Nathan Kensinger Photography

Samuel R. Smith Infirmary

2012-01-16T20:34:00.091-05:00

January 25, 2012 -

An abandoned castle sits on a hill in Staten Island. Its windows are boarded up. Its roof is collapsing. Inside, its interior has been gutted by arson and decay. Graffiti artists have covered the walls with anonymous tags and several floors are missing. Rain, snow and wind flow through the empty space. Once, this 122-year-old ruin was "like a fairy-tale palace," according to the Staten Island Advance, and a "spectacular Neo-medieval style brick structure," according to Staten Island Treasures. Named the Frost Memorial Tower, it was the cornerstone of the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary, Staten Island's first non-profit volunteer hospital. This 6-acre complex opened its doors in 1890, and was renamed the Staten Island Hospital in 1916. "Generations of Staten Islanders were born at the former Staten Island Hospital site," according to the Staten Island Advance, but that was before the hospital moved in 1979, leaving their old campus to rot.

Today, the city is planning to demolish the Frost Memorial Tower, unless the building first collapses under the weight of this winter's snow. Yet despite the destruction caused by three decades of abandonment, the Frost tower has remained an iconic neighborhood presence. "Activists say the building is one of the most important, beloved, and beautiful buildings on Staten Island," according to the Staten Island Advance, and several Staten Island groups have worked towards preserving the building. These include the Coalition to Save the SI Castle and the Preservation League of Staten Island, which has led rallies, organized a petition, and started a "Save the Castle" Facebook group. The New York Landmarks Conservancy has placed the Frost Memorial Tower on its Endangered Buildings Initiative list, but notes that "despite repeated requests for evaluation, the building has not been heard by the Landmarks Commission."

Frost Tower and Main Hospital Building

Over the years, the abandoned Samuel R. Smith Infirmary complex has also attracted the attention of several more destructive groups. "Homeless, drug addicts and vandals have made it their playground," according to the Staten Island Advance, and "the Fire Department has to pay regular visits there to extinguish fires." The most recent fire was a March 2011 blaze in the Frost tower, and "emergency responders were bracing for squatters in the structure... but thus far initial searches have turned up negative," according to the Staten Island Advance. The decline of the hospital complex began almost immediately after it was closed, according to a Staten Island resident called The Wasp, who wrote that in 1980 - over the course of less than one year - the abandoned campus went from a place where "guard dogs were being allowed to patrol the [main] building at will" to a space where "anything left behind by the hospital move had since been stolen if it had any value. Copper wire and light fixtures had been ripped out and removed. Door knobs, switch panels and sink fixtures were all gone."

Kitchen, Main Hospital Building (2007)

The main hospital building, which stands next to the the Frost Memorial Tower, bore the brunt of the damage. "There was plan in the mid-eighties to turn them into condos," according to The Wasp, "but that was a money laundering scheme that left dozens of tenants ripped off and in debt. Over the years a few con men set themselves as the rightful owners and let people rent the apartments from them but they were eventually evicted by the city and the lower floors of the buildings sealed with cement." By 2005, the entire campus was half-demolished and rotting, according to the Urban Exploration website Opacity: "Clambering through the rubble of the bulldozed infirmary wing and into the large six story building, we were greeted with a few inches of standing water and air so stagnant that the mold was tangible in our noses and mouths." A visit to the main building in 2007 revealed abandoned apartments with kitchens and living rooms destroyed by vandals, while the Frost building was a gutted ruin overgrown with trees. By 2009, the Urban Exploration website The Kingston Lounge predicted that the campus would "either be demolished by the hand of man, or just left to demolition by neglect."

Living Room, Main Hospital Building (2007)

In November 2011, the city began taking steps to tear down the remaining hospital buildings. "The city Buildings Department issued an emergency declaration in June to demolish what formerly was Staten Island’s first voluntary hospital," according to the Staten Island Advance. "The HPD has hired a demolition company, and site preparation work started earlier this week to clear a safety zone." The overgrown land around the hospital campus has since been bulldozed, removing trees and rubble. Some residents remain hopeful that they may still find a reprieve for the Frost building, but, as the Staten Island Advance pointed out in a 2009 editorial, "If the long-abandoned Frost Memorial Tower is landmarked, then what? Landmarking, in and of itself, saves nothing. It prevents the owners of landmarked properties from making changes perhaps. But it does nothing to protect abandoned buildings."

Examples of this can be seen throughout New York City, where many officially landmarked buildings have been left to rot, including Staten Island's abandoned Farm Colony complex and collapsing Physician-in-Chief's residence at Bayley-Seton Hospital, and Brooklyn's hollowed-out 68th Police Precinct and crumbling Domino Sugar Refinery. Even if the supporters of the Frost Memorial Tower are somehow successful in defending the castle, it would take millions of dollars and many years to stabilize and repair this long-neglected structure. In the meantime, the tower slowly collapses, its dark interior empty and bitterly cold. These photographs take a last look inside.

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For photo essays on abandoned New York City landmarks, please visit The New York City Farm Colony (2011), The 68th Police Precinct (2011), Victim Services (2008) and The Domino Sugar Refinery (2007).

Frost Tower Ground Floor

Dark Turret

Empty Room

Frost Tower Lobby

Grand Staircase

Upper Floor Landing

Demolished Hallway

Third Floor Steps

Respect Nature

Collapsed Roof

Open Turret

Wooden Roof Beams

Hubris

Staten Island View

Bloomfield, Staten Island

2011-12-19T19:13:00.061-05:00

December 31, 2011 -

There are very few roads that lead to Bloomfield, a quiet industrial neighborhood on Staten Island's northwest coast. Much of the neighborhood has been demapped and fenced-off by miles of razor wire, leaving its interior a vast forbidden zone, its desolate streets patrolled by a private security force. Bloomfield's remaining roads are poorly maintained dumping grounds, prone to flooding from bordering marshlands. They are lined with abandoned lots filled with mattresses, toys, living room sets, empty trailers, a beached jet ski. A hot tub sits in the middle of an unused road near an abandoned chocolate factory. A boat graveyard is hidden off a dead-end road overgrown with dense foliage. The profound isolation of Bloomfield has created a fertile breeding ground for a mix of strange uses. Its recent history includes the intersection of dead bodies, oil tanks, mafia extortion and NASCAR.

Hot Tub Road

Bloomfield's landscape is a microcosm of Staten Island's conflicted relationship to its post-industrial waterfront. Like nearby Fresh Kills, which is located further south on the Arthur Kill, Bloomfield's marshlands and wilderness survive next door to toxic storage systems, and its wetlands are tainted by the aftermath of devastating pollution. The demapped dead-zone at the heart of Bloomfield was once the GATX tanker field, "a 414-acre oil tank farm," according to the Chicago Tribune, which contained "81 above-ground tanks with a capacity to hold 218 million gallons of petroleum products."

Oil spills were common and in 1992 GATX agreed to "undertake a $6 million cleanup and repair program at the tank farm." The oil tanks were demolished shortly thereafter and "the lot has remained vacant since GATX Corp. stopped using it as an oil storage tank farm in 1998," according to Scene Daily. The cleanup of the tanker field is ongoing and includes a plan to spread nearly 5 million cubic yards of fill across 234 polluted acres, according to a 2011 New York State Department of Environmental Conservation document. For now, a surreal landscape of ghost roads and concrete crop-circles is all that has been left behind.

Ghost Road in the Dead Zone

Abandoned Guard Booth

Over the years, Bloomfield's much-abused marshlands have also been a dumping ground for murder victims. In 1942, a "19-year-old war plant worker was found... in a field at Bloomfield," according to the NY Times, her death "caused by fracture of skull as if by hammer blow." In 1998, "the body of a man killed by a gunshot to the neck" was found in a Bloomfield marsh, according to the NY Times, "wrapped in a blanket and set on fire." Along the dead-end road leading to Bloomfield's power plant, an empty hole that resembles a shallow grave can be found behind a dump site. A piece of pink carpet lies in the bottom of the human-sized hole.

Like the infamous mob burial ground on the Brooklyn/Queens border named The Hole, Bloomfield has been closely linked to Mafia activity. The family of Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, a prominent member of the Gambino crime family who later became an FBI informant, once lived in Bloomfield, according to the NY Times. And in 2008, a multi-count indictment highlighted "the Gambinos' stranglehold on Staten Island," according to the Staten Island Advance. The indictment chronicled "a slew of crimes over three decades, including murder, theft of union benefits and extortion at the site in Bloomfield where NASCAR proposed to put an 80,000-seat racetrack."

