they appear on the tombstones, many of which are sadly neglected. The Alsop Cemetery is within Calvary Cemetery, which absorbed all of the property, and is thus certain of receiving proper care. The owner in trust of the reservation is William Alsop, the only living lineal descendant, who resides in New York at present, but for a great many years had his abode in Florida. The family relics have disappeared almost entirely. The only thing that remains to be cherished is an old clock, which is in the remaining descendant’s possession. The house itself, two centuries and a quarter old, has now disappeared forever.
The yellow fever epidemic of 1798 made havoc in the Alsop household, and two tombstones mark the graves of the victims, one of whom was Elizabeth Fish, the widow of Jonathan Fish. She was the widow of the grandfather of President Grant’s Secretary of State. Several slaves died of the contagion, and one at least called Venus, on account of her remarkable beauty, was buried in the family plot. The graves were made ready before death, and no coffins were used. The bodies were merely wrapped in the infected cloths, saturated with pitch and tar, and hastily interred. The slaves’ graves are not marked by stick or stone, because the custom of that time forbade it. The house at one time occupied by Peter Donohue, near the side entrance of Calvary, at Blissville, was built by Thomas Alsop, the father of William. Eventually, it fell into the hands of Paul Rapelyea. The farm surrounding it was part of the Alsop estate, derived from the marriage of Thomas Wandell with the widow Herrick, who owned it in 1750.
After the death of Richard Alsop in 1790, the property was divided between the sons, John and Thomas. John retained the old homestead, and Thomas received the Blissville section. John Alsop died in April 1837, and his widow sold the property to a corporation, and it now embraced in Calvary. John Alsop left no children. Thomas, his brother, married Catherine Brinckerhoff, the daughter of George, a Revolutionary patriot residing at Dutch Kills. A British officer, Finlay McKay, cut his name on a pane of glass in the old Brinckerhoff house in 1776, and it remains there to this day. The well on the Alsop property, which was sunk at the time the mansion was built, still supplies water to many families in the neighborhood. The house was one hundred feet long, and the first floor was divided into four rooms, with a hallway eighteen feet wide. Two round windows, resembling port holes, were cut in the ends of the building in 1776 by Lord Cornwallis for musket practice, and as lookouts to guard against surprise. The chimney place, around which the slaves need to gather, had the capacity of receiving logs of wood ten feet in length. Rufus King married Mary Alsop. He died at Jamaica in 1827. Of this union came John Alsop King, who was Governor of this state from 1857 to 1859.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Johnston Mausoleum is surely the grandest structure, beyond the ceremonial chapel of the Cemetery itself, to be found here at First Calvary. Smaller tombs and mausolea ring the hillsides, as do vaults whose gated entry points hide tunneled corridors which burrow into the earth to unknown depths. The shot above, for instance, was captured while standing on the earthworks which bury just such a vault. Just as every other form of city, the Necropolis maintains infrastructure. Calvary has its own sewer system, roads, and irrigation channels. A vast buried culvert underlies the place, providing drainage for this formerly swamped valley of the shadow. Who can guess, what it is, that might be buried down there?
from wikisource.org, “How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis”
Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom the doctor’s skill is powerless to save. When the white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odds. Fifty “summer doctors,” especially trained to this work, are then sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with free advice and medicine for the poor. Devoted women follow in their track with care and nursing for the sick. Fresh-air excursions run daily out of New York on land and water; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers in Calvary work over-time, and little coffins are stacked mountains high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners’ boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Disturbing subsidences aside, there is obviously an expensive schedule of groundskeeping kept here, despite the ravages wrought upon the statuary and monuments by the acid rain and corrosive miasma which arises from the nearby Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Newtown Creek’s industrial activity. In all the time I’ve spent here, peaceful rustications of devastating loneliness, not once have I ever noted “the colour” which is both odd and remarkable. The pernicious influence of that otherworldly iridescence does not seem to penetrate the fencelines of Calvary. Perhaps it is hallowed, this ground, and the working invocations of Dagger John still protect this place from that which lies beyond its gates.
from wikipedia
John Joseph Hughes (June 24, 1797—January 3, 1864) was an Irish-born clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church. He was the fourth Bishop and first Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, serving between 1842 and his death in 1864.
