Posts Tagged ‘Pickman’
Aces
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One found himself within the confines of the City of Greater New York a couple of weeks ago, tending to some personal business.
A point was made of visiting some of the old familiar places, which obviously included the fabulous Newtown Creek, and Astoria. I had the car with me, which ended up being a bit of a curse, but I don’t like to fly and there was a not inconsiderable amount of cargo which I’d need to transport back to Pittsburgh, at the end of the trip.
Seven dozen bagels. Some of them were for my personal cache, and immediately bagged up and frozen for later deployment upon my return to Pittsburgh. Others were requested, from friends in Pittsburgh. Two weeks later, the Mobile Oppression Platform still smells of ‘everything bagel.’
Check me out, I’m an interstate bagel trafficker now.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A friend put me up at his crib in Middle Village, so that was my home base for the interval. Beer was quaffed at my old ‘local’ in Astoria in the evening, and I ran into a bunch of the old neighborhood types and got caught up. I kept it a bit quiet that I’d be back, but saw a few of the people whom I’ve made it a point of staying in touch with.
Nothing but trouble greeted me when trying to use the car to get around, and at one point I just drove back to Middle Village and parked the thing. I called a ride share taxi to get me out of that transportation desert and took a walk around my beloved creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I stopped off at Newtown Creek Alliance HQ in Greenpoint and caught up with my old crew. NCA HQ is across the street from the sewer plant in Greenpoint, and one couldn’t resist cracking out a shot or two for old times sake. I felt disconnected from it all, which was an extremely odd sensation for one such as myself.
It’s a 7 hour drive, back to Pittsburgh. One had lots of time to ruminate about the experience of returning to NYC for a few days, something I couldn’t help but do, since I was awash in bagel aroma for some 400 miles.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everything back home seemed to have been magnified a bit, and definitely it’s gotten a lot more intense. This is the third version of this post you’re reading, with the other two having been essentially rants about how horrible everything there seemed to me, compared with what’s become ‘normal’ to me after a year.
I’ll happily fill your ear with invective about this subject during a conversation, but the text version of it was just boring. Everybody knows what’s wrong back in NYC, but ultimately it’s not my problem anymore. I’m rooting for y’all from afar, but NYC is a city of the young and wealthy and I’m neither. Armchair Quarterbacking really isn’t my style.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I got lucky, weather wise, on this trip. Bright skies and a lack of precipitants. Despite being fully ‘kitted out,’ I ended up only using one lens the whole time I was there. As mentioned yesterday, there’s very little on Newtown Creek in particular that I haven’t fully explored and photographed at every time of day and in all seasons.
Also, to be honest, I was more interested in human interaction with the people I left behind than I was in expanding my catalog of creek shots.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m digging the anonymity I experience in Pittsburgh, I should mention. It became pretty common for me to be standing on the Kosciuszcko Bridge, behind the tripod, and hear ‘get that shot, Mitch’ from a passing vehicle, or to have a business owner walk up to me on Review or Kingsland Avenue and ask ‘are you Mitch Waxman.’ This happened a surprising number of times, believe it or not.
Back tomorrow with more from a visit to the greatest City in the history of mankind, a hive of villainy and perdition called New York.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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.
Fourteen Months later…
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator stumbled out of HQ in Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont at about five in the morning, fired up the Mobile Oppression Platform, and then drove through the entire state of Pennsylvania into New Jersey, and then across the George Washington and Triborough Bridges into NYC. I timed it right, and was traveling at 50 mph on the Harlem River Drive by mid afternoon.
All told, the drive is about 400 miles – and with bathroom and lunch breaks, costs about 7 hours of my life and a full tank of gasoline to execute. One wasn’t planning on returning to the corruption of the nest until the end of this year, but exigency is what it is.
Pictured above is the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site, along the fabulous Newtown Creek. In my absence, decking and seating has been installed.
I had some family business to attend to, back in the old neighborhood, if you’re wondering.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was staying at a friend’s place in Middle Village, but he wasn’t going to get home from work until well after 5 p.m., so I had a bit of time to kill.
The Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site has been discussed endlessly here at Newtown Pentacle.