Dumping Grove

Empty Hole

The plan to bring NASCAR to New York City was formulated in 2004 by the International Speedway Corporation (ISC), which proposed to build a 3/4 mile track on top of the old GATX tanker field. "In 2004, ISC paid $100 million — the single largest private sale ever recorded in the county — to purchase the 450-acre former oil tank farm on the edge of the West Shore Expressway," according to the Staten Island Advance. "An adjacent 239-acre parcel was purchased for $10 million." Very soon after, in 2006, "ISC pulled up stakes... in the face of mounting opposition."

The project failed for several reasons, including the Gambino's alleged extortion plot at the tanker farm, which involved "control over trucking contracts used to deliver large quantities of dirt fill needed when excavation of the Bloomfield site began in 2006." However, "the real problem," according to the New York Times, was "the island's relatively primitive road system -- mostly paved-over paths set down centuries ago by American Indians, then used by farmers and other early settlers. The meandering layout makes even simple traffic control measures, like timed stoplights, virtually impossible," and leading politicians and nearby residents to voice "concerns about how the borough’s roadways would handle an influx of cars and fans headed to NASCAR races," according to the Staten Island Advance.

Bloomfield's remaining handful of narrow, flooded, deserted roads remain relatively empty today. One of the few social hubs in this quiet neighborhood is at the Staten Island Sportsmen's Club, located across the street from the empty NASCAR/GATX wasteland. Founded in 1936, club members are invited to fire their shotguns throughout the day, blasting clay pigeons from the sky, with no fear of bothering the neighbors. The lure of Bloomfield is simple, according to one club manager. "There's nobody out here. And we like it that way."

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For other photo essays from Staten Island's waterfront, please visit New Dorp Bungalows(2011), Fresh Kills (2009), The Wrigley Building (2008), and Staten Island: North Shore (2008). For other photos from this exploration of Bloomfield, please visit Nate Dorr's website, Hyraxical Apocrypha.

Bloomfield Meadow

Clay Pigeon

Bloomfield Avenue

Abandoned Trailer

Lazy Boy Field

Grand Am

Empty Trailer

Cat Food Interior

Squatter Bedroom

Marshland View

Boat Graveyard

Caitlin Rose

Life Preserver

For Sale: "As Is"

Big George Bridge

Tracks into the Marsh

Arthur Kill Shores

Arthur Kill Sunset

Curate NYC

2011-12-19T17:55:00.007-05:00

In December 2011, one of my photographs was selected for Curate NYC, "a juried exhibition and online platform that exists to heighten exposure and opportunities for New York City visual artists." Over 1,500 New York artists submitted work for this competition. The top 150 entries were selected by a panel of judges and exhibited at the Rush Arts Gallery in Manhattan. My entry was a photograph titled "A Kissproof World" (2009), which was from a series taken underneath the Coney Island boardwalk. It was exhibited at the Rush Arts Gallery from December 1st-10th, and was also selected for an online gallery by the Deep Tanks Studio in Staten Island.

More information on Curate NYC can be seen at their website.

A Kissproof World (2009)

Block By Block: New York Street Historians

2011-11-11T17:22:00.006-05:00

On Sunday, November 20th, 2011, I curated an event titled "Block By Block: New York Street Historians" at UnionDocs, the documentary collaborative in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The event was a panel discussion with several "street historians" who are creatively exploring and documenting the city - author Kevin Walsh of Forgotten New York, location scout Nick Carr of Scouting New York, urban explorer Moses Gates of All City New York, and tour guide Cindy VandenBosch of Urban Oyster. "Block by Block" was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Urban Omnibus, and the Brooklyn Paper, and in an article I wrote for PBS 13 WNET's website, MetroFocus. The event was part of a series of UnionDocs panels I am curating - the first, from April 2011, was "Down the Road: Modern New York Street Photographers." More information can be seen at the UnionDocs website.

The following is from my description of "Block By Block":

"In a city as vast as New York, there is always a story waiting to be told, a block waiting to be walked, a building with an unwritten history. Over the past decade, many New Yorkers have been creatively documenting the changing streets of the city on websites and blogs. Often, these modern day storytellers are not historians or authors by training. Their work is part of a tradition of “unofficial,” “informal,” “underground,” and “alternative” histories of New York City. However, after walking through the city block by block, a better title for their work could be “street history.”

The modern New York City street historian can be traced back to George G. Foster, a reporter who explored 1800′s New York as it grew from a town into a modern metropolis. His seminal work, “New York By Gas Light” (1850), is considered a groundbreaking example of urban non-fiction, and presented “the under-ground story – of life in New York,” with portraits of “the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch.”

Foster’s candid explorations of New York’s streetscapes directly influenced the work of many writers in the 1900′s, including Joseph Mitchell – The New Yorker magazine’s “poet of the waterfront,” Herbert Asbury – a reporter who penned a series of “informal” New York histories including “The Gangs of New York,” and Meyer Berger – a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and “incurable New Yorker” whose colorful New York portraits were published in several collections.

In the same era, several New York street historians physically embraced the challenge of exploring modern New York. For his magnum opus, “History in Asphalt” (1978), amateur historian John McNamara walked, biked or canoed every street in the Bronx, creating an exhaustive encyclopedia of street and place names. His peers include Commander Thomas J. Keane, who completed his walk of every street on Manhattan Island in 1954. Unfortunately, Keane did not keep a diary, but in the next century, Robert Jay Kaufman did, writing “Blockology: An Offbeat Walking Guide to Lower Manhattan” (2005), after walking the 1,544 blocks below 14th Street, a distance of about 300 miles.

Today’s panel brings together four active New York City street historians – a guide, an author, an urban explorer, and a location scout – who are tirelessly exploring the 21st century city, block by block, on their own unique paths - Nathan Kensinger, curator"

The Newtown Creek Armada

2011-11-09T13:09:00.009-05:00

On November 8th, 2011, The North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition (nbART) announced the selection of its sixth public art project, The Newtown Creek Armada, an interactive installation in which a model boat pond will be created on the Newtown Creek, one of America's most polluted waterways. The Newtown Creek Armada is a collaboration between myself and two other Brooklyn artists - Laura Chipley and Sarah Nelson Wright - whose work also explores industry, ecology, and change in urban spaces. The project was commissioned by nbART through nbECO 2012, an open call seeking environmentally and sustainability conscious art installations.

The Newtown Creek Armada will be launched in Spring 2012, when visitors will be invited to pilot a fleet of artist-created, miniature, radio-controlled boats along the Newtown Creek's surface, while at the same time documenting the world hidden beneath the water. Each boat in The Armada will be equipped with an underwater camera and lights, allowing participants to record a unique voyage on the creek. Video from these underwater explorations will be on view at the creek, giving visitors a chance to virtually immerse themselves in the toxic waters of this Superfund site. In Fall 2012, the archive of voyages from The Armada will be presented in an immersive gallery installation.

The Newtown Creek has been a neglected toxic waste zone for more than a century, and has been described as "the bleeding edge of an environmental disaster, one of the largest oil spills in the world," by Mother Jones Magazine. I have been photographing the polluted banks of the Newtown Creek for several years, as part of my explorations of New York City's industrial edges. Photo essays on this website about aspects of life along the creek include Newtown Creek: Brooklyn Shores (2011), Secret Parties (2009), The Dutch Kills (2008) and Linden Hill Tracks (2007). In 2010, the Newtown Creek was declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency, and a massive cleanup effort is now underway. The Newtown Creek Armada will engage the long history of the creek while inviting the public to explore the potential of its polluted waters.

For more information on The Newtown Creek Armada, please visit the project's website: www.newtowncreekarmada.org

Gowanus Canal: Toxic Playground

2011-10-23T22:49:00.026-04:00

October 31st, 2011 - This photo essay is excerpted from a lecture & slideshow I presented at Cabinet Space on October 8th, 2011 titled "Gowanus Canal: Toxic Playground," which was part of Gowanderlust, my nighttime walking tour of the Gowanus Canal organized by Cinebeasts. For a description and photos from Gowanderlust, read the Urban Omnibus writeup.

For the past several decades, the Gowanus Canal has been a center of unrestricted creativity in Brooklyn. With seemingly few rules or regulations, the canal area became a source of inspiration to numerous artists, filmmakers and photographers. Bohemian communities developed on its waters, including a houseboat armada and the now-defunct Batcave. Its empty lots, once described as "Brooklyn's biggest toxic playground" by Robert Guskind, were taken over by graffiti artists, sculptors, and homeless camps. Arts groups and gallery spaces, including Rooftop Films and Issue Project Room , found homes in its industrial buildings. Creative projects like the Dumpster Pools were installed on its banks, while community groups like the Gowanus Dredgers organized access to its waters.