A native of Northern Ireland, Hughes came to the United States in 1817, and became a priest in 1826 and a bishop in 1838. A figure of national prominence, he exercised great moral and social influence, and presided over a period of explosive growth for Catholicism in New York. He was regarded as “the best known, if not exactly the best loved, Catholic bishop in the country.” He also became known as “Dagger John” for his practice of signing his name with a dagger-like cross, as well as for his aggressive personality.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Proverbial, the needle in a haystack your humble narrator seeks is the grave of a certain man, named Gilman. Engendering frustratingly unproductive journeys to dangerously obscure corners of the City of Greater New York in the name of finding a certain document, which might be used as a cypher to decode the ancient graveyards mysteries, my searching for Gilman is frustrated. Your humble narrator has been reduced to performing a visual census, wandering the place looking for his name recorded in stone.
from archny.org
Our Catholic Cemeteries have a history as old as the catacombs. Early in the development of our Catholic tradition, our forefathers in the Faith found the ministry of burial of the dead to be most important. From the catacombs, where early Christians met secretly in prayer and entombed the mortal remains of the early martyrs, to today where the Archdiocesan cemeteries serve the needs of the millions of Catholics located in the greater New York area, our Catholic cemeteries silently bear witness to the respect we give the human body, even in death, because of its status as Temple of the Holy Spirit. Our Catholic cemeteries, filled with artistic expressions of our religious traditions, provide an environment of comfort in times of sorrow and are meant to continually remind us that Jesus Christ promised one day we would all be together in the Eternal Life of Resurrection.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
By 1900, nearly three quarters of a million people were buried here. Today, millions of interments are recorded. Many of these gravesites, according to Catholic tradition, represent a multiplicity of individual burials. Many of the stones and markers which once adorned these family plots are gone- destroyed or misplaced by careless workers, vandals, or in some cases lightning. Whatever records there are, maps and charts of the place, are sealed and vouchsafed by the bishops- who state categorically that the history of Calvary is no one’s business but that of those who are resident there. Frustrated, is my search for Gilman- by the sudden realization that the word “Gilman” was used during the 19th century as a given name- as well as surname.
from wikipedia, another Gilman with no tangible relation to the enigmatic Massachusetts man…
Henry Gilman (May 9, 1893, – November 7, 1986) was an American organic chemist known as the father of organometallic chemistry, the field within which his most notable work was done. He discovered the Gilman reagent, which bears his name…
For a short time after receiving his Ph.D., Henry Gilman worked an associate professor at the University of Illinois after being invited by his former instructor Roger Adams. In 1919, Gilman moved on to become an assistant professor in charge of organic chemistry at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University). At the age of 30, Gilman was given the title of full professor. While at Iowa State College, Gilman met Ruth V. Shaw, a student of his first-year organic chemistry class, and the two were married in 1929.
Gilman had high expectations for his graduate students, and it often took them more than twice as long as the norm to earn their degrees. They were expected to work in the research lab well into the night and on weekends. Gilman was known for frequently visiting the lab during the day and questioning each student as to what they had accomplished since his last visit. Gilman had another common practice for his graduate students. He would not assign a research project for his graduate students, but he would push students to produce a series of preparations. Students would write short publications that would spark ideas about additional experiments to perform, drawing all the material together to form a central thesis.
During his career, Gilman consulted for many companies such as Quaker Oats and DuPont, although he continued as a professor at Iowa State University, as it came to be known. At the usual retirement age of 70, at that time, Gilman chose not to retire from Iowa State University and remained active in research until 1975 when he was 82 years old.
