Posts Tagged ‘photowalk’
circumstance alone
A Jedi craves not these things.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Noticed on a fairly recent walk down to Hunters Point from Astoria, a neat and somewhat older car. Not sure what make or model it is, but it reminded me of the 1980’s, when a young Joe Piscopo taught us all how to laugh again. Back then, early pontifications from a humble narrator stated that “the future” would offer three likely paths which I summarized using popular science fiction movie tropes. First was the dystopian “Road Warrior” future, which can still happen but doesn’t seem to be the likely path upon which the world walks. Second was the utopian “Star Trek” future, which also seems increasingly unlikely to occur. Unfortunately, it seems the world has seemingly embraced a “Robocop” pathway instead.
I’d buy that for a dollar, I guess.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above, and a couple of others which you’ve already seen, were my goal for the evening in LIC’s Hunters Point section. This was the night when something went “sproing” in my left foot (the pain squirrel strikes again) which has been bedeviling me for the last couple of weeks, and while shooting it a weird sort of chill sapped away any and all of my strength. For some reason, standing at the East River waterfront at night in February caused a physical effect in me. Weird, huh? Must be supercancer.
For those of you who don’t understand the term, supercancer is what Google tells you that you have if you search for an explanation of any number of ordinary or mundane aches and pains. As my team of doctors often tell me: Don’t google, make an appointment with us instead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Uncharacteristically, my little photo expedition to the next neighborhood over was cut short, and I bowed to my physical weaknesses by taking the train home. Of course, I had to go the long way around, and caught the 7 for a transfer to the N and then a walk down Broadway in Astoria back to HQ. What was weird about that was that it was only about 11 p.m. as I was scuttling up the avenue, and literally every shop other than the ubiquitous bodegas were closed. Even bars. Alright, it was a Tuesday, but… sheesh.
Adventure, excitement… I crave these things, which indicates that I am no Jedi.
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various inhabitants
Hooray, it’s Monday!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few odds and ends in today’s post, as a humble narrator is fairly hurting for new stuff to show you. The weather and a few “have to’s” had forced my butt to remain static at HQ last week, and the camera has received little to no exercise outside of the normal rounds here in Astoria. Additionally, something went awry with my left leg in the ankle zone so I spent half of last week with a disturbing bit of “owie” going on. Often I’ll describe my physical woes as being due to the presence of the “pain squirrel” which alights on different branches of my body randomly, in much the same way as the Norse myths describe the squirrel Ratatoskr running about on the world tree Yggdrasil. Ratatoskr would chew on various branches of Yggdrasil, which caused earthquakes and volcanic activity to manifest. The pain squirrel, instead, causes one to merely exclaim “what the hell did I do to myself now?”
The older you get, the more hypochondriacal you get. Eventually, you get to the point where the impact of sunlight on your skin is felt, and hurts. Pictured above is a gas station on Northern Blvd. in LIC. Have you noticed that the real estate people have been devouring gas stations recently, along with supermarkets? Anything with a big enough footprint, I guess.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is in the process of becoming diurnal again, after long months of activity in the dark of night. Transitioning between the two results in a feeling akin to jet lag, with drowsy intervals occurring in the afternoon. Given that one has more or less been surrendering to the embrace of Morpheus just before sunrise for a few months, this rather jarring process will likely take all week. I’m not abandoning the night shooting, not by a long shot, but a biological need to experience the rise and fall of the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself in the wan winter sky is upon me.
Don’t want to start growing a patch of mushrooms on my back.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Additionally, I haven’t caused any real trouble for a bit, and there’s probably battles I should be fighting.
It’s also marginally warmer during the days, I seem to recall.
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nothing unprecedented
Just another day in paradise, yo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The sculptor who designed the plastic pink lawn flamingo was Donald Featherstone, a task he accomplished in 1957 for a company he ended up running until his retirement in 2000 A.D., called Union Products Inc. I had a dream once where Featherstone’s Flamingoes were chasing me and fell out of bed. Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is quite rare and only regularly affects about 4% of adult humans. Sleepwalking episodes typically last anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes, and there are sleepwalkers who have actually left their homes for a sleep drive in their cars while dreaming. There are sleep eaters, and sleep “shtuppers” who engage in sexual coitus (sexsomnia) while totally asleep. There are several legal proceedings in which a sleepwalker has actually murdered someone, wherein the somnambulist was pronounced not guilty. That’s a slippery slope.
As a child, I became convinced that quicksand, which is a fascinating soil condition caused by a particular ratio of sand and water that forms a “shear thinning non Newtownian fluid” was something you needed to be prepared for as an adult. Stress the sand/water mix – say by stepping on it – and the sand and liquid will seperate and you’ll sink right in. The physics of it all are fascinating, and removing yourself from the quicksand is difficult and complicated. Trying to just pull yourself straight out would require titanic amounts of force. Your best bet, I’m told, is to slowly work your self into a position where you’re facing the sky and your limbs are spread out as far as you can manage (which is the same advice offered for those caught in avalanches of snow). Then you sort of wiggle and wriggle your body towards the solid ground direction that you came from. Contrary to popular belief, due to the relative material density of the quicksand and of your body, you likely won’t sink in past your waste even if you do panic and struggle. Those who die in quicksand do so due to hypothermia and or the arrival of carnivores. I don’t know if Flamingoes qualify as carnivores, and don’t want to find out.
