Posts Tagged ‘newtown creek’
slackened metabolism
Borden Avenue, Long Island City
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator has nothing new to show you this week, so archived shots are on offer. Fear not, as you’re receiving this, one is running about the City whilst the camera is clicking and whirring away. In the meantime, enjoy yourself, as it’s probably a lot later than you think.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Regular posts resume next Monday, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
such odours
Hiding in the dark, me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sort of places I inhabit, and any physical description of me, are best analogized by early European folkloric accounts of a wild man living in the wasteland and hiding in the shadows. That’s where I like to menace passerby and scare children from, the scrabbly edges of civilization. Sometimes I like to howl, which booms alongst the bulkheads. Hurling rocks at isolated dwellings, allowing photographers to get blurry shots of me moving through the brush, tearing up vegetable gardens in the dead of night… Maybe it’s more of a Native American legendarium that I belong to.
I’ve become a Creeksquatch.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These are all handheld shots in today’s post, not the long exposure type which I’ve been displaying for awhile. The cold patch of the last month or so has really gotten in my way, and the only reason I was on scene to capture these was because I was helping someone out. This fellow I met on one of my tours last year was desirous of doing audio recordings around the Creek using a super sensitive microphone and recording device, and he asked if I’d take him around the creek at night to do his thing. We donned our reflective vests and went for a short walk after one of the many Newtown Creek Alliance oriented community meetings which I religiously attend.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The path I chose to take this fellow on was a fairly safe one, centered in on Long Island City and Blissville.
Above is the garbage train, moving around under the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge in Blissville.
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
In the Shadows at Newtown Creek
The big announcement is here, and it’s a photo book!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the Shadows at Newtown Creek is finally ready for public consumption, I’m proud to announce. 88 pages of full color photos encased in a perfect bound card stock cover edition, this is the first of several publications which Newtown Pentacle will be offering this year. This edition is a magazine format photo book, one embellished with minimal text beyond simple descriptions of location. It collects the night photography work which I’ve been engaged in for the last year around the Newtown Creek Superfund site at locations in Long Island City, Greenpoint, Maspeth, Ridgewood and East Williamsburg/Bushwick.
The sales price is $30, and here’s the link again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve chosen blurb.com as the printer, who will handle ordering and fulfillment. Sample copies in hand look and feel great, and everybody whom I’ve shown them to has been blown away by the quality of their printing. I’m thrilled with it, and hope that everybody reading this will consider placing an order for a copy of the book. A not insignificant percentage of the sales price will end up in my pocket, which will help support this blog and the time and expense that go into producing it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Many of the photos contained within “In the Shadows at Newtown Creek“ have been displayed at Newtown Pentacle soon after they were captured, such as the shot of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge pictured above and of Maspeth Creek pictured below. The urban landscape around this highly industrialized waterway found at the heart of New York City is frankly spectacular, visually dynamic, and I have been working extremely hard to capture its vibrant spirit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For those of you new to the Newtown Pentacle and the world of Newtown Creek, I’m Mitch Waxman.
I’m the Newtown Creek Alliance historian, official photographer for the Working Harbor Committee, Steering Committee at Access Queens, and also a member of the NYS DOT’s Stakeholders Advisory Committee for the ongoing Kosciuszcko Bridge project. I’ve been offering walking, bus, and boat tours of the Newtown Creek watershed, and the greater harbor beyond, for nearly a decade. I’m a steering committee member of the Newtown Creek Superfund Community Advisory Group, serve as an ad hoc member of the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee (which provides citizen oversight of the DEP’s sewer plant project in Greenpoint), and I was a Parade Marshall for three of the NYC Bridge Centennial Committee celebrations back in 2009 including the Manhattan and Queensboro events. My photography of Newtown Creek and NY Harbor has appeared in National Geographic, the NY Times, Scholastic publications, lots of local websites and newspapers, several official NYC and NYC EDC publications, as well as a bi weekly column I used to write for Brownstoner about Westrn Queens. On June 9th of 2009, this blog – the Newtown Pentacle – was founded, on the day of the Queensboro Bridge centennial.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For the last several years, the shots that I’ve captured which have really caught my eye have been the long exposure night time ones, and in the last year or so it was decided to “get serious” about low light urban landscape shooting. The results gathered from Newtown Creek are collected in this new book of mine. Blurb.com’s “In the Shadows at Newtown Creek” sales page offers an online (partial) preview which will give you an idea of the layout, and content, of this publication.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Geography governed the placement and sequence of the images presented, starting with Newtown Creek’s intersection with the East River and then ranging nearly 4 miles eastwards towards the bitter end of things at the English Kills tributary in Bushwick/East Williamsburg. Along the way, every bridge, important site, and tributary is visited – many of which are locations accessible only through jagged holes in chain link fences or through acts of physical derring do.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A chance to support for this blog, and a humble narrator, is offered. June 9th of this year will mark the tenth anniversary of this publication, which publishes five days a week and fifty two weeks a year. I’m beginning to think about doing some sort of event to celebrate the anniversary, as a note. Also, there will be more print publications later in the year.
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30. I hope you’ll consider adding it to your library.