World War II brought new opportunities for Gilman to do research for the government. He took part in the Manhattan Project, which was the code name for the government’s work on the atom bomb. Gilman concentrated on preparing volatile uranium derivatives, mainly dealing with alkoxides.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gilman… where is Gilman?
ratstravaganza or “I am not that demon swineherd”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The voice was familiar, polished by Marlboro and inflected by origin and experience in Astoria, when it asked “Do you want to take pictures of rats… I mean a whole lot of rats?”. One of my buddies, employed by a mid size garbage haulage company based in Maspeth, described the scene to me in lurid detail- when his trucks returned to the garage from a weekly garbage run (they normally specialize in certain recyclable materials, but also handle organics) rats would pour out of them and claim free reign over the enormous structure for a few hours. A home grown colony of rats, as well, were known to come spilling out of the walls when the lights went down.
from wikipedia, and note- this isn’t the company “waste management”, just the subject
Waste management is the collection, transport, processing, recycling or disposal, and monitoring of waste materials. The term usually relates to materials produced by human activity, and is generally undertaken to reduce their effect on health, the environment or aesthetics. Waste management is also carried out to recover resources from it. Waste management can involve solid, liquid, gaseous or radioactive substances, with different methods and fields of expertise for each.
Waste management practices differ for developed and developing nations, for urban and rural areas, and for residential and industrial producers. Management for non-hazardous residential and institutional waste in metropolitan areas is usually the responsibility of local government authorities, while management for non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste is usually the responsibility of the generator.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dark and effluent, the garage is a multiple acre building with 40-50 foot ceilings and cinder block walls. Industrial equipment is installed directly into concrete flooring, and in places there are pits and deep channels that allow the automated equipment room to operate. An amiable Brooklynite agreed to accompany me around the place, and steer me from hazardous drops familiar to him after a life time of occupation at the facility. I had to rely on flash photography and high ISO settings, as the quick moving rodents shied away from any attempt at lighting.
from wikipedia
Rats are known to burrow extensively, both in the wild and in captivity, if given access to a suitable substrate. Rats generally begin a new burrow adjacent to an object or structure, as this provides a sturdy “roof” for the section of the burrow nearest to the ground’s surface. Burrows usually develop to eventually include multiple levels of tunnels, as well as a secondary entrance. Older male rats will generally not burrow, while young males and females will burrow vigorously.
Burrows provide rats with shelter and food storage as well as safe, thermoregulated nest sites. Rats use their burrows to escape from perceived threats in the surrounding environment—for example, rats will retreat to their burrows following a sudden, loud noise or while fleeing an intruder. Burrowing can therefore be described as a “pre-encounter defensive behavior”, as opposed to a “post-encounter defensive behavior”, such as flight, freezing, or avoidance of a threatening stimulus.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scurriers abound in this cairn of municipal waste management, which is built in the industrial heartland of the Newtown Creek. Concentric layers of factory and mill are pancaked beneath the structures that have survived into modernity. Beneath the ground, collapsed crawl spaces and forgotten pipelines rifle through the poison soil. Memory of these voids beneath Maspeth is long dead, and the architectural plans that detail their course have long since turned to dust… or have been recycled.
from wikipedia
Industrial archaeology, like other branches of archaeology, is the study of material culture from the past, but with a focus on industry. Strictly speaking, industrial archaeology includes sites from the earliest times (such as prehistoric copper mining in the British Peak District) to the most recent (such as coal mining sites in the UK closed in the 1980s). However, since large-scale industrialisation began only in the eighteenth century it is often understood to relate to that and later periods. Industrial archaeologists aim to record and understand the remains of industrialisation, including the technology, transport and buildings associated with manufacture or raw material production. Their work encompasses traditional archaeology, engineering, architecture, economics and the social history of manufacturing/extractive industry as well as the transport and utilities sector.
