The Glenwood power plant has long been a favorite place for us to visit. Abandoned since the 1960s, these massive buildings have deteriorated significantly over the decades.
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Month: November 2012
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Glenwood Power Plant 2012
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Freight Rail ‘detour’ in Queens: A Bad Idea.
Over the last few years a group of NIMBYS in central Queens have been basically advocating for the eradication of rail freight through Queens. The people behind this campaign seem to live close to Fresh Pond Yard (which has been a rail yard since at least 1906). After years of freight rail decline and the lost of the large ‘Yard A’ classification yard in L.I.C. (which will become a passenger rail yard in support of the ESA project) the LIRR outsourced its freight operations to a small startup railroad (New York & Atlantic) which has aggressively and successfully marketed its services. The growth of their business has made Fresh Pond yard busier than it has been in the last 20 years.
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Hurricane Sandy Part 2, one week later.
At this point it had been nearly a week since I was on Rockaway. it was a week without work, spent mostly poking around the house and shooting scenes from the Manhattan Blackout (subject of a post to come). (more…)
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Hurricane Sandy Part 1
On the one hand you could say these are not ‘exploring’ photos. On the other hand there is the fact that they were nearly all taken in Rockaway just after the sun rose on the Tuesday morning after the super-high tide brought in by Hurricane Sandy caused so much destruction. At the time, NYPD was blocking all non first responders from entering the peninsula. Quite literally we had to sneak onto the peninsula when there was a momentary shift change at the bridge checkpoint.
What we found you can see in the photos above, though photos can never grasp the smells of still smoldering fires, the eerie silence only being broken by harsh gusts of wind tossing debris through the streets and the sirens of fire trucks racing to and from the main land to refuel.
Rockaway, as we knew it, is no more. What reminds is a flooded out mess. Residents will have to decide if it’s worth the thousands of dollars to fix each home, in face of the scientific fact that the ocean is rising and global warming will eventually put the entire peninsula under water – perhaps sooner than later.
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Ces53 vs. Cope 2
This is awesome.
Cope2’s ratting antics have landed him on Rat Island.
I eagerly await the ALL CAPS RESPONSE to this post. BRING IT!!! TRUE KING!!!
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Post-Sandy Ft. Tilden exposes old WW2 Relics
As a thank you to veterans I offer this photo: what you’re looking at is most likely a very very old (WW1) machine gun placement I stumbled across today at the old Ft. Tilden (on Rockaway) – This concrete foundation has been under sand for decades, and Hurricane Sandy washed away all of that sand covering it. It lasted through the storm (along with all the other old bunkers) even while the road along the beach crumbled away and is now completely destroyed. The dune that separated the road from the beach has also completely washed away.
As for this gun placement – let’s just say it was built to last by men that didn’t compromise.
This gun placement was one of two, connected to the bunker seen in the above photos – and was known as ‘Battery Kessler’. We’ll be posting a whole lot about Ft. Tilden sometime in the next year.
The bunkers at Ft. Tilden also survived, all very much intact. As you can see one of them (directly behind the gun turret) now has trees stuffed in it from the water that flowed through.
The storm also up/uncovered a long stick of railroad track. This likely came from somewhere on the Tilden property, given how old it looks and the fact that Ft. Tilden once had it’s own military railroad. In different areas this long buried track is also now exposed, revealing rotted out cross-ties and rusted railroad spikes.
More on that in the coming months when we give a deeper dive into Ft. Tilden history.
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Oak Point
Oak Point is ‘The jewel of the Bronx’ – CSX’s South Bronx rail yard which they’ve endowned with a hilarious tagline. This yard is in constant motion, full of trash cars, general freight and reefers. For a long time this yard was a hard spot to bench, given all the fencing surrounding it. This recently become significantly simpler with the construction of a large box store overlooking nearly the entire yard. The parking lot is publicly accessible, with a fence low enough that any good telephoto lens can be used to view nearly every car in the yard.