Posts Tagged ‘photowalk’
mortal assurances
Did you feel that? Did a truck just go by?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The geology of Western Queens is fairly fascinating. A humble narrator is interested in all things, and one of them is the very ground beneath his feet. Historically speaking, the zone which modernity calls Queens Plaza and Court Square in Long Island City were wetlands. There is rock down there somewhere, but the “craton” which underlies this section of a very Long Island was deposited by the glacial retreat at an odd angle which slopes downward as you head south. A craton is essentially a giant boulder, and that underground slab of rock which is found in LIC’s neck of the woods is buried beneath layers of naturally occurring clay and sand, and a loosely packed 20-30 foot thick layer of anthropogenic landfill material sits atop it. True geologic bedrock doesn’t appear until you get to Maspeth, where the terminal moraine of Long Island begins.
Municipal landfill began to reduce the wetlands and swamps of LIC beginning in the early 19th century, which buried many of the now lost tributaries of both Newtown and Sunswick Creeks which flowed through these parts. Once, you could sail from Newtown Creek all the way to Northern Blvd. at 31st street, and by once I mean 1881. The desire to stamp out typhus and cholera in LIC, Dutch Kills, and Astoria during the “sanitary era” is part of what provided impetus for the landfill process.
The construction of the Queensboro Bridge and the Sunnyside Yards in the first decade of the 20th century finished the job of reclaiming what was – by all accounts – a pestilential swamp. Modernity has forgotten all about that, just ask the East Side Access guys who accidentally found one of those buried waterways – a catastrophic discovery which delayed their progress and added billions of dollars onto the cost of the project.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now, I’m not much of anything, let alone an engineer or a geologist. What I am, however, is a guy with a collection of old maps and a series of books which describe what things were like in the area surrounding Jane Street Queens Plaza from the colonial period to the start of the 20th century. The engineers who worked on Sunnyside Yards described some pretty esoteric conditions at the corner of Skillman and Thompson – for instance – including mud that would form 18 feet high waves spontaneously as the tidal action from surrounding waters transmitted through it. The Ravenswood houses are built on a tidal pond/marsh/swamp formed by Sunswick Creek, and the area around the present day LaGuardia Community college was known as the “waste meadows” until Michael Degnon got ahold of them in the 1910’s and filled the wetland swamps in with rock tailings harvested from the subway tunnels which his company was working on.
I’m also a guy who understands that even the stoutest limb will crack if it’s made to bear weight beyond its tolerance. Now, it’s pretty unlikely that a craton, which is a boloid of rock the size of an asteroid that is miles across and thousands of feet thick, would crack. It could sink, however, into the glacial till which it rests upon. This fills me with real concern, given the whole climate change/sea level thing that the Republicans claim isn’t happening. How much crap can you pile in one place before something “gives”?
The firmament is literally shaking in LIC these days, what with all the high rise construction going on, and the truck loads of structural steel and concrete rolling through.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My buddies in construction tell me that once you find solid footing – driving steel and concrete down until it meets that rock craton – you can pretty much build as big as you want. The piles sit on the rock, then you create a concrete slab which provides for a stable surface that spreads weight load out over a large area, and you build. Engineers calculated wind sheer, vibration, soil solidity and a thousand other factors years before the first shovelful of earth was turned. An elaborate bureaucracy of planners and building specialists have scoured the plans, looked for any possible error or issue, and made corrections when warranted. Believe when I tell you, these people won’t allow any single structure to crack the earth open anywhere in NYC.
Saying that, they are all largely looking at projects on an individual basis, and not a holistic whole. What will happen when everything scrapes the sky? Will the ground continue to shake, or will LIC just sink?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
abundant melancholy
Yo, you seeing what I’m seeing?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above is representative of how such a scene would appear to a raccoon, a seal, a dolphin or just about any whale. It’s also likely how it appears to a human being who suffers from a condition called Achromatopsia (which there are several different forms of, some congenital and others acquired). Achromatopsia is the lack of any color vision whatsoever, with the entire visual experience of those afflicted rendered in shades of gray. While this can be considered “quite goth” and is somehow poetic – it’s a pretty serious vision disease.
“Normal” human eyes are meant to perceive color. The typical human eye can discern around one million colors, whereas the eye of an Achromatopsiac can only see about a hundred shades of gray.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The neurologist Oliver Sachs once pointed out that whereas there’s a frequency of reflected light which humans will agree upon as being “red,” or “blue,” there is no way to test whether or not we are all actually seeing the exact same thing. Is my “coca cola” red your “coca cola” or is it a little more “fire engine” or “cherry”?