The term ‘industrial archaeology’ was coined in the 1950s in Birmingham, England by Michael Rix (academic) although its meaning and interpretation has changed. Its development as a separate subject was further stimulated by the campaign to save the Euston Arch. Palmer and Neaverson (Industrial Archaeology Principles and Practice, 1998) defined it as: “the systematic study of structures and artefacts as a means of enlarging our understanding of the industrial past.”
Initially practiced largely by amateurs, it was at first looked down upon by professional archaeologists. However, it has now been welcomed into mainstream archaeology. Since the timeframe of study is usually relatively recent, industrial archaeology is often (but not always) able to achieve a more reliable and absolute recording of past behaviour than is possible for the more remote past.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Urban explorers have brought reports of this underworld to the surface, but they will only discuss the subject after a series of stiff drinks. Following the natural course of water, voids in the subsurface are found and accessed through sewer and electrical utility vaults. Compass readings and radio telephony are impossible beneath the streets, and hushed allusions to a pair from East Williamsburg who are rumored to have never returned from the sepulchral depths verge on urban legend. As one proceeds closer to the Newtown Creek, vast middens of rats are mentioned, living amidst and in some cases feeding on an oozing black jelly whose vile smell vaguely suggests vaseline mixed with ham.
from wikipedia
Petroleum jelly, petrolatum or soft paraffin[1], CAS number 8009-03-8, is a semi-solid mixture of hydrocarbons (with carbon numbers mainly higher than 25), originally promoted as a topical ointment for its healing properties. Its folkloric medicinal value as a “cure-all” has since been limited by better scientific understanding of appropriate and inappropriate uses (see Uses below). However, it is recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an approved over-the-counter (OTC) skin protectant and remains widely used in cosmetic skin care.
The raw material for petroleum jelly was discovered in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, United States, on some of the country’s first oil rigs. Workers disliked the paraffin-like material forming on rigs because it caused them to malfunction, but they used it on cuts and burns because it hastened healing.
Robert Chesebrough, a young chemist whose previous work of distilling fuel from the oil of sperm whales had been rendered obsolete by petroleum, went to Titusville to see what new materials had commercial potential. Chesebrough took the unrefined black “rod wax”, as the drillers called it, back to his laboratory to refine it and explore potential uses. Chesebrough discovered that by distilling the lighter, thinner oil products from the rod wax, he could create a light-colored gel. Chesebrough patented the process of making petroleum jelly by U.S. Patent No. 127,568 in 1872. The process involved vacuum distillation of the crude material followed by filtration of the still residue through bone char.
Chesebrough traveled around New York demonstrating the product to encourage sales by burning his skin with acid or an open flame, then spreading the ointment on his injuries and showing his past injuries healed, he claimed, by his miracle product.
He opened his first factory in 1870 in Brooklyn, United States. The brand name “Vaseline” has been anecdotally claimed to be from the German word for water, wasser (pronounced vahser), and the Greek word for oil, elaion, but this is unconfirmed.
The part of Brooklyn Chesebrough located his factory in, incidentally, was Red Hook and it was at Columbia and Delevan Streets.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My guide in the garage informed me that these rats were nearly impossible to control via the use of baited traps and poisons. It was his supposition that the whole place was poisoned, afflicted with some sort of chemical overdose, and pointed out the stunted trees that dot the area. I mentioned “the colour” and he said that was as good a name for it as any. He went on to say that the only thing which has alleviated the rat population in the garage at all is a raccoon which has taken up residence in the place.