When I first started offering walking tours of Newtown Creek’s uplands, this often flooded spot was hidden by invasive weeds and thorny brush. A buddy of mine, who works nearby, had a stack of wooden palettes he couldn’t get rid of, so we loaded them into the bed of his pickup and set them into the soil here to create a pathway. Literally recreating a plank road at Plank Road.
My pals at Newtown Creek Alliance have been working here since, executing no small amount of time and treasure to ensure that an intentional point of public access to Newtown Creek exists in Queens. In the intervening years, the place has become quite well used by workers and Maspeth residents for a variety of purposes. If you build it, they will come.
As you’d imagine, returning here was a bit of a ‘head trip’ for me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
“Why bother, it’s a dump,” “they should just fill it in and pave it over”… I’ve heard it all from the people of Maspeth. The only way I ever found to motivate that part of the Newtown Creek world was to intone that Superfund money was going to go to the Hipsters in Brooklyn and Ridgewood (whom they generally hate), and Queens would get left out of the equation unless they got involved with the process. That side of the community, however, never really bothered to get involved with things here so my colleagues and I ‘took the bull by the horns’ for them instead.
Contemplative after my long drive, I took just a few photos. There’s very little on Newtown Creek which I haven’t exhaustively photographed – and especially so the Plank Road – which I’ve shot at every interval of the day, including the dead of night. This is where I photographed the implosion of the old Kosciuszcko Bridge from, as an example, and I’ve brought hundreds of curious lookie loos here on tours over the years.
It was weird, being here again. It almost felt like I was visiting my own grave. I always referred to this area as ‘the happy place,’ but instead I was filled with a deep melancholy, and possessed by reminisces of times past and absent friends.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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.
Gray days
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a spell of what felt like two weeks of rain and snow showers, a brief January interval occurred here in Pittsburgh during which precipitation wasn’t falling from the sky, and a humble narrator headed over to the West End Overlook park to try and capture a few shots. What I was hoping for was an image or two of some shoreline flooding which all that sky water had wrought along the river banks – during which the level of the three rivers had risen about 24-36 inches over their mean average, but by the time I got there – the waters had receded.
That’s me, a day late and a dollar short.
Most of the locally sourced photographers in Pittsburgh seem to make it a point of operating during early mornings and sunset, and I’m beginning to understand why. The early afternoon light was absolutely ‘meh.’
That’s Downtown Pittsburgh and the confluence of the Three Rivers pictured – Allegheny and Monongahela’s meeting point, where their admixture becomes the Ohio.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Regardless, I was there anyway and decided to crack out a few shots. This location is about a 20 minute drive from HQ, and it’s a public park, so there’s no worries about trespassing on someone’s property. I’ve captured some genuinely lovely shots there in the past, and as long time readers of this – your Newtown Pentacle – will tell you, when I find a nice spot or ‘point of view’ I’ll revisit it during different seasons, times, and climatological conditions.
Also as mentioned, I’ve been in a bit of a ‘mood’ for the last few weeks, which is something easily forecast when the season is mid winter. If you click through to any of the January and February archives listed on the right hand side of the page, you’ll find lots and lots of me bitching about the cold and dark months. It’s not ‘seasonal disaffective disorder’ if you’re wondering, instead I’m just somewhat bored and miss the ‘good light.’
That’s the West End Bridge, and that tug is navigating the headwaters of the Ohio River.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This photo looks up the Monongahela River, which is a corridor that I’ve spent a lot (most) of my photo time exploring in the last year.
It started to rain again just as I was clicking the shutter button for this shot, and one had to break down the tripod and camera quickly and return to the Mobile Oppression Platform for cover. All told, I think I had something like an hour up there in between bands of rain and drove back to HQ in a frustrated mood.
Man, I’ve got to find somewhere where I can go shoot that has a roof.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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.
Descent
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Today’s post is populated by a few ‘odds and ends’ images left over from the longish Pittsburgh walk which I was describing to y’all last week. I’m a bit out of touch with those posts, as I’ve been ‘on the road’ for the last week and administering Newtown Pentacle remotely.
As those posts were going live (WordPress allows me to schedule publishing details), a humble narrator was actually back in NYC for a few days to handle some business, so it’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’ve got a lot on my mind about all that I saw and experienced there.