However, the darker side of the canal's lawlessness includes more than a century of criminal dumping. As chronicled in Allison Prete's documentary "Lavender Lake: Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal" (1999), the canal has long been "an open sewer" for the surrounding communities, in the fecal sense and in other ways. The canal was completed in 1869, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and industries along its shores have been poisoning its waters ever since. At one point, according to stories, the pollution was so bad that the canal was prone to spontaneous combustion. It was also a reputed Mafia dumping ground, with neighbors finding dead bodies in the water, sometimes tied to chairs. In 2010, the canal was Superfunded, with the EPA labelling it "one of the nation's most extensively contaminated water bodies."

Canoeing on the Gowanus Canal (2009)

For the past eight years, the Gowanus Canal was my backyard. I boated in its waters with an inflatable boat found in a trashcan, swam in the dumpster pools, went to parties on its houseboats, canoed with the Gowanus Dredgers, and explored the many abandoned buildings and empty lots on its shores. The Gowanus was an early inspiration for my photographs of New York's industrial waterfront, and I assisted many other filmmakers, journalists and photographers in their creative pursuits along the canal.

In the past few years, even with its Superfund designation, a surge of upscale hotels and venues has threatened to overwhelm the canal's established creative community. The lure of empty streets, open space, and a measure of lawlessness has drawn new crowds to the neighborhood, and to large warehouse venues like The Bell House, Littlefield, and the Brooklyn Boulders rock climbing gym, located in the old New York Daily News garage. At the same time, however, new creative projects have also appeared on the canal, offering a balance to the suddenly crowded streets. These include the hand-built birdhouses of the Canal Nest Colony and several guerrilla gardens that have sprung up on dead end streets. As the cleanup of the Gowanus Canal continues over the coming decades, it will hopefully not erase the unique balance of industrial, artistic, and creative uses that continue to thrive in the area.

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For more photo essays about the Gowanus Canal, please visit The Whole Foods Lot (2010), The Batcave Revisited (2010) and the Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station (2009).

Bran (2009)

Toxic Playground (2009)

Silos and Graffiti (2009)

Rubble Sculpture (2009)

Abadi Warehouses (2009)

Graffiti Blocks (2009)

Whole Foods Lot (2009)

You Go Girl (2009)

Filmmaker Digging (2009)

The Batcave Revisited (2010)

Long Gone (2010)

Needle Supply (2010)

Dumpster Pools (2009)

Dumpster Diving (2009)

Doomsday Symposium: The Post-Apocalyptic New York Landscape

2011-10-18T19:22:00.001-04:00

October 19, 2011 -

From October 21st 2011 to January 2012, a selection of my photographs will be exhibited at the 92Y Tribeca. The exhibit, part of the 3rd annual Doomsday Film Festival and Symposium, "brings together a wide variety of artists who have created work inspired by the idea of an Apocalypse." My photographs will explore the post-apocalyptic landscape, with images of devastation from across New York City.

The selected photographs capture the ruins of a once thriving industrial empire, the remains of neighborhoods that have been destroyed and wiped off the map, abandoned military bases and civic structures, toxic environmental wastelands, and the unstoppable return of nature to desolate areas where humans once lived. They include the photograph featured above, from the South Edgemere Wasteland, a New York City neighborhood which was destroyed over 35 years ago during an economic and social crisis, and which has since become a beachfront wilderness populated by homeless encampments and marauding wild dog packs.

The exhibit will open on Friday, October 21st with a reception from 6-8pm. For more information, please visit the 92Y Tribeca.

Child's Shoe - The South Edgemere Wasteland (2010)

Bring To Light: The Forgotten City

2011-09-26T11:15:00.001-04:00

On October 1st 2011, my photographs from inside the Greenpoint Terminal Market were projected onto the exterior of this warehouse complex in a site-specific installation titled "The Forgotten City." The piece took viewers through the hidden rooms and passages of these warehouses with a series of photographs taken between 2007 and 2011. The piece detailed the history of these buildings, which date back to 1890, and included stories of riots, explosions, fires and squatters. "The Forgotten City" was inspired by my original photo essay, "The Greenpoint Terminal Market Revisited," which was published on this website in November 2010.

This installation was a part of Bring To Light, an outdoor nighttime art festival of light-based video, sculpture and installations on the Greenpoint waterfront. Bring To Light included over 50 artists from around the world, "some of the established auteurs of this artistic genre... and a long list of emerging talent," according to Urban Omnibus. "The Omnibus team, proud civic partner of the event, is particularly excited to check out... the industrial photography of Nathan Kensinger."

Brooklyn Based wrote of the event "photographer Nathan Kensinger has a... interesting project planned for Bring To Light. He’s been taking photos along Greenpoint’s waterfront for years, and will be projecting images that he’s captured of the inside of the Greenpoint Terminal Market onto the side of one of its buildings tomorrow. 'The photographs were taken over the past five years, and will be presented along with the story of the buildings, which date back to 1890,' Kensinger wrote... 'They have a long, dark history: a century ago, a thousand workers rioted in the streets in front of the Greenpoint Terminal Market, in the same streets where Bring To Light will take place.'"

For more information, visit Bring To Light's website: www.bringtolightnyc.org. The following are several photographs documenting the installation.

"The Forgotten City"
at Bring to Light (2011)

Governors Island: Manhattan's Ghost Town

2011-09-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

September 21, 2011 -

Governors Island is a 172-acre ghost town on the southern shore of Manhattan. Covered in ruins, the island houses an impressive collection of abandoned structures, with empty apartment towers, homes, schools, churches, swimming pools and playgrounds. Half of the approximately 100 buildings on the island are in some state of decay, including a supermarket, auto body repair shop, movie theater and hospital. Many of the other buildings are controlled ruins, minimally cleaned up to allow limited public access. Walking through this deserted landscape is a surreal experience, especially when considering its close proximity to the bustling financial center of lower Manhattan.

After serving as a base for military operations for over 200 years, Governors Island was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1996. The federal government sold most of the island to New York City for $1 in 2003. Today, Governors Island has come to resemble San Francisco's Alcatraz Island and Japan's Gunkanjima Island, with evocative off-limits ruins dominating the landscape while smaller sections are slowly reclaimed and opened to the public. Artists have been brought in to help colonize the wilderness, creating a variety of installations inside otherwise empty spaces. Often, they are appropriately post-apocalyptic - embalmed wildlife, metal skeletons, animal bones, zombie films. Despite these creative uses, many of the island's structures are slated for demolition, to make way for a public park. Some have been purposefully set ablaze by the fire department to "test new techniques."

These photographs were take between 2005 and 2011, after the island was opened to the public. They offer an update to a photo series from 2003-2004 titled "Governors Island: Photographs by Lisa Kereszi and Andrew Moore," a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund to document the deserted island before it was open to the public. Hundreds of thousands of people have visited Governors Island since it has been made accessible, but the ruins still remain.

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For more photo essays from partially abandoned New York City islands, please visit The Encampment on Roosevelt Island (2007) and Ellis Island: South Side (2007).

Living Room (2005)

Rope Swing (2005)

Bulldozer Playground (2009)

Game Time (2009)

Bones (2009)

Fenced Off Homes (2009)

Fire Practice Tower (2011)

Coast Guard Bedroom (2011)

Empty Kitchen (2010)

Raccoon Island (2010)

Abandoned Classrooms (2008)

Blackboard (2008)

Dropped Ceiling (2008)

Hospital Kitchen (2011)

Box Office (2009)

Theater Lobby (2009)

Empty Theater (2009)

Church Interior (2009)

Hospital Lounge (2011)

Hospital Admissions (2011)

Staircase (2011)

Abandoned Hospital (2011)

Water's Edge (2010)

The Demolition of Manhattanville

2011-08-29T15:56:00.001-04:00

August 31, 2011 -

Not long ago, the streets of Manhattanville were lined with small businesses. Gas stations, auto body shops, parking garages and storage buildings stood alongside popular restaurants, creating a unique mixed-use neighborhood. Today, that neighborhood has largely been demolished. Businesses have been shuttered. Warehouses have been reduced to cracked bricks. In total, seventeen acres in the heart of this historic industrial valley will be destroyed and Manhattanville will be a construction site for the next two decades, as Columbia University completes its plan to build a $7 billion campus extension.