That’s a raccoon, -which just showed up- in Maspeth, a few blocks from Newtown Creek.
from wikipedia
The area known today as Maspeth was chartered by Dutch and English settlers in the mid-17th century. The Dutch had purchased land in the area known today as Queens in 1635, and within a few years began chartering towns. In 1642 they settled Maspat, under a charter granted to Rev. Francis Doughty. Maspat became the first European settlement in Queens. The settlement was leveled the following year in an attack by Native Indians, and the surviving settlers returned to Manhattan. It wasn’t until nine years later, in 1652, that settlers ventured back to the area, settling an area slightly inland from the previous Maspat location. This new area was called Middleburg, and eventually developed into what is now the town of Elmhurst, bordering Maspeth. Following the immigration waves of the 19th century, Maspeth was home to a shanty town of Boyash (Ludar) Gypsies between 1925 and 1939, though this was eventually bulldozed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As we headed back for the office section of the facility, where my buddy awaited, my guide pointed out the cinder block wall and the apertures chewed through it by the rats. The rats are in the walls… there are rats in the walls, the rats… in… the… walls…
Just then, my buddy walked out and asked if I enjoyed my “ratstravaganza”.
from HP Lovecraft’s “Rats in the walls” at wikisource
When Dr Trask, the anthropologist, stopped to classify the skulls, he found a degraded mixture which utterly baffled him. They were mostly lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human. Many were of higher grade, and a very few were the skulls of supremely and sensitively developed types. All the bones were gnawed, mostly by rats, but somewhat by others of the half-human drove. Mixed with them were many tiny bones of rats — fallen members of the lethal army which closed the ancient epic.
I wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that hideous day of discovery. Not Hoffman nor Huysmans could conceive a scene more wildly incredible, more frenetically repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through which we seven staggered; each stumbling on revelation after revelation, and trying to keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must have taken place there three hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand or ten thousand years ago. It was the antechamber of hell, and poor Thornton fainted again when Trask told him that some of the skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more generations.
Horror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural remains. The quadruped things — with their occasional recruits from the biped class — had been kept in stone pens, out of which they must have broken in their last delirium of hunger or rat-fear. There had been great herds of them, evidently fattened on the coarse vegetables whose remains could be found as a sort of poisonous ensilage at the bottom of the huge stone bins older than Rome. I knew now why my ancestors had had such excessive gardens — would to heaven I could forget! The purpose of the herds I did not have to ask.
Gods Gift to Pain
Please click through to Flickr and the larger incarnations of the above shot- it’s composed of 7 photos stitched together. Thats 7 fifteen megapixel shots and its HUGE – photo by Mitch Waxman
That extinction of hope called the Newtown Creek enjoys a series of canalized industrial waterways which act as tributaries to its main course. In the past we have visited Dutch Kills, Whale Creek, Maspeth Creek… today, it’s time for a visit to the vicious end of it all.
note: This post violates a number of the rules followed by this, your Newtown Pentacle, regarding rail tracks and probable trespass of private property… yet my hypocrisy knows no bounds. Realize, however, that I was with learned company- individuals overly familiar with this area, its mores, and the rail schedules. Do not come here, especially by yourself- for reasons later explained in this very post!
Welcome to the poison heartlands of New York City, where foul ichors flow freely, and English Kills bubbles in the afternoon sun.
from wikipedia
Newtown Creek is a 3.5 mi (6 km) estuary that forms part of the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, in New York City, New York, United States. It derives its name from New Town (Nieuwe Stad), which was the name for the Dutch and British settlement in what is now Elmhurst, Queens. Channelization made it one of the most heavily used bodies of water in the Port of New York and New Jersey and thus one of the most polluted industrial sites in America, containing years of discarded toxins, an estimated 30 million gallons of spilled oil, and raw sewage from New York City’s sewer system. Newtown Creek was proposed as a potential Superfund site in September 2009.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is as bad as it gets, one of the few places along the Creek where exposure to the water is life threatening in the short term.
Sure, if you fall off the Grand Avenue Bridge, you’re going to experience broad spectrum antibiotics administered intravenously over the course of a week or two in the hospital- but this stuff is pure dragon blood.
Nauseous miasmas were luckily carried away by stiff breezes, but several times- your humble narrator felt one of his spells coming on.