Initially, let’s just say that as this ‘little froggy’ has escaped that proverbial pot of boiling water which gets subtly hotter minute by minute more than a year ago – the same pot which all New Yorkers live in – and it was startling to experience how much of a roiling boil the City is in right now. Apparently, I got out just in time.
More on that in a couple of weeks after I’ve gathered my thoughts, but I was frankly staggered by how much rapid decline I was witnessing, and exactly what has occurred to ‘Home Sweet Hell’ in just the last 14 months. Wow.
Pictured above are Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tunnels, which allow vehicle traffic to punch through Mount Washington and enter the South Hills region of the Pittsburgh metroplex. This is what ‘rush hour’ looks like here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things that really hit me, as is usually the case when you haven’t been dwelling within NYC for a while, is the constant hum and standing wave of 35-50 decibel background noise. I’ve become acclimatized to a quieter environment in the last fourteen months, and that din of noise splashed over me as soon as I opened the MOP’s window after having crossed the GW Bridge on my way back to Queens.
In the shot above, that’s the off ramp for the Liberty Bridge that I’m walking under, a span which guides vehicle traffic into the Liberty Tunnels from the peninsular Downtown section of Pittsburgh.
One of the other things which just blew me away was that there was visible smog. Haven’t seen visible smog in NY for a good thirty years, but that’s the consequence of ‘traffic calming’ for you. Maybe slowing traffic down to a crawl, sequencing traffic lights to cause maximum idling time for trucks and other heavy vehicles at intersections… all that jazz… maybe that was a bad idea from an air quality point of view. I’ve got photos of the murky pall hanging over the place, of course.
Wow. There’s several reasons I left NYC in the first place, but I hadn’t reckoned on the reemergence of Smog as an environmental problem in the 5 Boroughs. I guess that since Tammany Hall is back in power, so too are other historical features of the big city.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I drove back to NYC from Pittsburgh, which is a back and forth trip of about 800 miles. Over the course of that entire back and forth journey, the Mobile Oppression Platform (a Toyota RAV4 hybrid) used about two tanks worth of gas, which equates to about 28 gallons of fuel. It’s a 14 gallon gas tank that’s hidden deep within the MOP, one which offers a MPG number of 39.5 mpg during the summer and about 37 or so mpg during the cold months. A full tank gives me a range of better than 400 miles after a fill up.
Just moving around in the heavy and slow moving traffic of Queens and Brooklyn (LIC, Astoria, all around the fabulous Newtown Creek) last week burned about 3/4 of a tank of gas, which was largely consumed in idling time at lights and sitting in traffic. Again – the car is a hybrid – so my engine jumps over to electric when it’s stop and go, but it still burned down the equivalent of about 350 miles worth of gas in the ‘Vision Zero’ zones of NYC.
Coupling that with the basic unavailability of a place to just pull the car off the road for a minute, let alone park at a meter, meant that the engine was working harder and far more than it does here amongst the steep hills of Pittsburgh, where I go to a gas station about once every two weeks to fill up the tank (and that’s usually just a quarter to a half tank ‘top off’).
Observationally – the ‘two wheels good four wheels bad’ crowd have actually caused air quality in the City to drop, which is kind of hilarious when you think about it. Childhood asthma rates must be rising and having soot rain from the sky is always fun. Desirable outcome for the policy of any advocacy group which cloaks itself in environmentalist rhetoric should include improving things, not making them worse.
Back tomorrow with something unrelated, but this whole experience is a subject which I’ll be talking about again fairly soon, once I’ve got some of the photos developed. I guess you really can’t go home again.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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.
I can hear that train a-coming…
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is taking the week off from the usual folderol, and on offer are single shots captured sometime in the last year since relocating from ‘Home Sweet Hell’ back in NYC to Pittsburgh.
Pictured above is a Norfolk Southern Freight Train, moving along the south side of the Monongahela River, with the former Pittsburgh & Lake Erie RR station building in the background.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Kwazy Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year to you all. 2024 is going to be a real whopper, I think.
Back next week for a walk over the Birmingham Bridge, continuing the walk from Pittsburgh’s Downtown, to Uptown and beyond.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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.
The Newtown Pentacle 