This past December, the state of New York won the final round in a six year battle against the last private property owners inside Columbia University's project footprint. The owners had been fighting against the state's decision to use eminent domain to seize their property and hand it over to the university. The battle went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately refused to hear the property owners' appeal. "In all likelihood... the battle is over," the NY Times wrote after the decision, and since then the demolition of Manhattanville has proceeded quickly.

Barricade Road

Sinkhole and Pigeon

The blocks condemned by the university's plan already feel desolate and abandoned. Huge vacant lots are filled with dirt, debris and heavy equipment. Emptied buildings are marked by the symbols of planned demolition. A sinkhole idles in the middle of an unused road, clogged with trash. Sidewalks are inaccessible, streets lined with barricades. "The Manhattanville expansion will, by Columbia’s own estimates, displace 5,000 people," according to the Columbia Spectator, creating a temporary ghost town while the project is underway. Residents who remain in the area complain that a "rat epidemic" has been unleashed by construction activity, according to the Columbia Spectator, while others fear the swirling clouds of demolition dust will cause respiratory illness, according to DNAinfo, leading the university to buy air conditioners for at least one apartment tower.

A century ago, these empty streets teemed with horses. Manhattanville's long industrial history includes thriving dairy factories with stables that sent out "wagons to drop off thousands of bottles every morning to individual customers," according to the NY Times, alongside "factories producing lumber, paint, beer, dye and other materials." Columbia has already demolished at least one historic stable, and Manhattanville's industrial heritage will soon be consigned to the past. The majority of street traffic today is from yellow cabs refueling at the neighborhood's two remaining gas stations. They are scheduled to be torn down too.

If all goes according to plan, the Manhattanville campus will be completed by 2033. However, "of the 17 planned buildings on campus, the specific uses of only six have been determined," according to the Columbia Spectator, and in the meantime, the failing economy has led the Village Voice to ask "will NYC's college building boom bubble pop?" For now, Manhattanville's empty lots and demolished businesses wait for their promised transformation.

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For more photo essays on neighborhoods endangered by eminent domain, please visit The Bloomberg Era, Part Two (2010), Manhattanville: Phase One (2008), The Iron Triangle (2008), and The Atlantic Yards (2007).

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Demolition

Crushed Warehouse and Diner

Demolition Debris

Viaduct and Empty Lot

Jesus is Good

Crossed Cranes

Manhattanville Houses and Cranes

Cleaning Up

Condemned Home and Dumpster

Condemned MTA Warehouse

Idle Garage

Gate N

Brick Field

Richmond Parkway Interchange

2011-08-09T21:15:00.000-04:00

August 11th, 2011 -

In his quest to radically transform New York City's built environment, Robert Moses left behind many scars on the land, blighting communities with wastelands and ruins. One reminder of the Master Builder's incomplete mission to redesign the city's infrastructure still hovers above Staten Island. Moses built more than 400 miles of parkways during his long reign, but the Richmond Parkway Interchange - one mile of twisting concrete paths - is a symbol of his final days in power. It has been abandoned for 45 years.

The Richmond Parkway "was originally intended to be 9.5 miles long" according to the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, and would have connected southern Staten Island to the Staten Island Expressway via the Richmond Parkway Interchange, providing quick access to the nearby Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which was completed in 1964 as "the last great public works project in New York City overseen by Robert Moses," according to Wikipedia. The plan for the parkway was to cut through what is now the Staten Island Greenbelt, tearing down pristine forests, threatening Pouch Camp and devastating the Blood Root Valley. The southern section of the parkway - known today as the Korean War Veterans Parkway - had already been completed and construction of the interchange was well underway: "Earth and rock blasted away for the highway was hauled to a remote area eventually forming a 260-foot-high mound ironically nicknamed 'Moses Mountain',” according to the Greenbelt Conservancy.

Abandoned Ramp into the Greenbelt

Mt. Moses Leftovers

The Richmond Parkway Interchange was nearly complete before members of the community were able to stop the planned destruction of the Greenbelt. "Intrepid citizen-activists vigorously protested the highway and won their battle," according to the Greenbelt Conservancy, and "in 1966 Mayor John Lindsay ordered a halt" to construction on the northern section of the Richmond Parkway, according to the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. The victory helped galvanize the creation of the Greenbelt, "the largest of New York City’s five flagship parks," according to the Greenbelt Conservancy, with "more than 2,800 acres of public and private land." For Robert Moses, who had "thrust many of New York's great ribbons of concrete across an older and largely settled urban landscape," according to the NY Times, it was a rare defeat at the end of a long career, and "his last significant hold on power was lost in 1968."

The Richmond Parkway Interchange remains abandoned today, covered in juvenile graffiti from a nearby high school and littered with empty liquor bottles. The curving roads above the Staten Island Expressway are spotted with weeds, while trees and shrubs have reclaimed the inland ramps. On the side of the road, cars rust in the woods, tree trunks in their engine blocks, like some post-apocalyptic version of a city once ruled by automobiles.

Upper Road Entrance

Upper Deck

High School Party

Lower Deck

Over the Staten Island Expressway

Empty Concrete

Sunnyside Gaelic

Vanishing Road

Guard Rail

Overgrown Chrome

Forest Smile

Wrecked Car

End Of The Road

Sleeping in the Sommerville Basin

2011-07-30T14:57:00.057-04:00

July 31, 2011 -

The Sommerville Basin is a small Jamaica Bay inlet in The Rockaways, located on the border between the Queens neighborhoods of Arverne and Edgemere. Fishermen and crabbers ply its waters from all sides, despite being downshore from the Edgemere Landfill, an abandoned toxic dump which is leeching trash into the bay nearby. A warning sign posted by the NY Department of Health reads "no more than one meal per week of Bluefish, American Eels, or Striped Bass from Jamaica Bay shall be eaten," but that does not seem to deter the fishermen of the basin, who proudly describe catching and grilling fish over three feet long.

They cast their lines in the shadow of the Ocean Bay Apartments, which are more commonly known as the Edgemere Houses, one of New York City's most notorious housing projects. "Cops at one time called [it] "Edgefear" because it was the worst public housing in the city by any indicator you care to choose," according to The Wave. The neighborhood of northern Edgemere, on the eastern side of the Sommerville Basin, is plagued by gang warfare, with abandoned waterfront buildings and marinas covered in gang graffiti. A pack of wild dogs lives in the park behind the Edgemere Houses, near city-owned fishing piers that jut out above the Sommerville Basin.

Sommerville Fisherman and Edgemere Houses

Sommerville Crabber and JFK

The main feature of the Sommerville Basin is Marina 59, a small three pier marina primarily used to store fishing vessels. Home to a surplus of abandoned boats, the marina is patrolled by a herd of goats which trim the weeds underneath vessels with names like "Parking Lot Pimp," "Beeracuda," "Like It Wet III," and "Wasting Away - Margarittaville." The marina rents kayaks and motorboats, has a bait shop selling hot coffee and worms, and is surrounded by a razor wire topped fence. With its remote location, "Marina 59 is a money-losing venture," according to the NY Times.

This summer, however, an improbably popular resort has sprung up inside the marina. Named the Boggsville Boatel and Boat-In Theater, it is a small collection of refurbished abandoned boats clustered around a floating platform at the end of a pier. For a donation of $50 to $100 a night, visitors can stay onboard a private vessel, be entertained by either a movie or lecture, and can paddle out into the basin. Created by artist Constance Hockaday, The Boatel has been described as "New York City’s newest and perhaps loopiest tourist outpost," by the NY Times, and is entirely booked for the summer.

Spending a night at The Boatel is surprisingly peaceful. The sounds of the city - jets taking off from JFK, elevated subway trains, traffic from the Edgemere Houses - tend to fade away into the background as gentle waves rock The Boatel platform. Despite its urban setting, the Sommerville Basin is a pleasant and quiet refuge. Several fishermen stay late into the night with their boats.

Abandoned Boat

Goats and Boats

One hundred years ago, The Rockaways were the main summer escape for New York City, with grand hotels, amusement parks, tent cities and thousands of seasonal bungalows. At its peak, the peninsula was known as "The Playground of New York," according to The Wave, but by the 1960's most of the eastern section of The Rockaways had become blighted by failed development schemes, arson, abandoned bungalows, and "one of the city's highest concentrations of public housing," according to the NY Times. The neighborhoods of Arverne, Edgemere and Far Rockaway - located at the farthest eastern end of the peninsula - were hit the hardest.