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less than
Another day, another bridge across Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are five bridges crossing the Dutch Kills tributary of that lugubrious ribbon of urban delight called the Newtown Creek, here in Long Island City. You’ve got two movable railroad bridges, the retractile Borden Avenue Bridge, the high flying truss which carries the Long Island Expressway and then slopes down into the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and the good old Hunters Point Avenue Bridge. There’s been a bridge of one kind or another here since about ten to twenty years after the Civil War, with one notable span made of wood whose opening and closing was powered by ropes and a donkey. The current bridge was installed in 1910, when Michael Degnon was building his industrial terminal around Dutch Kills, and the Pennsylvania Railroad was finishing up their construction of the Sunnyside Yards.The Hunters Point Avenue Bridge was originally a double bascule drawbridge, but back in the 1980’s, the City rebuilt the roadway and replaced the mechanism with a single bascule version, which is the one featured in today’s post.
Apparently, Hurricane Sandy did quite a job in the electrical equipment that operates the thing, and since the City is required by the United States Coast Guard to maintain the HPA Bridge as a movable structure there’s been folks working “down below” in the gears and gizmos of the thing. It’s on one of my main routes when I’m out for a walk.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The other night, Dutch Kills was frozen into a giant plate of ice. This isn’t surprising, since the hydrology of the canal displays very little in the way of laminar or horizontal flow. The water rises and falls with the tide, obviously, but the shapes and angles of the bulkheads in addition to zero sources of flowing water at its terminus other than a couple of open sewers cause the waters of Dutch Kills to mimic the behaviors of a stagnant lake rather than a flowing creek.
A few years ago, I started reading up on hydrology and talked to some of the powers that be about using “shaped” concrete forms to cause zones of compression and expansion which would passively move the water around a bit, but nothing really came of it. I still think this sort of engineering is the way to go, however. As I understand the concept, rounded shapes act as “brakes” in fluid systems, whereas narrowing the width and obliquing the angle of channel walls causes water to flow (think river rapids). Essentially, large bodies of water can’t rise that much above the level of surrounding water bodies they’re connected to, so when the volume hits a point of compression it gets “squeezed” and pressurized which causes it to begin moving towards a point where it can expand again. As an example, the same water pressure in your kitchen faucet is what feeds into your garden hose, with the only difference between the wildly dissimilar behavior of the same water pressure being that the stuff in the hose has been compressed all the way through the nozzle and the sink faucet flow can just expand into the basin.
Design in enough points of compression and expansion, you’ve got “flow.” Or at least, that’s my theory. What do I know, I’m a schmuck with a camera, not an engineer.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another hypothesis I can offer is that the Newtown Creek is far more biologically active at night than it is during the daytime. All the time I’ve spent around the waterway in the last year at night has revealed an otherwise hidden world that comes out in the dark. There’s higher mammals, both feral cats and raccoons, which are occupying the predator and scavenger niches. You can see and hear vast numbers of fish splashing around in the water, and there’s all sorts of critters crashing around at the littoral edges and along the bulkheads.
The shots in today’s post were exposures of about thirty seconds, so you won’t see what I saw when shooting them unless it held stock still for that interval of time. What I saw was a big fat raccoon foraging around at the water’s edge, scooping up shell fish and other horrible wriggly things to eat for dinner. Actually, it was probably for breakfast, as the trash pandas are nocturnal – just like me.
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present bungalow
Flushing Bay, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week I attended a meeting thrown by the NYC Parks Dept. detailing their $35 million dollar upgrades to the World Fair Marina in Flushing Bay. The plans involved relocating and rebuilding one of the docks, installing a new facility house and refueling dock, and installing a bunch of new street furniture on the public sections of the marina (benches, lamp posts etc.) It was my kind of meeting, truth be told, where the government people deliver their information in a punchy and well organized fashion, and public commentary is offered in a businesslike and terse fashion. My main interest in attending revolves around a long term bit of advocacy for Newtown Creek’s Queens shoreline which I’ve been working on, namely the creation of a similar marina on the Newtown Creek coastline Long Island City, and I wanted to take a look at “how it’s done” in the modern era.
Afterwards, a bit of time was spent outside with the camera and tripod, shooting into foggy darkness.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just like the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, the NYC DEP has been experimenting with the installation and planting of greenery, specifically Saw Grasses, in the littoral zones at Flushing Bay. Littoral means the intertidal area of the shoreline, and they’re engaged in the project for the same reasons that they are at Newtown Creek – mitigating the long term environmental consequences of an abundance of their Combined Sewer Outfalls on the waterway. DEP, or the New York City Department of Environmental Protection if you must, inherited a messy combination of underground pipes from precursor agencies when their organization was created during a 1983 City charter revision, many of which were installed in a hodge podge manner and prior to the Federal Clean Water act.
Due to the outfalls, a lot of raw sewage has historically found its way into area waterways, and the section of Flushing Bay nearby LaGuardia Airport and the World Fair Marina is notoriously and reliably smelly. The creation of these engineered wetlands is an attempt to harness the curative powers and mechanisms of nature in pursuance of fixing a manmade problem.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the section of the north shore of Queens which isn’t forbidden, as a note. There’s a NYC Parks property which sits between the water and the Grand Central Parkway called the Flushing Bay Promenade. It’s 1.4 miles long, starts at the equivalent of 27th avenue, and is a modern addition to the Flushing Meadows Corona Park facility whose creation was funded by the NYC DEP in return for Parks allowing them to build a sewer retention tank in the main park.
When it warms up a bit, I plan on bringing the camera back out here to the promenade and do some exploring.
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