Greenpoint terminal was a big enough set of buildings that you could go over and over and over and still find new things. On this night we accessed a room that looked as though a squatter was living in it. Upon closer inspection though it appears the room was used as a local hang out for kids growing up in the area in the 1980s, and judging from the style of graffiti, may later have been used by some punk rock squatters.
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Author: Control@ltvsquad.com
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Greenpoint Terminal Graffiti Room
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Subways – Vent Shaft 2 – Chelsea
This is another MTA exhaust ventilation fan plant construction site. This project, costing nearly $30 million dollars, involves the expansion of yet another preexisting fan plant to better remove smoke and increase air circulation within an MTA Subway tunnel.
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Sea Honk Hell
What is the “Sea Honk”? And how many red pills do you have to take before you finally find it, whatever it is?
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Subways – Vent Shaft 1 – Lower East Side
In the spring of 2001, the MTA proposed the construction of this fan plant. The construction consists of a large hole, 70 feet deep, ripped open cut-and-cover style below a local Manhattan street. This location had previously contained an MTA subway emergency exit with an extra ancillary space constructed specifically for future utility use such as this.
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The Gold Drain
the first time I ever entered this drain, it was a cold rainy day. The water level was far too high to navigate this tunnel without ending up with some very cold very wet feet. So we came back one night when it was a little dryer, and found that despite the absolute blackness of this tunnel (no lights anywhere, no lights coming in from the manholes above), the tunnel was not without color. The bottom of the tunnel floor was thick with a golden brown sediment, perhaps some type of soil that had run off into this drain from some of the pipes and smaller drains that feed into this very large (and very smelly) drain.
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Jersey City Shithole
So we’re driving through the ghetto and we come upon this shithole. It’s a series of abandoned warehouse buildings that are basically gutted. There is utterly nothing left sans graffiti (of good quality) and one or two signs. Oh, and let’s not forget the coal silos, abandoned freight tracks, and 2 nice bashed up stolen cars.
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Nelson Galvanizing, L.I.C. NY – aka NYC Taxi Hell
Me, Filthy and Snatch are determined. We were here just an hour ago trying to pry our way into the old Nelson Galvanizing warehouse, all to no avail. We left, hopped in the ride and went to a construction site, combing the building in search of tools. Nothing. So we stop by my place again, get what we need, and come back 5 minutes later. As Snatch would later say ‘it’s open like your mom’s bedroom!’.
Open indeed. both me and Filthy had wanted to come in here for quite some time. She always saw it around the hood, and I saw it ever since childhood when the place was active. Back then, LIC was still just barely clinging to it’s industrial past. This was one of several steel fabrication shops in the area. It’s also a superfund site, and is listed as one of the area’s highest contaminated plots of land
Today though, the space has been taken over by a taxi repair shop. They leave their junk, stripped of parts taxis in this warehouse while they keep mechanics on duty in another building maintaining the rest of the fleet. You see, NYC taxi’s are owned by many different companies, just aboutt all of whom maintain a large fleet of cabs with several crashed or worn out cabs kept at their base as a part supply for those that they keep running. Taxi garages have always found the LIC area home, right along side the manufacturing shops and steel fabrication shops, thus the progression of this lcoation, from steel to taxi, keeps the location ‘in the LIC family’. To me, this is much better than had the place become condos…
Besides, there are still plenty of remains from the old steel shop. It is as if they locked the door and walked away. An ancient truck sits rusting in the back of the warehouse, along with piles of bricks and debris. Towards the front are stairs up to a second level, where the offices once were. The floors have sagged and appear ready for collapse. Nevertheless we carefully made our way in to the corner office, where piles of paperwork and unopened mail sad on old wooden desks. There was no graffiti, and no signs that anyone had been up here in at least 20 years.
It was a better bargain than we had wagered for, and well worth the effort.
Update: 2013: The Nelson Galvanizing building was bulldozed last year. All of the wrecked vehicles were removed. Today (March 2013) the land is nothing but an empty lot. No soil remediation has taken place so far as we know. It joins a long list of former industrial sites across NYC that are no more.
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Claiming The Throne – Newly abandoned Bowery & Canal platforms
When the MTA closed its first station platforms in decades, we made a point of being the first in.
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RIP W.K. 1959
While poking around some tracks downtown, we gained access to a part of the tunnel that was partitioned off in the late 1990s in order to keep the homeless out. Within this area, we found a mysterious bit of graffiti – a chalk outline of a tombstone on a tunnel wall, labeled ” RIP WK 1959″.
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