Posts Tagged ‘photowalk’
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Sludge Boats, baby, Sludge Boats.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These shots are actually from the height of that shoulder injury period last month, and represent a desperate desire one acted upon to “shake it off” by indulging in a bit of exercise. The weather was less than cooperative from a light point of view, and the affected limb was less than pleased at the rest of my body moving around, so I decided that since I was in the “hell of pain” I’d simply head over to Hells Gate and indulge the horror.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Luckily for my diversion starved and somewhat depressed state of mind, the MV Red Hook was observed while debarking from the Wards Island dewatering facility across the river. Wards Island is the end point for the sewage sludge process, which is operated by the NYC DEP. Centrifugal machines are fed the material, which has the consistency of syrup or warm honey at the end of the thickening process at the various neighborhood sewer plants, which is carried here by the DEP’s fleet of “Honey” or Sludge boats. The dewatered material is compressed into “cakes” and sold for use as fertilizer on non food crops such as cotton and Christmas Trees.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
MV Red Hook is one of NYC’s older generation of Sludge Boats, although it’s the newest of its type – having come online in 2012. The newer class of Sludge Boats has been discussed here at Newtown Pentacle before.
from NYC.gov
The Red Hook sludge vessel was built over a three-year period in Brownsville, Texas by Keppel AmFELS. Once completed, it took seven days to make its way to New York City, arriving on November 19, 2008. The vessel has recently completed post-delivery dry-dock inspections and adjustments at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and is ready for service. Each six-person crew consists of a captain, chief engineer, assistant engineer, mate and two mariners. Crews work a 40-hour week divided into 14, 13, and 13 hour shifts. The Red Hook is slightly over 350 feet long, about 53 feet wide, with a depth of slightly over 21 feet. It has eight storage tanks with 150,000 cubic foot capacity equivalent to 1.2 million gallons. The Red Hook weighs over 2,098 long tons and is designed to travel at 12.75 knots or approximately 15 miles per hour. On a typical week, each vessel makes 14 round trips and visits eight wastewater treatment plants.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All of the DEP’s honey boats will find themselves heading to or from Wards Island periodically, after making their rounds at one of the City’s 14 sewer plants. Hells Gate is a great place to spot them, and Shore Road along Astoria Park is a great place to observe Hells Gate.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are many who would agree with me, in my assertion that the view from Shore Road rocks.
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catenary connections
Just one more from the Creeklands, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last weekend, a humble narrator somehow found himself up in Ridgewood on Fairview Avenue off Linden and it was decided that I’d walk home to Astoria since it was a fairly nice afternoon. It’s literally “all downhill,” after all, and not that far. My path carried me down off of the proverbial “ridge” for which the community is named, and down through the valley of tears which the loquacious Newtown Creek flows through.
Once again, my path found me in West Maspeth (or Berlin). Topography is something I notice continually as I wander around Queens, and the area around Newtown Creek is shaped like a sort of soup bowl. Proper Maspeth, as in the Mount Olivette Cemetery area along Grand Avenue, is embedded into the terminal moraine of Long Island – true rock. All of LIC, Astoria – pretty much anything west of the high point in Maspeth, is sitting on a giant pile of glacial till which is supported on the back of a giant underground Boulder called a craton.
Ridgewood literally sits on a rocky ridge which leads north/east to the Maspeth Plateau. Seriously. The British mapped it all out during the Revolutionary war.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Having a couple of hours of light left before the vampires began to awaken, I decided to wander around a bit after turning up on 48th street. “Up” is apt, as you are climbing away from one of the lowest points in all of New York City which is nearby Maspeth Creek on 49th street. 48th street continues to rise until it meets the Long Island Expressway near Third Calvary Cemetery and crests at Queens Blvd. in Sunnyside (which is built on another elevation, but an elluvial one).
The best way I can describe the up and down nature of the hills leading from Ridgewood to Astoria would be ripples in stone rather than water with Newtown Creek at the center. There’s a conflicting set of ripples leading away from the East River and Bowery Bay which apparent in Ravenswood/Dutch Kills and Astoria, respectively. Hunters Point is flat as a pancake.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Turning onto 55th avenue, carven into what was once known as “Berlin Hill,” this little house was encountered at 46th street. Before you ask, I have no idea what’s up with the office chair tied to the pole. There are just some things you don’t want to inquire into too deeply. It always amazed me – here in the middle of what can only be described as a “post industrial and apocalyptic” landscape defined by cemeteries and highways and a nearby superfund site – here – people actually live here. Funny thing is, it used to be worse, when the acid factory was still up and running a couple of blocks away.