Up until the latter part of the 20th Century, industries along the creek had free reign over the disposal of unwanted byproducts. With little-to-no government regulation or knowledge of impacts on human health and the environment, it made business sense to pollute the creek. The legacy of this history today is a 17 million gallon underground oil spill caused by Standard Oil’s progeny companies—7 million gallons more than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, copper contamination of the Phelps Dodge superfund site, bubbling from the creek bed in the English Kill reach due to increases of hydrogen sulfide and a lack of dissolved oxygen, and creekbeds coated with of old tires, car frames, seats and loose paper. Nearly the entire creek had the sheen and smell of petroleum, with the bed and banks slicked black.
There is no natural freshwater flow into the creek as the historic tributaries were covered over. Flow exclusively consists of contaminated stormwater runoff, carrying trash from numerous bridges, unsewered and wholly paved streets and industrial sites, waste transfer stations, and combined sewer overflows (CSOs) from the city’s sewer system. Moreover, severely toxic groundwater seeps through the bed and banks of the creek. Every year Newtown Creek receives 14,000 million gallons of combined sewage overflow, a mixture of rainwater runoff, raw domestic sewage, and industrial wastewater that overwhelms treatment plants every time it rains. There are also discharges from numerous permitted and unpermitted pollution sources. The creek is mostly stagnant, meaning all the pollutants that have entered the creek over the past two centuries have never left. The creek is also home to a federal Superfund site, several State Superfund sites and numerous brownfields that have not yet secured the attention of regulators.
All is not lost, however. Recently, life is returning to the creek. You can find blue crabs at the mouth, fish swim in its waters, and waterfowl are prevalent. Wetland plants are taking over the abandoned bulkheads and sediment piles and school children are growing oysters, which serve as natural water filters. The Newtown Creek Alliance is actively fighting to help life return to the creek by decreasing pollution and increasing the wetlands along the creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sickly vegetation, everything, was pulsing with “the colour”. Neither black nor white nor gray, but somehow “shiny”, this alien colour – like something out of space- permeates and identifies the creeklands. Nothing moved, but seemed instead to sway against the wind instead of with it.
In 1655, Director Stuyvesant being absent on an expedition against the Swedes on the Delaware, a horde of armed Indians landed at New Amsterdam, and began to break into houses for plunder. Driven back by the soldiers and armed citizens, they fell upon the unprotected Dutch farmers in the vicinity, many of whom were slain and others taken into captivity. The troubles experienced from the savages were now so alarming as to require the residents of Mespat Kills to concentrate for mutual safety. They, therefore, formed a village on “Smith’s Island,” at the English Kills. The Hon. Nicasius De Sille, who had a patent for the island, had the direction of the new settlement, and called it Aernhem after his native place.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dead things were observed in the filth, amongst other unidentifiable shapes and eyeless tubiforms that slithered and flopped and listened from the littoral mud. A vague sense of being watched affected my guides and I, and the loneliness of our location created a sense of certain misgivings which was both real and profound. Nevertheless, I continued my incessant photography, trying to make the best of limited access.
from The Eastern District of Brooklyn By Eugene L. Armbruster, via google books
BEYOND THE NEWTOWN CREEK
In the olden times the lands on both sides of Newtown Creek were most intimately connected. County lines were unknown, the creeks were dividing lines between the several plantations, for the reason that lands near a creek were taken up in preference to others, and the creeks were used in place of roads to transport the produce of the farms to the river, and thus it was made possible to reach the fort on Manhattan Island.