These neighborhoods are still struggling to recover today. In recent years, however, redevelopment and gentrification have slowly reached out to transform the The Rockaways. In Far Rockaway, artists have been buying and refurbishing some of the few remaining bungalows. In Arverne, empty blocks are being transformed into Arverne By The Sea - "New York City’s newest and most improbable neighborhood," according to New York Magazine. "Over the last few summers, this sandy and pockmarked peninsula has become an unlikely hangout for young, artsy types," according to the NY Times. It remains to be seen whether the new-found popularity of The Rockways will create permanent change, or whether the artists will all float away when this latest season of summers is over.

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For more photo essays from The Rockaways, please visit The North Edgemere Shore (2010) The South Edgemere Wasteland (2010), The Edgemere Landfill (2010), Hammels Wye (2010) and Far Rockaway: Abandoned Bungalows (2009).

A Dock

The Four C's

Aboard the Four C's

Boatel Platform

The Edgemere Houses

Boatel Boating

Sommerville Basin Shores

Abandoned Dory

Sunken Steamer

Sunset Oar

Marina 59 Sunset

Twilight at the Boatel

Marina 59 and Edgemere Houses

Boat Lift

Night on the Marina

Boatel Night

Boatel Pier

The Boatel

Drawbridge, California

2011-07-13T15:16:00.050-04:00

July 20, 2011 -

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to over 7 million people and 12 major cities. It is one of the largest urban hubs in the United States. However, its southern end is anchored by a landscape more similar to the Colorado plains, with vast open vistas, rolling hills, and empty dirt roads lined with decaying carcasses. In the middle of this incongruous landscape lies a collection of empty buildings sinking into the mud of an abandoned island. This is Drawbridge, the Silicon Valley ghost town.

Officially given its name in 1887, Drawbridge started as a train stop on Station Island, between bridges over Mud Creek and Coyote Creek. Due to an abundance of fish and birds, it soon became a popular destination for hunters. At its peak, Drawbridge held over 90 structures - hotels, restaurants, cabins, and dozens of rod & gun clubs linked together by narrow boardwalks. Its skies were so full of birds that hunting was sometimes done with a cannon. "Legend has it that five hundred to one thousand ducks would fall out of the sky after one mighty blast," according to an excellent history compiled by the Soft Underbelly of San Jose.

Drawbridge Diagonals

Today, the skies above Station Island are nearly empty and the water nearby is dark red, fouled by algae spawning in abandoned salt harvesting ponds. After its peak in the 1920's and 30's, Drawbridge became a victim of the industrialization and development of the Bay Area. The wetlands around Station Island were parcelled off to salt harvesters while nearby communities like San Jose pumped water out of the area, causing Drawbridge to sink into the mud, and then pumped raw sewage back in, poisoning its waterways, according to Ghost Towns in the USA and Canada. The entire area is "now in the middle of a $400 million effort to restore South Bay wetlands," according to the SF Chronicle, and "the story of Drawbridge is, in many ways, the story of the West."

Station Island is now a part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, "the first urban National Wildlife Refuge established in the United States," according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, including "30,000 acres of open bay, salt pond, salt marsh, mudflat, upland and vernal pool habitats." Drawbridge has been left to collapse, a silent witness of the decline and subsequent restoration of the Bay Area.

---

The waterfront of the San Francisco Bay Area has long been a source of inspiration for my photographs of New York City. For more photo essays of the San Francisco Bay, please visit The San Francisco Police Athletic Club (2010) and The San Francisco Naval Shipyard (2009)

The Boardwalk

Red Waters

Floating Ghost House

Ghost House

Where Is Home?

Dead Dog

In The Salt Pond

Water Tower

Boardwalk and Shack

Slough View

In the Window (2008)

Ghost House Diagonals

Shelves and Windows

Track Diagonals

Shotgun Shack (2008)

Backyards (2008)

Ladder

Hills and Prairie (2008)

Train Passing (2008)

Brooklyn's Bridges: Engineering as Art and Inspiration

2011-06-25T15:26:00.016-04:00

From June 28th to September 18th, 2011, the Brooklyn Public Library featured my work in a group exhibition titled Brooklyn's Bridges: Engineering as Art and Inspiration. Jay Kaplan, Director of Programs & Exhibitions at the Brooklyn Public Library, wrote of the exhibit: "Brooklyn's bridges have long fascinated artists in a wide range of media. This exhibition brings together the work of 17 visual artists who have chosen to explore these omnipresent and monumental features of our daily lives. Their work reflects a range of responses - among which we can readily detect awe, a sense of mystery, scientific curiosity and simple sensual delight..."

The exhibit included one of my photographs from inside the Domino Sugar Refinery, looking out onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The image - titled "Domino Sugar Refinery" (2007) - is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Public Library, and this was the fourth Brooklyn Library exhibit to include my work. For a list of other exhibits, please visit this page. "Brooklyn's Bridges" was on display in the Grand Lobby of the Central Library, which is located on Grand Army Plaza. For more information, please visit the library's webpage.

Domino Sugar Refinery (2007)

Urban Camping in Staten Island

2011-06-20T13:11:00.034-04:00

June 22, 2011 -

Camping in New York City can be a challenge. There is only one campground open to the public inside city limits, and it has just four campsites. In a city of over 8 million people, getting a reservation at Floyd Bennett Airfield's campground can be difficult, and it is often pre-booked for Native American powwows and Gypsy festivals. Recognizing this, the United States Secretary of the Interior announced a plan on June 13th to transform Floyd Bennett from an abandoned municipal airport into "America's largest urban park campground," according to NY1, with up to 600 campsites available sometime in the future.

In the meantime, a variety of other options are occasionally available to urban campers. Several artists have recently created unique camping opportunities, including The Encampment (2007) on Roosevelt Island, and House of Cards (2009), a shanty timeshare inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There are also a handful of private campgrounds inside the city, like Pouch Camp - the Boy Scouts' private 143-acre oasis in Staten Island. For most New Yorkers, however, the best bet for finding a legal campsite inside New York City is winning a lottery to sleep in a park.

The Encampment (2007)

House of Cards (2009)

The Urban Park Rangers' Family Camping program is "one of the better-kept secrets of the city," according to the NY Times, and throughout the summer, New Yorkers can apply to win a camping spot in the Rangers' lottery system. Some of the more popular campouts include nights in Central Park, Prospect Park and Fort Greene Park. However, the program also offers camping opportunities in many lesser-known parks in the five boroughs that make far superior campsites. Camping with the Urban Park Rangers is free, and includes a tent, food and campfire. All that is needed is a sleeping bag.

One of the best camping locations offered in the Urban Park Ranger lottery is at Wolfe's Pond Park, "one of Staten Island's largest parks," which includes a beach, pond, picnic area, forest and mountain biking trails. Although Wolfe's Pond is situated near the far southern end of the city, camping in the park is still a uniquely urban experience. The park itself highlights the harsh contrast between urban and natural. One section of its beach is open for swimming, manned with lifeguards, and is regularly raked free of debris and seaweed. Just down the beach, though, the uncleaned section is littered with syringes and "more tampon applicators than I have ever seen in my life," according to one camper. In Wolfe's Pond itself, fishermen ply waters littered with empty beer cans and 40's.

After dark, when the park is largely emptied out, the Urban Park Rangers lead a night hike through the forest, over bridges and alongside patches of poison ivy, while birds and insects compete with car alarms and a steady stream of nearby traffic. On the deserted beach, waves crash at the edge of an empty lifeguard station as barges and tankers slip by the southern end of Staten Island. The distant glow of fireworks in Coney Island is a reminder that the crowds of the city are just a few miles away. Back at the campground, a campfire in the darkness erases any lingering memories of the city.

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For more information on the Urban Park Rangers' Family Camping program, please visit their website.

Wolfe's Pond

Dark Bridge

Closed Beach

Sand & Syringe

Fire Pit

Wolfe's Pond Sunset

Campground Sunset

Classic A Frame

Night Beach

BBQ Bonfire

Urban Rangers Campfire

2011 Brooklyn Film Festival

2011-05-24T23:44:00.010-04:00

The 2011 Brooklyn Film Festival (BFF) took place from June 3rd to 12th, 2011 and presented over 100 film premieres from 26 different countries. As the Director of Programming for the festival, I led a team of screeners and programmers to select these films from a field of more then 2,400 submissions coming from over 100 different countries.

While all of the selected films merit equal attention, several had subjects related directly to this website's themes, especially in the documentary category. Locally, Battle For Brooklyn (Best Documentary and Grand Chameleon Award) documented the struggle against the Atlantic Yards development site and the fight against eminent domain abuse in Brooklyn, while Bed Stuy Do Or Die (Audience Award for Documentary) captured the gritty reality of life in Brooklyn, riding along with the Bed Stuy Volunteer Ambulance Corp. Outside of Brooklyn, Mann V. Ford focused on one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States, a doubly toxic Superfund site located just a few miles from New York City. Scrapper (Spirit Award for Documentary) was filmed on the fringes of society, in California's Chocolate Mountain bombing range, and presented a story of missile-scavenging, meth-using outlaws living in a militarized post-apocalyptic landscape.