The people who live here must… have to be some of the most resilient folks on the earth.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is DUKBO – Down Under the Kosciuszko Bridge Onramp. A couple of hundred thousand vehicle trips a day rumble through here on the highway alone. There’s heavy trucking businesses, like UPS, and other huge warehouse operations that are busily at work here twenty four hours a day, and there’s nearby freight rail tracks operating at street grade. Enormous fleets of concrete trucks are based here, and the number of light trucks and automobiles that roll through the local streets are uncountable.
And people live here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
44th street near 54th road, and a line of 20th century row homes which are spectacularly well kept. Acros the street is a yard hosting tower cranes, and a block away is the LIE interchange ramp with the BQE. This is about midpoint on Berlin Hill, and 44th street used to called Locust Street hereabouts.
Locust continued north back then, heading for Sunnyside, before the “House of Moses” first landed on the neighborhood back in the 1930’s. Moses kept coming back to this neighborhood, smashing his roads and bridges into it, until the early 70’s.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The border between Newtown and Long Island City was just a block away – the Kosciuszko Bridge sits atop it. On the LIC side is Laurel Hill (Calvary Cemetery) in Blissville.
This section of West Maspeth was formally part of Newtown (prior to NY City consolidation) – the municipal entity which had evolved from Dutch colonial to British and later American governance. Newtown county was once enormous and contained a good chunk of what is now Nassau County, but in the context of which I’m speaking – it’s the municipality which was centered in Elmhurst near the intersection of Queens Blvd. and Broadway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The first time I wandered through this area, many years ago, I had a very odd conversation with a very skinny and somewhat disheveled fellow standing in front of the home on the corner of 44th and the Queens Midtown Expwy. service road that is pictured above.
He insisted that “he knew that I knew that he knew that I know, and that he knew things which I didn’t know nor could I understand what he knew, but he knew that I knew that he knew and he was ok with that.” I thanked him and moved on, after affirming that he didn’t want me to take his picture.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The high point of this hill/ripple once called “Berlin” is up on 46th street. As a point of interest, there is no 45th street found between 44th and 46th hereabouts – no doubt to confuse invaders.
As opined endlessly in prior posts, the DOB records for western Queens are spotty, but as far as I’ve been able to determine – the house pictured above and below on 54th avenue dates back to 1915.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On other rambles through this section, kid’s bicycles and toys have been noticed on both porch and staircase. Not sure if it’s still occupied, but there’s a car parked in the driveway on the other side of this home. Notice how there are no side windows? It’s the last survivor of a series of old row houses – a type of working man’s quarters which folks from New Orleans might call a “shotgun.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Passing under the Kosciuszko Bridge, via “used to be 43rd street” I made my way towards 43rd street and headed back to Astoria.
Next week – something completely different!
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potential responsibility
Creek Week continues, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After visiting the Kosciuszko Bridge project, 57th avenue, and then Railroad Avenue, a humble narrator’s dogs were barking and a generally homeward course was adopted. As usual, that meant swinging down Borden Avenue and cutting over to Skillman Avenue on the way back to raven tressed Astoria.
My favorite sections of Newtown Creek to photograph are found in LIC, along this particular tributary of the troubled waterway – called Dutch Kills.
It’s something about the light, I guess.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I haven’t been around here in a few weeks, and I discovered that a formerly fenced in section of the shoreline adjoining the Borden Avenue Bridge had been cleared away, which offered a few points of view which would have formerly required illegal trespass to capture.
Given such an opportunity, a humble narrator will always take it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking west, towards what I call the “empty corridor” found under the Long Island Expressway truss.
The LIE is some 106 feet high in this spot over Dutch Kills, and was built so to accommodate the stacks of ocean going vessels which were headed for the Degnon Terminal Turning Basin which is about a half mile away. The Federal War Dept. also required this particular height for the possibility of installing warships in the canal in order to protect the industrial sector in case of foreign invasion forces entering New York Harbor (a real worry, prior to the Atomic Bomb).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking eastwards, you see the sort of scene most life long Queensicans would associate with the words “Newtown Creek.” Still, check out that tuney old truck – cool, huh?