The territory along the Newtown Creek, as far as “Old Calvary Cemetery” and along the East River to a point about where the river is now crossed by the Queensboro bridge and following the line of the bridge past the plaza, was known as Dutch Kills. On the other side of Old Calvary was a settlement of men from New England and, therefore, named English Kills. The Dutch Kills and the English Kills, as well as the rest of the out-plantations along the East River, were settlements politically independent of each other and subject only to the Director-General and Council at Manhattan Island, but became some time later parts of the town of Newtown.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This place, the very end of English Kills in East Williamsburgh, is non navigable and well beyond the containment boom that is observable from the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge. It hosts a rather large CSO (combined sewer outlet), and is crossed by a rail bridge which connects the massive Waste Management operation to infinite Brooklyn on one side and Queens on the other. The wooden structures which are so pleasingly posed, in their relict decay, are the remains of a former rail bridge which served the same purpose as the modern bridge.
The desk chair above is anybody’s guess.
from habitatmap.org
Combined Sewer Outfall – Newtown Creek 015
- Address Johnson Ave., Brooklyn, NY
- Neighborhood Newtown Creek
- Owner/Occupant NYC DEP
- Location Details Combined Sewer Overflow Outfall NC-015:
- discharges 344.4M gallons per year into English Kills
- Tier 2 outfall
- Ranked 20 out of over 400 in terms of volume
- located at Johnson Ave
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shores were littered with death and disposal, and I spotted this sad little duck perched out on one of the rail structures. It didn’t seem to be moving very much, and its posture suggested sickness.
The City of New York has plans for this area. Check out page 29 of this PDF
DEP proposes to construct a 9 million gallon CSO storage facility to improve water quality by reducing the CSO discharged into the English Kills during rain storms when the CSO exceeds the capacity of the combined sewers. When this occurs, the CSO would be bypassed to the storage facility. At the end of the rain event the CSO would flow by gravity or be pumped back to the sewer system to be conveyed to the Newtown Creek Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) for treatment. This system was recommended by the Newtown Creek Water Quality Facility Planning Project (WQFP), a study that was part of the Citywide Combined Sewer Overflow abatement program.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Here’s a close up of the duck, which is what I was shooting when my companions and I heard a series of voices and shuffling from the overgrown border of one of the warehouses that abuts the English Kills. Haste was made for a more advantageous position, as we were downhill and the water was at our backs. Strange gutterals were heard emanating from somewhere back in the forbidden brush, a sound almost reminiscent of a dog or bear attempting to speak as a man might- an imitation of speech rather than true use of language.
from epa.gov
Various sediment and surface water samples have been taken along the creek. Pesticides, metals, PCBs, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are potentially harmful contaminants that can easily evaporate into the air, have been detected at the creek.
In the early 1990s, New York State declared that Newtown Creek was not meeting water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. Since then, a number of government sponsored cleanups of the creek have taken place. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has sampled sediment and surface water at a number of locations along the creek since 1980. In 2009, EPA will further sample the sediment throughout the length of Newtown Creek and its tributaries. The samples will be analyzed for a wide range of industrial contaminants. EPA will use the data collected to define the nature of the environmental problems associated with Newtown Creek as a whole.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
2 men, whose macabre appearance and bizarre style of dress took me aback, emerged from down this trail. Something odd was happening back there, and it was decided that discretion was the best part of valor, and we prepared to exit. Allowing the two men to gain some distance from us (I did not photograph them, out of cowardice) I swung my camera back toward the water and the Waste Management fenceline just as music began to play somewhere back in this wood of suspicion and horror.
from wikipedia
Waste Management, Inc. (NYSE: WM) is a waste management, comprehensive waste, and environmental services company in North America. The company is headquartered in Suite 4000 at the First City Tower in Downtown Houston, Texas, in the United States.