Odds are they’re not, as we aren’t really “seeing” anything. The brain is creating the things we see based on the limited amount of the raw photonic data, as collected by the eyes, which it decides to process. You generally don’t notice how much dust there is in the air unless a shaft of sunlight illuminates, it causing the brain to “notice” the anomaly and render it visually. Essentially, brains compress collected light into a construct which jibes with what the other senses are telling it.
Is that an image of a cormorant? Nope, it’s a capture of the light which was bouncing around one day when a cormorant swam by, which our brains process and interpret using a chemical database of prior observations called memories. Looks like a cormorant, though.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A lot of the information passing through the optic nerve is actually jettisoned by the brain. We don’t perceive the higher and lower frequencies of light – infrared or ultraviolet. Some critters have traded the ability to see the mid range entirely to focus on these spectrums, like the bee. Invisible light isn’t just a song from Sting’s old band “The Police” and it’s always been something a humble narrator is intensely curious about.
There are specialist cameras out there – security and nighttime cameras use a set of near infrared LED emitters to pump out a bright stream of IR light which these cameras can visualize and record. There’s also UV and IR film stocks, as well as esoteric lens filters and all sorts of DIY equipment you can use for the task of seeing the unseeable. Long have I had my eye on a camera kit offered by Nikon which is intended for the use of Police forensics teams, as said device can operate in both IR and UV to aid in the capture of splattered bodily fluids at crime scenes. Unfortunately, the unit is quite expensive and you need to flash credentials when purchasing it.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
squamous litanies
It’s a real migraine out there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s face it, what we New Yorkers actually do is raise a hell of a ruckus wherever we are, but especially so when we’re at home. Personal experience of visiting relatively rural and quiet areas, like Vermont, reveals the effect on my hearing that living in this constant din has wrought. For 24-48 hours after leaving the City, there’s a high pitched phantom tone constantly present. I’ve always thought that the “wheeeeeee” sound, in addition to having a medical definition and name, is my brains attempt to filter out the constant rumble and thunder of city life – cerebral noise cancelling if you will.
All the engines, and generators, exhaust fans, jets, car tires on asphalt, buzzing things on utility poles, everybody talking, the subways, the chattering of millions of birds – the air is polluted not just with toxic gases and sewage bacteria rising on the breeze from out of the harbor – but with noise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s only during power outages and blizzards that you get to hear the City hush up for a while. I’d settle for regular powers like being able to effectively climb a ladder or balance my check book, but a humble narrator has often fantasized about possessing some sort of super power. My first choice would be invulnerability, of course, but a lot of the really interesting choices involve sight and perception. X-Ray vision? I’d worry about giving people cancer just by looking at them. Being able to fly without the invulnerability would actually be kind of dangerous.
What if you could visualize sound?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I know, that’s the sort of thing somebody would ask in a dorm room shortly after passing the bong, but still.
The BQE would probably look like something from Van Gogh, with crashing scalars creating fractal wavefronts which bounce and dance along the road itself and all the brick walls of the buildings which the highway weaves through. The East River would likely be a majestic sight, and would exhibit something akin to a sonic Jackson Pollack painting.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
thousand young
A goat with a thousand young, that sort of thing, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Magna Mater notwithstanding, one worries that he has lost his moorings, but I’ve thought that since the age of five.
So many dreams are left unfillfilled – such as sparking a witch panic in western Queens. It has also also long been one of my goals to lead a torch bearing mob, but little success has been found in pursuing this goal. There’s the nuanced side of it all – you need to store the rag wrapped sticks, the accelerants, and determine some sort of organizing point for the angry masses… it’s all quite complicated. You also need to get a group angry enough to take to the streets and chase the monster towards the old and flammable mill. There’s no way to start a political riot these days which doesn’t involve some sort of intense preparation, and advance permitting, and I’ve always been a spontaneous sort of guy. Also, my apathy can be considered as being weaponized, and I just can’t be bothered to pointlessly bleat. What’s wrong with a Monster anyway, who’s it bothering, and why do you want to slay it so badly?
At any rate – anarchy, chaos, and – wooooh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I spent last night at the District Office, which is what I call the bar in Astoria that I frequent, and chatted with the working guys for awhile. A surprising number of them were “big” on Donald Trump’s candidacy for President. In particular, they were in favor of the expulsion of “illegal immigrants.” I reminded them that most of these “illegals” who would get caught up in this effort wouldn’t be of Mexican lineage (whom most stereotype as being the “illegals”) and that a significant number of 70-80 year old Greeks, Croatians, and Irish people who have lived here for decades would be the likely victims of this policy. Why? Because back in the 1970’s and 80’s it was fairly easy to buy a green card from forgers.
Also, given what I know about the way things actually work in this City – you’d have to literally go from house to house and search every attic and basement for “illegals” to comply with the Federal Mandate.