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consequential consistencies
It does seem to be Creek Week, doesn’t it?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In yesterday’s post, I told you about Deadman’s Curve in Maspeth, and we explored 57th avenue – the former “Creek Street.” The shot above looks eastwards towards Deadman’s Curve from the former Penny Bridge LIRR stop at Review Avenue. The water facing property is currently owned by John Quadrozzi Jr., who is a major land holder in the Red Hook and Gowanus areas. The property seems to be mainly used for storage and maintenance of heavy construction equipment these days.
As the name of the LIRR stop would imply, this is also the former location of Penny Bridge, which connected Brooklyn’s Meeker Avenue to Queens’s Review Avenue. Additionally, the Roman Catholic Church used to run a ferry service from Manhattan to Calvary Cemetery which docked nearby.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Review Avenue, the stretch of it that runs along Calvary Cemetery, is where the first large scale petroleum refinery in the United States was founded – Abraham Gesner’s North American Kerosene Gas Light Company, which would become first the New York Kerosene Gas Light Company and then be acquired by Charles Pratt and Standard Oil and rechristened it as the Queens County Oil Company. Queens County Oil’s bulkheads are the ones that the Blissville Seep oozes petroleum into Newtown Creek from.
If you follow Review to the west, you’ll find the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge and a pair of roads which descend downhill on either side of it. They take you to, and from, Railroad Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The eastern side of railroad avenue was formerly the home of the Van Iderstine company, who had their own rail spur down here which was populated with Van Iderstine’s distinctive black tank cars. As the name of the street – Railroad Avenue – would imply, it’s all about the tracks down here and on the western side of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge you’ll find the LIRR’s Bliss Tower and Blissville Yard.
Welcome to DUGABO – Down Under the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge Onramp.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Van Iderstine was a nightmare of a company, incidentally, or at least their occupation was. They were renderers, which means that pack animals, butcher scrap, rotten eggs, barrels of abattoir blood – even dead circus elephants – would be brought here to be broken down into components. What exited the factory was tallow.
Believe it or not, they weren’t the most ghastly operation along this stretch of the Lower Montauk tracks, just the smelliest. I can tell you stories about the yeast distilleries…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of smelly, the modern occupation of the Blissville Yard is garbage. That’s the Waste Managemnt garbage train you see above, which is shipped around and about by the New York and Atlantic freight line. NY&A services two Waste Managemnt facilities on the Creek – one here in Blissville and the other in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg along Newtown Creek’s English Kills tributary.
Something like 30-40% of all of NYC’s putrescent (black bag) waste comes to Newtown Creek to be processed and shipped off in green boxes such as the ones above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Railroad Avenue is one of those cul-de-sac streets along the Creek where there’s only one entrance or exit and which – if you get in trouble or hurt, it’s going to be damned difficult to explain to the 911 operator where you are. At the west end of the street is Sims Metal Management’s Newtown Creek dock, on the east you’ll find Waste Management’s Green Asphalt works, the same company’s putrescent waste transfer station, and the Marlyn industrial park which hosts such luminaries as LeNoble Lumber and A&L Cesspool. Personally, I’d call Sims for help, as they’re closer than any hospital and I know a couple of guys who work there.
This is, incidentally, some of what you’ll find located between Review Avenue, the Lower Montauk tracks, Railroad Avenue, and Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Blissville Yard connects to the DB Cabin railroad bridge, which connects Blissville Yard to the Wheelspur and Hunters Point Yards in Hunters Point, and which crosses the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek. There’s also a connection to the M Cabin bridge which leads to the abandoned Montauk Cutoff tracks and Sunnyside Yards.
Freight traffic on Newtown Creek heads east into Maspeth and to the Fresh Pond Yard, eventually meeting the switch to the New York Connecting Railroad through Woodside and Astoria, which leads to the Hell Gate Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Down towards the end of Railroad Avenue, one encountered this immolated automobile.
As mentioned multitudinous times, I cannot resist this sort of thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This car wasn’t just burned up, it was thoroughly incinerated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the sort of stuff you’ll see on Railroad Avenue, here in DUGABO, in the Blissville section of Queens, along the lugubrious Newtown Creek.