On the fiction side, My Last Day Without You (Best Production Award) was a romantic feature film that made excellent use of locations around the recently superfunded Gowanus Canal, while Money Dog presented a time capsule view of 1980's Bronx dog fighting culture, and Siberia, Monamour (Best New Director Award) told the story of a young boy and his grandfather trapped by wild dogs in a half-abandoned complex at the edge of Russian society.

Additionally, the official trailer and poster for the 2011 festival were shot at S&S Machinery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a location which was featured on this website in 2010. The trailer was directed by Corey Wascinski and produced by Nicholas Weissman, the filmmaking team who created The Minutemen, which won the Grand Jury prize and Best Documentary award at the 2010 Brooklyn Film Festival. Their trailer for BFF 2011 can be viewed online here.

The complete film lineup can be seen at the Brooklyn Film Festival's website.

Battle For Brooklyn

2011-05-24T02:45:00.028-04:00

On June 3rd, 2011, the Brooklyn Film Festival presented the United States Premiere of "Battle For Brooklyn" as its opening night film. This screening - called "the perfect combination of movie and event" by the NY Daily News - took place at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema, and was followed by an Opening Night Party at the powerHouse Arena in Dumbo.

"Battle For Brooklyn" is a feature-length documentary directed by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley which tells the story of the controversial Atlantic Yards development site in Brooklyn. Over the course of seven years, it follows Daniel Goldstein, a neighborhood resident whose life is radically transformed by the threat of losing his home to eminent domain. While struggling to keep his property from being seized by private developers, Daniel helps organize his community to fight back against the developers plans, working with the group Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. This "amazing grassroots movement," according to the NY Daily News, "came closer than our leaders dare admit to stopping Atlantic Yards."

As the Director of Programming for the Brooklyn Film Festival and as a documentary photographer living in Brooklyn, I've had the privilege of getting to know many of the Brooklynites who battled against the Atlantic Yards. "Battle For Brooklyn," however, is a film that all residents of Brooklyn should be proud of, as it fairly presents the opposing sides of the issue and captures the passion that Brooklynites have for their borough, no matter where they stand on the Atlantic Yards.

The US Premiere of "Battle For Brooklyn" was covered in the NY Post as one of the "Best of B'klyn Fest" films, and in L Magazine in an article about "The Atlantic Yards Odyssey." Additionally, the NY Daily News wrote three articles about the film's premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival, saying of the screening "the timing couldn't be more perfect" and "it would be hard to find a better movie to open this year's Brooklyn Film Festival than "Battle for Brooklyn." The film went on to win both Best Documentary and the grand prize for best film at the Brooklyn Film Festival.

On June 17th, "Battle For Brooklyn" opened in theaters, with excellent reviews from many sources - it was a New York Times Critics' Pick, and received 4 stars from Time Out New York and the New York Daily News. In their review of the film, NPR wrote "this story is pertinent far beyond New York." On November 18th, 2011, "Battle For Brooklyn" was among the 15 documentary films shortlisted for an Oscar from the 84th Academy Awards.

For more information on the film, please visit battleforbrooklyn.com. For more information on the Atlantic Yards - and on some of the Brookly residents who have fought against it - please visit Norman Oder's Atlantic Yards Report, Lumi Michelle Rolly's No Land Grab and the website of photographer Tracy Collins, who has been documenting the Atlantic Yards project since its inception. Also, several other films have captured aspects of the Atlantic Yards story, including Vicente Ortega's documentary "Freddy's" - which had its World Premiere at the 2010 Brooklyn Film Festival, the Meerkat Media Collective's short documentary "Brooklyn Boondoggle" (2009), "Stadium Status" (2010) by the Internets Celebrities, and "Brooklyn Matters" (2007) by Isabel Hill. In addition, in 2007 several photo essays were published on this website exploring inside the tunnels underneath the Atlantic Yards development site.

Pouch Camp

2011-04-27T00:19:00.032-04:00

April 28, 2011 -

There are many strange things in the Blood Root Valley. There is the half-abandoned tuberculosis hospital. There is a 260-foot mountain made by Robert Moses. And there is Pouch Camp, a hidden 143-acre oasis with a 68-year-old lake, mountain ponds, rustic cabins and 55 lean-tos. For over 60 years, Pouch Camp has been a secret haven for New York City's boy scouts. Each year, thousands of scouts learn to swim and camp within the boundaries this vast idyllic refuge. Located in the heart of Staten Island, Pouch Camp is so large it even has its own private island, which is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the camp is situated inside the most populous city in the United States. Located just 10 miles from Wall Street, Pouch Camp has somehow remained largely anonymous. "Few New Yorkers know of it," according to the NY Times, and it is instead "a habitat for deer, owls, snakes, turtles and herons."

In the off season, William H. Pouch Scout Camp is peaceful and largely deserted. Winding trails snake through hills dotted with ponds. Lean-tos sit quietly in the woods, waiting for summer. Small streams flow down from the hills into Ohrbach Lake, the man-made lake at the heart of Pouch Camp. Its beaches are closed, the boats stowed, and park rangers are busy replanting trees and cleaning roads around its edges in preparation for another busy summer season. Aside from the scouts, Pouch Camp also hosts a day camp each summer for boys and girls from around New York City, with fishing, swimming, boating, rock climbing and archery.

Ohrbach Lake

Docked

However, a "black cloud" hangs over the preparations for this summer, and "the future of the property is very much uncertain," according the most recent news from the Staten Island Advance. Back in November 2009, "citing financial stress," the Greater New York Councils of Boy Scouts announced that they planned to market and sell Pouch Camp (PDF document). The boyscouts had been "hit hard by the recession," according to the NY Times, and had lost $5 million in donations. Almost immediately, thousands of Pouch Camp supporters organized in response, according to the Staten Island Advance, amidst fears that the property would be sold to developers. Members of the community have marched on City Hall, organized a website (www.savepouch.com) and have a 6,000+ member facebook group (Save the William H. Pouch Scout Camp). Despite their efforts, the camp may still be closed down and sold off.

For many of Pouch Camp's supporters, the heart of the issue is not just supporting the camp's activities, but trying to preserve a vital link in Staten Island's Greenbelt, a 2,800 acre wilderness that is "New York City’s largest remaining forest preserve," according to the Greenbelt Conservancy. "Even if you don't have any first-hand caring about the Scout program or the habitat for critters there, the economic benefit throughout the world, the country and the region is proven," the president of the Greenbelt Conservancy told the Staten Island Advance. "Something like this just makes your home livable."

Down in the Valley

Scout Skills

Black Oak Lean-Tos

Yellow Pine Cabin

Dark Shadows

Pouch Amphitheater

Not For Sale

P.O.P

Hill Pond Lean-tos

On The Trail

Fire

Scout Knot

Ropes Course

Bazooka

Lumberjack Director

Island Bridge

On Lee A. Ellison Island

South of the Border

The New York City Farm Colony

2011-04-11T16:21:00.059-04:00

April 20, 2011 -

The New York City Farm Colony is one of the most popular ruins on Staten Island. Although closed to the public and completely surrounded by chain link fences, this 70 acre site has many visitors throughout the year. On weekends, couples can be seen strolling along its abandoned streets. Paintball enthusiasts have built an elaborate homemade obstacle course on its grounds, including sniper roosts in the trees. Graffiti artists have entered into every building and covered nearly every surface with thousands of tags. Inside some buildings, visitors have even built makeshift bedrooms.

These visitors, alongside decades of city neglect, have left the buildings on the Farm Colony campus wide open to the elements. About a dozen structures still stand on the campus, ranging from a huge four story dining hall to a single small greenhouse. All of these structures are gutted shells, their interiors covered in dirt and full grown trees. The oldest structures in the Farm Colony - Dormitory 1 & 2 - date back to 1904 and are collapsing under the weight of decay, their roofs entirely missing.

Staten Island has not been kind to its many abandoned hospital buildings. A landmarked 1842 building rots at Bayley-Seton Hospital. The endangered 1889 Smith Infirmary has never been landmarked and is slowly falling to pieces. The ruins of the 1899 Seaside Hospital, which was demolished in 1964 by Robert Moses, are being washed away by the tides on New Dorp Beach. And directly across the street from the Farm Colony, many of the historic buildings on the Seaview Hospital campus have been left to decay in dense overgrowth.