Speaking strictly as someone of Jewish descent, this sort of thing has been tried before in other countries and it didn’t work out well for anyone involved.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s do the thought experiment though, said a humble narrator, of how President Trump’s expulsion program would actually play out – using Astoria as an example. NYPD sets up a cordon on 21st street, and on Woodside Avenue. A skirmish line of Police begin moving north from Northern Blvd., working their way through every building and business and demanding identification and proof of status from everybody they meet. Those individuals who aren’t “pure” citizens are arrested, and shipped out to a holding cell.
The detainees would have to taken somewhere for further processing. Since our jails are already fairly full, we’d have to create mass incarceration camps where they could await deportation. Our national nightmare is the presence of an army of terrorists on American soil, yes? I can think of no better way to create one than building concentration camps full of angry people that know implicitly how to avoid detection when crossing a national border whose only wish was to become Americans and live in the United States.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
terrible unseeing
Fear and loathing, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A bit of research was committed here at HQ to try and ascertain what sort of critters might be found down in the Subway tunnels. I found an interesting study which discussed the distribution of Manhattan bedbug populations – it seems that east side bedbugs display a different DNA profile than west side ones – which the researchers attributed to the separated subway lines. There’s certainly roaches and rats below, no secret there.
Thing is, in a cave system – which is essentially what the subway tunnel network is – rodents, roaches, and beetles are close to the top of the food chain and subsist on diets of lesser insects and invertebrates. Conventional wisdom suggests that it’s the human infestation which supplies caloric fuel to the biota down here, but you never hear tell about centipedes, spiders, worms and all the other creepy crawlies which logically have to be resident in the system. Supposedly there’s a rich and variegated world of micro organisms found in the tunnels, but little in the way of accessible documentation on the subject. Maybe I just haven’t figured out what to call a subway taxonomy, or transit biota census, or whatever obfuscation it’s customary to use for this sort of thing.
A separate study of DNA harvested from the Subway system has reported that a certain percentage of the nucleotides and genetic material present down here emanate from no creature known to science.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most everyone has heard stories about “the condos.” For those not in the know: the condos are residences found in side tunnels and abandoned stations that are populated by groups of homeless individuals who are referred to as the “mole people.” MTA says this is both a fabrication and a myth. Urban apocryphals dictate that track workers will freeze in place and refuse to enter subterranean areas where furniture or camping equipment is observed. I’m no Steve Duncan nor LTV Squad, so I can’t intelligently describe these less common sections of the underground, but I can’t imagine that “mole people” would be anything other than strictly anomalous and out of the ordinary in the underground complexes. Simply put, there’s a lot of street level ATM rooms out there these days, and they are air conditioned during the summer.
Saying that, I’m certain that there are a few individuals here and there who have found a Subway hidey hole to camp in. Maybe there are mole people, which I certainly do hope. NYC needs more mole people.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a surprising lack of occult oriented Subway lore, especially when compared to the famously haunted London system. A humble narrator is always looking around the web for ghostly tales (actually, I have an automated Google search gadget that does it for me) involving NYC, and there’s virtually nothing I can relate. The ghost of a slain track worker here, a 7 foot tall demon seen at Port Authority there – nothing other than that which a decent psychiatrist could prescribe away. That’s weird, actually, but I’ve always found New York somewhat lacking in folkloric traditions as compared to places like Boston or New Orleans or even White Plains.
Most of the subway horror stories I see on the web involve unwanted sexual attention – women being victimized by nut jobs with their nuts out, gropers, lewd talkers and so on. Men of debased mind whom my grandmother would have referred to as “meshigga poyvoyts.”
It should be mentioned that this sort of behavior has always mystified me, and the behavior set is beyond my understanding. I really don’t understand, and wish y’all ladies didn’t have to deal with it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of New York’s folklore seems to involve real world circumstance rather than the spooky stuff, in my experience. The ones involving the mob, or crime figures in general, have always been the most prevalent. There’s the ones which describe suicides landing on cars or sidewalk cafes, the aforementioned mole people, and sinister or conspiratorial attributions to otherwise mundane occurrences such as “alternate side of the street parking.” The one about dropping a penny off the Empire State Building onto a guys head, the ghost train at Hell Gate Bridge, and that old chestnut about the birth rate jumping nine months after the 1965 blackout.
It’s actually fairly hard to find a good New York City ghost story, as in something iconic. Guess all the superstitious types moved north or west after the civil war.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally, I miss earwire. That’s the name I assigned to some nut who I used to see on the R train during daily commutes, whose “thing” was dipping a length of copper wire into a jar of what looked like mercurochrome and then playing a lighter over the anointed cable, whereupon he’d jam it into and then dig it around in his ear. He’d pull the wire back out, thoughtfully consider the length and then talk to it.
He was puzzling and grotesque, but hardly an urban legend.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