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trammeled less
A bit of the Newtown Creek which I’ve oddly enough never shown you – in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a bunch of streets around the Newtown Creek which are cul-de-sacs, as in there’s only only way in and one way out. One of these cul-de-sacs in Queens is just beyond “Deadman’s Curve” in industrial Maspeth, on the LIRR Lower Montauk Branch tracks, which these days are freight only. The street is either called 57th Avenue or Galasso Place, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s a private or public way. The property to the south, I’ve always been told, belongs to the Galasso Trucking people, but I can’t pronounce that for certain.
If I was trespassing, I can’t say or not.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a rail spur that leads off of the Montauk Line on the rail bed, and the roadway to the north – Rust Street – follows the ancient property line of the LIRR tracks. I always say that when you find a street that exhibits a long arcing curve, you’ve found a relict of the locomotive city.
The 20th century “automotive city’s” streets follow straight lines, the 19th century’s “locomotive city’s” are all parabolas.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is looking back to the west where you can see the old spur leaving the main Lower Montauk tracks. That’s the end of “Deadman’s Curve” you’re looking at. It’s called that because of “The Berlinville Railway Disaster,” and because laborers at Phelps Dodge used to run across the tracks here, and once upon a time, this was a VERY busy rail center that saw long freight trains moving back and forth between Long Island City and points east.
Lots and lots of people got killed during the dash across the tracks, but they were willing to take their chances rather than clock in a minute late and lose an entire hour of pay.
– fire insurance map from Belcher Hyde “Newtown, 1916”
As you can see in the 1916 map above, which is a fire insurance map, the shoreline of this area was VERY different a century ago than it is today, and the only thing which hasn’t changed one little bit is the pathway of the Lower Montauk Branch tracks. There’s nowhere near the number of rail spurs there used to be of course, but then again there’s nowhere even close to the amount of industry present that there was back then.
Modern day 57th avenue corresponds to “Creek Street (Hanover Avenue)” and these shots were gathered in the region which once hosted the now demapped Berlin Avenue back to Munich Street. That’s the 19th century street grid you’re looking at, lords and ladies, before the United States Army Corps of Engineers did their thing to the shorelines and bulkheads of Newtown Creek during the First World War.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just beyond the property between the 57th avenue and the water is Newtown Creek’s intersection with its tributary Maspeth Creek. I couldn’t resist focusing in on this banged up construction equipment, incidentally. It’s a weakness of mine, can’t resist this sort of thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There were a few pieces of such heavy equipment laying around back here, all exhibiting broken windows. This is one of the most out of the way and remote spots in Western Queens… can’t imagine somebody coming here to just vandalize the odd machine, it’s weird.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There was quite a bit of construction debris in the area visible from the road.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the spot at which I might have stepped off the public way, or not? 57th avenue had a bit of sewer work going on at the unfinished and unpaved end, which terminated at a barbed wire fence. It seemed as if this fenceline was the western side of the plot occupied by a plumbing supply company which borders most of the length of Maspeth Creek whose street entrance is found on 49th street, but I could be wrong.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rail spur actually had a chain link fence built over it, which was kind of interesting for a couple of reasons. Partially, it was because the rest of the fence is pretty much gone.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If I’m reading the old maps correctly, this entire area – about half of the length of 57th avenue – is the former footprint of National Enameling and Stamping company, as you’ll notice in the map above. There was all sorts of nasty happening along this stretch a century back, including a phosphates works.
For those of you not in the know, a phosphate mill was in the fertilizer and gunpowder business, and in the business of mining nitrogen out of manure and animal carcasses. It was considered a “low” profession, as the workers in this sort of industry picked up a horrible stink from particulates that became embedded into their skin, and you couldn’t bathe it out nor perfume it away.
A lot of Union supporters found their jobs at more attractive industrial occupations dry up after they announced their intentions to organize, and phosphate mills ended up being their only option. They were called “stinkers,” and weren’t allowed into saloons or church due to the reek. Nobody would want to associate with them, lest they share their fate.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now, as to the reason why you don’t see many posts from a humble narrator exploring the cul-de-sacs around the Newtown Creek. The simple reason is that I’m on foot, rather than vehicle or bicycle. If something goes wrong back here – whether it be guard dogs or somebody offended at the idea of a photographer wandering through, I’m hosed. There are places along the Creek in which you want to tread softly, this is one of them.
Could you explain to a 911 operator where you were, if you break a bone or get chewed on by a Rottweiler, on what was formerly Creek Street?
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