Greenpoint
Last Wednesday, July 22, I met Nina at the Nassau Avenue G train station. We started off down Nassau and were lured by the bright shine of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant to turn down Monitor Street. Looking an amazing aerial photo from 1954 of the area I found on the Newtown Creek Alliance website, Monitor Street would have run right through Mobil’s Oil Refinery. So why isn’t this defined as brownfield?
We walked down Greenpoint Avenue and saw the Water Pollution Control Plant construction and some of the recycling activity. Paper. Metal. Then we walked back and over the JJ Byrne Bridge. The images can’t convey how deafening the truck traffic is.
Petroleum still has a visible presence.
As does just the old waterfront.
Then we walked back down Kingsland past the ExxonMobil “Greenpoint Remediation Project.” This I guess is the center of the huge spill in Greenpoint. From the bridge, the site looks completely innocuous.
315 Kingsland Avenue is the address of the former Spic and Span Cleaners and Dryers which is in the State Superfund program. TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE). The site is part of the Meeker Avenue plume.
June 7th-East Williamsburg
Nina and I met on Grand Street as in grand piano. Not Graham Avenue. I had wanted to go to the McKibben Street site. I had been there once in the winter and wanted to shoot it again before it got too overgrown. But it seemed too early. I wanted the lovely evening light. So we walked down Grand Street to the Metropolitan Bridge. Before we got there, right in front of Pumps Exotic Dancing, we saw a man lying half on the sidewalk, half in the street. As we got closer, it was apparent that he was breathing. It didn’t seem quite right just to keep walking. Nina called 911. We were asked to wait at the site until the police arrived. I felt very uncomfortable. I was sure that the last thing this man would want would be for the police to come and wake him up but what if he rolled more fully into Grand Street and got run over by a car? The cops came relatively quickly. They woke him up. He jumped up surprisingly alert. He accused Nina and myself of stepping back when he moved. He accused us of being afraid of him and therefore racist. We left the scene to go shoot. Neither of us really had the heart for it. I had not taken this man’s photo as he was lying abjectly in the street. While I am depressed by the degradation of much of Brooklyn’s land, I can still photograph it. Human misery leaves me paralyzed. Yet there is a clear relationship between the toxic areas of Brooklyn and poverty. Homeless people live on a number of the brownfield sites. There are always men with carts of bottles up by the end of Douglass Street at the Gownanus. Information in this case does not provide liberation as it doesn’t increase these people’s ability to make choices.
The weather had clouded over. We then walked to the Grand Street Bridge. The smell was nauseating. We saw quite a few birds including a cormorant and barn swallows yet it wasn’t heartening. We turned and went back up Metropolitan.
The rest of the evening was a bust. The streets were deserted and felt monotonous. We never got to the McKibben Street site. The sky got darker and darker. It was time to go home. The moral of the story is to go to the site you want to photograph first as a bird in the hand is worth more that the promise of evening light.
May 10th-Maspeth Avenue and the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge
This whole project is about the ground.
There are three brownfield sites around the corner of Maspeth and Vandervort, 2 former MGP sites and an oil refinery. During the week, there is very heavy truck traffic. It is hard to believe that the toxic stuff Is all inside the fence.
People work here. On the ground. This is TNT Scrap Metal which is right between the former Equity Works site and BCF Oil Refining. TNT was formerly on the Frito Lay site on Morgan Avenue before moving here. Nina and I talked to a man outside this site who claimed to be security for the auto salvage up the block. He said he wasn’t worried about the contamination. The really bad site was the Greenpoint MGP across the street, safely fenced off.
According to the man we met, this is where the really bad stuff is. The clouds relented and the evening light fell across the site.
On the fence I noticed this snail. If I had seen it elsewhere, I would have been fascinated. Here I was repulsed, largely I think due to the power of suggestion about the extreme toxicity of the site and what this snail might have absorbed.
We then walked over to the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge which crosses the English Kills. This blooming Royal Paulownia grows right on the edge of the Creek.
September 19th-The Newtown Creek
City Tech’s Water and Work group went on a watertaxi tour of the Newtown Creek. The car shredder was the peak of an amazing tour.