Dormitory 1 & 2 (1904)

Open Interior

Surprisingly, both the Farm Colony and Seaview are a part of Staten Island's first official historic district - the 320-acre "New York City Farm Colony - Seaview Hospital Historic District" - which was designated in 1985 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The commission's designation appears to have saved the Farm Colony buildings from outright demolition, but has done little else to preserve them, other than to create a detailed report on their history (PDF). This report traces the origins of the Farm Colony back to the Richmond County Poor Farm, an 1829 "institution for the able-bodied indigent." The poor farm was renamed the New York City Farm Colony at the turn of the century, and continued to house impoverished "inmates" who were expected to "pay for their board twofold by their labor, working on the farm raising vegetables, not only for themselves, but for other unfortunates."

Although the farm was shut down in 1925, the Farm Colony campus continued on as a home for indigents with "the following cases of dependency: senility, destitution, paralysis, crippled, epileptic, blind, dumb, deaf, deaf and dumb, and cancer." At its peak, this institution housed 1,700 men and women, and was "a haven for old people," including well-known Staten Island photographer Alice Austen, who died in poverty in 1952 at "the local poor house, the Staten Island Farm Colony," according to one biography.

The Farm Colony complex was closed in 1975 and its patients transferred across the street to Seaview Hospital, which continues to provide "long term care" to "vulnerable populations." The buildings of the Farm Colony were sealed, but by 1991 the campus was "developing into a tangled jungle" with "occasional vandalism," according to the NY Times and by 1999, the Preservation League of New York State reported that the Farm Colony was facing "demolition by neglect" and that its "buildings remain open to the elements and the city has no plans for their future reuse."

Several plans to redevelop the campus have failed to materialize. In 2005, the Municipal Art Society reported on a study that had established "stabilization plans, and conceptual reuse" for the buildings, and in 2010, the Staten Island Advance reported the Farm Colony had been mentioned as a possible site for a college campus. Nothing has come from these reports, and despite their acknowledged historic value, these buildings seem fated to be destroyed by the elements, much like Admirals Row. When considered alongside other abandoned New York City landmarks, including the 68th Police Precinct and Bayley-Seton's Victim Services building, the Farm Colony's derelict state questions the purpose and the mission of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Dormitory D (1931)

Dormitory Interior

Dormitory Cubicles

Dormitory Bed and Urinals

Dining Hall, Kitchen, Service and Bakery Building (1914)

Upper Floor

Dining Hall

Suck Me Hallway

Zone Portal

Laundry and Industrial Building (1914)

Laundry and Industrial Building Interior

Dark Interior

Open Doors

Obscured Ruins

Down the Road: Modern New York Street Photography

2011-03-22T22:15:00.006-04:00

On Sunday April 3rd 2011, I curated an event titled "Down the Road: Modern New York Street Photography" at UnionDocs, the documentary collaborative in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the event, I presented a history of New York street photography, and moderated a discussion with three photographers - Jake Dobkin, Clayton Patterson and Matt Weber - who presented their own work and discussed modern street photography. More information on the event can be seen at the UnionDocs website.

The following is from my description of the event:

"New York City has a long history of street photography, tracing back to the 1800′s and early practitioners like Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz. While rooted in Parisian traditions, New York street photography developed by its own rules. “New York was, in contrast to Paris, a tough graceless town,” according to Bystander: A History of Street Photography. “It demanded another kind of imagery." By the 1940′s, the work of street photographers like Weegee and Helen Levitt led to the “so-called ‘hard boiled’ strain of photography – cynical, gritty, raw – of post-war American photographers such as Robert Frank, William Klein, Garry Winogrand,” according to Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson.

Faced with the challenge of capturing “The Greatest City in the World,” New York’s street photographers often labored obsessively, building massive bodies of work, while struggling to be published. Entire photo archives sometimes remained unseen, as in the case of Angelo Rizzuto, who died unknown in 1967 and left 60,000 unpublished images to the Library of Congress, which were only compiled into a retrospective book – Angel’s World – in 2006.

Today, however, the wide availability of digital cameras and computers has resulted in an explosion of new photographers roaming the streets of New York, who publish their work on photo blogs and photo networking websites like Flickr. Emerging street photographers no longer need to work in obscurity, and can immediately present new work to a large audience online or self-publish a book with a few clicks of the mouse. But it takes more than a camera and a computer to be a successful contemporary street photographer. This conversation with several practicing New York street photographers will discuss the current state of street photography, and consider what may lie ahead, down the road. – Nathan Kensinger, curator"

The Archives

2011-03-14T21:15:00.013-04:00

March 17, 2011 -

This month marks the 4th anniversary of this website. Almost 100 photo essays have been published here since March 2007, including nearly 1000 photographs. These photo essays range across all five boroughs of New York City, telling the stories of dozens of neglected neighborhoods and endangered buildings. With a 100th photo essay approaching, several new pages have been created to help faciliate viewing this body of work, including a new Archives page, which lists each photo essay from 2007 to 2011. Other recently created pages include an Exhibits page, presenting a list of past exhibits, lectures and presentations, and a Press page, providing an overview of the interviews, reviews and publications that have featured these photographs. Each photo essay is also categorized by borough, year and subject in the sidebar to the right. Any other creative ideas for ways to organize this growing archive would be greatly appreciated!

New Dorp Bungalows

2011-02-27T12:41:00.048-05:00

February 28, 2011 -

The waterfront of New Dorp, on Staten Island's east shore, has been permanently scarred by eminent domain and city neglect. Once, this was a popular summer resort area known as the "Poor Man's Bermuda," according to the Village Voice, and the neighborhood's two beaches - New Dorp Beach & Cedar Grove Beach - were lined with summer bungalows, grand hotels and piers. Today, both beaches are part of the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation's 315-acre Great Kills Park, and are quiet and deserted in the winter. Their shoreline bungalows are now vacant or were demolished decades ago.

Although both of New Dorp's beaches are owned by the Parks Department, they are a study in contrasts. The sands of New Dorp Beach are filthy, covered in debris and washed up bottles, and scattered with decades-old hospital ruins. Just above the beach, the former resort area has become a haven for homeless camps, teenage drinking and public sex, according to New Dorp residents. Cedar Grove Beach, on the other hand, was recently considered so pristine "you could eat off the sand," according to one local. Until this winter, the beach was regularly raked and cleaned by the Cedar Grove Beach Club, a century-old community of summer bungalow residents who rented their beachfront cottages from the city. In October 2010, the Parks Department - despite their abject failure to maintain New Dorp Beach - evicted the Cedar Grove Beach residents and fenced off their bungalows. They are now planning to demolish these historic homes.

Cedar Grove Beach Bungalows

New Dorp Beach Ruins

New Dorp's shoreline has a long history of human occupation. "Like all of Staten Island, the area of New Dorp was populated by American Indians going back over 10,000 years," according to Wikipedia. Local residents claim to have found arrowheads and spearheads from this era on the local beaches. In 1671, New Dorp Beach became "the home of the second permanent European settlement in Staten Island," according to the Parks Department, but it wasn't until the late 1800's that the beach area became heavily developed. "After the Civil War, the area began to prosper as a resort, as campgrounds and seasonal bungalows began to develop along the gridded side streets along Cedar Grove Avenue. Along the waterfront, wooden piers and hotels popped up," according to Wikipedia. Many small bungalows still remain standing inland, crowded onto these narrow one way streets.

New Dorp Bungalow #1

New Dorp Bungalow #2

The neighborhood's grand hotels included The New Dorp Beach Hotel, "which contained about 100 rooms," according to the NY Times. Built in the late 1800's by Edward Hett - "the inventor of the multi color printing press," according to the NY Times - it burned to the ground in 1902. Soon after, a 1909 fire destroyed parts of a hotel complex owned by Felix Bohm, according to the NY Times. "The beach was crowded with visitors who saw a very spectacular show, free of charge. A high wind was blowing and the flames soon extended to the dancing pavilion, bathing pavilion and a bowling alley, all of which were destroyed." Artifacts from this era still wash up on New Dorp Beach, and many residents have become amateur beach combers. One local described having over 150 antique bottles in her nearby bungalow, and told of finding beer steins, coins and jewelry from the hotel era.