The company’s network includes 367 collection operations, 355 transfer stations, 273 active landfill disposal sites, 16 waste-to-energy plants, 134 recycling plants, 111 beneficial-use landfill gas projects and 6 independent power production plants. Waste Management offers environmental services to nearly 20 million residential, industrial, municipal and commercial customers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. With 21,000 collection and transfer vehicles, the company has the largest trucking fleet in the waste industry. Together with its competitor Republic Services, Inc, the two handle more than half of all garbage collection in the United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I shot this photo figuring it to be the end of this post, but that’s when I noticed it…
from wikipedia
The eastern half of East Williamsburg, roughly bounded by the Newtown Creek East and by the BQE and Flushing Avenue on the North and South, is mostly zoned for industry with some residential housing mixed among the warehouses and factories. The section is currently referred to by the city as the East Williamsburg Industrial Park (EWIP), or formally the East Williamsburg In-Place Industrial Park (EWIPIP)[8]. The western boundary runs approximately along Kinsgland Ave, then Morgan Avenue and then just East of Bushwick Avenue.
The EWIP is one of eight In-Place Industrial Parks in New York City and is managed by the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corporation (EWVIDCO), a company founded in 1982 with the goal of revitalizing East Williamsburg by attracting new businesses, providing business assistance to existing firms and grow overall job opportunities in the neighborhood
Historically, this neighboorhood was not part of the Village of Williamsburgh. In the late 1800s the region east of Smith Street (now Humboldt Street), west of the Newtown Creek, south of Meeker Avenue (now the BQE service road)), and north of Metropolitan Avenue was the 18th ward of the City of Brooklyn[10]. The north part of the EWIP is served by the Greenpoint Post Office and is considered by some to be part of Greenpoint. The portion of the EWIP to the South of Metropolitan Avenue was historically part of Bushwick and is still referred by many as being in Bushwick.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I really have no idea what this is about, and I have read every crackpot theory that has ever been concocted. It very well could just be “ironic” hipster graffiti. I really don’t know, but it’s here at the end of English Kills, where at least two VERY odd characters are camped out. The things I noticed about these two fellows, you see, was this…
Two skinny white guys, late 40’s- early 50’s. Gray hair, both of them. They walked kind of stiff, and they had the colour on them. They lived back there, was my impression. A lot of “down on their luck” people live in these kinds of places- that’s not odd. What was odd- every item of clothing they were wearing still had price tags on them, and their shoes weren’t placed on their feet correctly- one of them had the left foot in the right shoe and so on. It was as if they weren’t used to wearing the clothing of men- or at least the men of this era.
from wikipedia
While it is generally accepted that some homeless people in large cities do indeed make use of accessible, abandoned underground structures for shelter, urban legends persist that make stronger assertions. These include claims that ‘mole people’ have formed small, ordered societies similar to tribes, numbering up to hundreds living underground year-round. It has also been suggested that they have developed their own cultural traits and even have electricity by illegal hook-up. The subject has attracted some attention from sociologists but is a highly controversial subject due to a lack of evidence.
Jennifer Toth’s 1993 book The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City, [1] written while she was an intern at the Los Angeles Times, is allegedly a true account of travels in the tunnels and interviews with tunnel dwellers. The book helped canonize the image of the mole people as an ordered society living literally under people’s feet, reminiscent of the Morlocks of science fiction writer H.G. Wells.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As the sign at English Kills says, the one with the little pitchfork in the lower left hand corner:
“In Gods Blessed Darkness Rambo Harnesses Light as Gods Gift to Pain”.
Bigskybrooklyn got some shots of the place during the defoliated winter, which shows a shack back there- check them out.
from nyc.gov
New York City has an estimated 3,306 unsheltered individuals according to HOPE 2008-a ratio of 1 unsheltered homeless individual to 2,485* of the general city population. San Francisco has a 1 in 269 ratio; followed by Seattle with 1 in 295; Miami-Dade County with 1 in 1,741; and Chicago with 1 in 1,798.
There were an estimated 1,263 unsheltered individuals in Manhattan; 279 in the Bronx; 336 in Brooklyn; 135 in Queens; and 152 in Staten Island for a total of 2,165 on the surface (meaning streets and parks). There were 1,141 unsheltered individuals in the subways. Additionally, the Single Adult Shelter Census showed a decline by 19 percent from 8,687 in 2005 to 6,998 in 2008.
The Newtown Pentacle 