As a note, quicksand has not turned out to be the ubiquitous problem when “adulting” that I thought it would be.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s likely that you’ve experienced, when laying down to sleep, feeling your arms or legs suddenly twitch or jerk for no reason. That’s called a hypnic or “myoclonic jerk” by sleep specialists. It’s pretty normal, but the league of doctors aren’t of a single mind as to causation for the phenomena. On the other side of things, that period of 15-30 minutes when you first wake up and are experiencing both cognitive difficulty and motor skill impairment is called “Sleep Inertia.” Part of ir is caused by the presence of a certain chemical, and you’ve got a series of receptor cells in your brain for this chemical called “Adenosine,” which is abundant in the noodle when you’re sleep deprived – which most of us are. Caffeine is a blocker for these Adenosine receptors, and that’s why if you haven’t had enough sleep a “cuppa Joe” will help snap you out of the sleep inertia. Saying that, it’s still pretty normal to be a bit groggy when you wake up, since your body has been in an anabolic state and busy cleaning up the mess you made of it the day before. The natural process of waking up involves a spike in cortisol levels in your blood, wherein the adrenal glands can manufacture an average of more than fifty percent more cortisol than when asleep. Ultimately, Cortisol levels are the difference between “morning people” and “evening people,” which is thought to be related to individual “cortisol awakening response.”
A humble narrator has always been the latter, a “night owl” as it’s called. I’ve never been a Flamingo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The section of the East River pictured above varies in depth from about twenty five to fifty one feet, which you can visualize by thinking about submerging a series of buildings which range from two to five stories. If the Empire State Building ever found itself sitting in the middle of the East River, and hey… climate change, amiright?… it would still rise some ninety seven to one hundred stories into the sky. A couple of years ago, somebody asked me to do a boat tour of shipwrecks in New York Harbor, but it seems that wrecks are cleared out in an expeditious fashion as they’d otherwise be a hazard to navigation and commerce. So, I believe, are flamingoes.
Hope you enjoyed today’s completely random trivia, back on Monday with something completely different, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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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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spreading crypts
The other way!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above is the newly reopened Broadway stop on the Astoria line N/W elevated. I spent all week describing a walk heading northwards along 31st street towards Astoria Blvd., so I decided to do one today describing the walk southwards from Broadway towards Northern Blvd., just in the name of completeness. The station has been rebuilt and reimagined, as one of the new “Enhanced Stations,” by Governor Cuomo, who does and does not run the MTA with an iron fist. It’s the Dark Prince of Albany who decides on when and if he’s in charge, so ask him if today is one of those days.
The enhanced stations bring some amenities to the table like station wifi and new security cameras, and Broadway in particular has seen a new exit only stair way (no fare control) installed which really has been a game changer in terms of expediting exiting of the facility. The big change, most noticeable from the street, has been the amount of new lighting systems installed, which has really altered the “feel” of the corner.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of the 31st street corridor lives in perennial and centuried shadow, and even during the day, it’s dark. The street lamps are generally miniatures, with smaller than normal luminaire heads sitting on midget sized poles directly over the parking lane except at the intersections. There’s no lighting system in the middle of the street, suspended from the trackage, which lends an ominous “noir” to 31st street.
Personally speaking, given my proclivity towards darkness and skillful street camouflage born of living in 1980’s NYC, such lack of ambience holds no terror. Were I a lady or looked like I had money in my pockets, however, I’d likely be clutching my pearls while walking down this street given the lack of street life and darkness.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lighting schemes of the new stations spurt ambience all over the place. That’s the 36th avenue stop in the shot above, if you’re curious. It’s one of the “angles between neighborhoods” spots here in Western Queens, with LIC’s Dutch Kills and Ravenswood neighborhoods found to the south and west of 31st street and the “Astoria/Not Astoria” triangular shaped neighborhood between 34th avenue and Northern Blvd. to the east and slightly north. It’s also one of those interesting spots in Queens where you’ve got a soft geographic boundary between two wildly different ethnic populations, mostly Pakistani and extremely religious Muslims to the west and Brazilians to the east. There’s lots of other people mixed in there, of course, but dominant population groupings are what makes a neighborhood distinctive.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The remnants of “mixed use” industrial zoning can be observed on the dark parts of 31st street as you proceed south, but these buildings and businesses are doomed by the aspirations of the affordable housing crowd and the Real Estate Industrial Complex. It’s already started, there’s more than a few of these old warehouse and factory buildings which have been demolished to make way for cookie cutter glass box residential buildings. In the distance, you can see the high rise residential buildings of Queens Plaza and “next big thing LIC” rising alongside the boundaries of the Sunnyside Yards.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nearing 39th avenue, where another of the enhanced stations is nearing completion, and the luminance of said station making a real difference in the “feel” of the street. Across the street from where this shot was taken is a Coptic Christian church and pastorate house which serves a mostly Egyptian community, or so I’m told. A large group of apparnetly Egyptian men were gathered in front of a new Dunkin Donuts on the corner of 39th, drinking take away coffee in paper cups and smoking cigarettes while debating something in their native tongue.
It was growing colder by the minute, and I decided it was time to start winding up my “constitutional” and head back home to Broadway in the 40’s via Northern Blvd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Progress? One still wonders about the lack of street life, storefront businesses, and ambient light on 31st street. It’s a traffic thoroughfare ultimately – 31st street – connecting Queens Plaza with the Grand Central Parkway and Triborough Bridge in its 20th century incarnation. There are, in fact, homes and businesses along its route, but personally I wouldn’t want to live along it. One thing I haven’t mentioned, whether in this series of posts or the ones from a couple of weeks ago describing Roosevelt Avenue and the streets of the Flushing Line corridor, is noise. Train noise, specifically.
Famously, I’m always listening to something on my headphones while out on my little jaunts, and when the train is passing overhead the noise overwhelms the speakers which are plugged directly into my ears. Can’t imagine what it’s like living next to those tracks, it must be hellacious.
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