New Dorp Beach

New Dorp Beach Bottle

The bungalow-lined streets of New Dorp once "extended all the way to the beach," according to the Staten Island Advance. But, like bungalow communities throughout New York City, New Dorp's beachfront bungalows were threatened with extinction by Robert Moses. In the area adjacent to New Dorp Beach, "the city demolished the beach-side properties in 1962, citing eminent domain, to facilitate Robert Moses' plan to build a shoreline drive, part of his vision of parkways throughout the city," according to the Staten Island Advance. "That plan was abandoned in the 1970s, leaving the woods empty and the community in a bit of a backwater." Few artifacts remain inside this former bungalow area, which is now part of Great Kills Park. Crumbled sidewalks are buried under the dirt and old fire hydrants are overgrown with ivy.

Demapped Bungalow Street

Hydrant and Ivy

Younger residents of New Dorp Beach, who grew up after these bungalows were demolished, remember that "the woods were a myriad of paths that they knew like the back of their hand, dotted with tree forts and BMX ramps and later a haven for underage drinking," according to the Staten Island Advance. There are now several homeless camps hidden in this wilderness. Tents, fire pits and shanties are built deep in the park's woods. Baby lotion and blankets are found next to paths. One area, recently burned, is now a cratered wasteland covered in melted car parts. Further south, the ruins of Seaside Hospital, also know as the Staten Island Area Station Hospital, tumble out of the woods and onto the beach in "an apocalyptic scene," according to the Staten Island Advance. Like the New Dorp Beach bungalows, "the facility was demolished in 1964 to make way for the proposed parkway."

At the Fire Pit

Campsite

Tent

Just to the south of this blighted parkland, the residents of the Cedar Grove Beach bungalow community grew up in a vastly different environment. Somehow, their bungalow's were seized by eminent domain but spared from demolition. "Cedar Grove, one of dozens of beach colonies that dotted the shoreline during the borough's heyday as a resort community, was condemned and acquired by the city in 1958" for Robert Moses' planned parkway, according to The Staten Island Advance. "When the parkway failed to materialize, the city agreed to lease back the land with the understanding it could take it back whenever it wanted." In the ensuing decades, generations of families have been raised in these seasonal bungalows. "Many of them in this century-old resort trace their relatives back five generations," according to the NY Times.

More than one New Dorp resident described visiting the Cedar Grove Beach community as being like going back in time. "Where New Dorp [Beach] appears to have been abandoned, Cedar Grove is immaculate. The residents sift the sand regularly with a beachcomber the club bought for $80,000. There's not a speck of trash to be seen," the Village Voice reported last fall. "When you step through that gate, it's like it's 1930 all over again," one resident told the Voice. The Cedar Grove Beach Club maintained the beach and the grounds around the bungalows, and "paid the city about $140,000 a year" in rent, according to the NY Times. Access to the beach was open to the public.

Cedar Grove Beach Trio

Cedar Grove Beach Bungalow

John Murphy, who was raised in a Cedar Grove Beach bungalow, recalls a close knit community that worked hard to maintain their properties. His parents bought their bungalow in the 1950's, and when it was seized by the government, they rented it back from the city. Up until this October, John lived in his family bungalow almost year round, spending winters in a warmer climate. Although the roof leaked "like a sieve," he patched it every year, and when a nor'easter dumped so much sand on his front porch that you "could walk up onto the roof," he rented a bulldozer to clear the property. Other community residents recall pitching in to help rebuild their clubhouse one summer, "after it was destroyed by vandals," according to the Village Voice.

In October 2010, the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation evicted the Cedar Grove Beach community, claiming it wanted "improved access" to the beach. John Murphy says he was the last to leave the bungalows. The fence was already up around his childhood home, and he left his American flag flying on the flagpole. Like many of the residents of Cedar Grove Beach, he is not sure what he will do now, but hopes that the city will have a change of heart. All along the fenced off bungalows, belongings have been left behind, as though there may somehow be another summer season. Barbecues, beach toys, hammocks and boats line the empty sands.

Cedar Grove Beach Remains

Cedar Grove Beach Chairs

Despite the current budget crisis in New York City, the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation does not appear to be wavering from their plan to demolish the Cedar Grove Beach bungalows. According to a Parks Department document from February 10, 2011, "the proposed action involves the rehabilitation of Cedar Grove Beach, with the main goal being to provide improved access to this area for the general public... The project is divided into two phases: Phase one includes demolition of a majority of the structures on site... Phase two involves construction of a new playground and new bike path." No mention is made of improving on the already demolished ruins of nearby New Dorp Beach.

Many have questioned the wisdom of evicting paying tenants in the middle of a fiscal crisis. “It’s illogical for the city, at a time of severe budget pressures, layoffs and cuts, to kick out a community that provides revenue to the city,” U.S. Representative Michael McMahon told the Staten Island Advance. According to The New York Observer, "It will cost millions of dollars in capital money to tear down the houses and reopen the stretch next year, which is and has always been publicly accessible. At the same time, beaches across the city, including some just up the shore, have been closed due to lack of funds." Budget constraints may have already snarled the Park Department's plans: "The transformation of Cedar Grove Beach into a public park... may still be three years away.... the latest documents show completion is now expected by 2014," The Staten Island Advance reported on February 26th.

In the meantime, at least one empty bungalow has been rented out by the city as a filming location for the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire," according to a NY1 report from February 19th, much to the dismay of former residents. "'I think it's a little hypocritical,' said former Cedar Grove resident John Murphy. 'They said they're going to open it up to the public, and obviously they're not doing that. But private concerns can actually use it, and I think that's very wrong.'" Residents have organized a facebook page (Save Cedar Grove Beach Club) and a website (savecedargrovebeach.com) to contine their struggle to save these historic structures. For now, the Cedar Grove Beach bungalows are locked away, patrolled by a full time security guard, and awaiting their fate.

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For more photo essays from New York City's endangered bungalow communities, please visit Brighton Beach Bungalows (2010), Hammels Wye (2010), The North Edgemere Shore (2010) and Far Rockaway: Abandoned Bungalows (2009).

Cedar Grove Beach: Authorized Personnel

Cedar Grove Beach: No Trespassing

New Dorp Beach Apocalypse: Seaside Hospital Ruins

New Dorp Beach Fire

Cedar Grove Beach Chair Bungalow

New Dorp Chair

Cedar Grove Beach: Locked Out

New Dorp Beach: RIP

Newtown Creek: Brooklyn Shores

2011-02-22T19:53:00.022-05:00

February 23, 2011 -

In winter, the Brooklyn shores of the Newtown Creek are a desolate industrial wasteland. Large swaths of shoreline sit empty, dead zones with toxic chemicals beneath. Scrap yards, gas refineries and truck depots line the streets. Sidewalks are covered in icy mounds of debris, hibernating in the snow, waiting for a thaw to rot. Near a shiny new sewage treatment plant, a lonely memorial is strapped to tree trunk. Cars missing doors sit under bridges. Dirt roads, electric fences, barbed wire and graffiti are prevalent.

Gaining access to the waters of the Newtown Creek can be difficult on the Brooklyn side. A new boat launch and a nature walk are located near the creek's mouth, but the remaining length of the waterway is closed off by heavy industry. Security guards shout at pedestrians who walk too close to the water, while large signs warn "No Trespassing" towards the creek. It is not until the very end of the Newtown Creek that the waterfront is easily accessible once again. At this frozen terminus, train tracks travel over bruised, dark black waters.

The Newtown Creek was declared a Superfund Site in 2010 by the Environmental Protection Agency, which described it as "one of the nation’s most polluted waterways." The creek is home to one of the United States largest oil spills. Despite this, several year round residents live on its banks. An active homeless camp is situated on a dead-end spur of the waterway. Nearby, residents live aboard the "urban pirate" ferry boat. Life clings stubbornly to the edges of the water, even in the harshest conditions.

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For other photo essays from the Newtown Creek, visit Secret Parties (2009), The Dutch Kills (2008) and Linden Hill Tracks (2007).

No Toque

National Grid Wasteland

Empty Streets

"Low Rate"

Scrap Metal

Frozen Waters

"The Sh!t T!ts"

Truck Stop

Under the Bridge

Dead End

Discards

Memorial

Cash Money - Top Dollar

Sand Gravel

"I'm Losing It"

Train Track Terminus

Creek's End

Coney Island - Abandoned Playland

2011-01-28T13:26:00.033-05:00

January 31, 2011 -

There are few places in New York City as depressing and inspirational as Coney Island in the off season. Freezing winds whip up from the Atlantic Ocean, driving snow across the empty beaches and boardwalk. A handful of pedestrians brave the elements, hunkered down into fur parkas in a scene more reminiscent of a frozen Siberian outpost. Nearly every business in Coney Island's amusement district closes for the winter season, shutters pulled down over arcades, bars and seafood shacks. Even the homeless camps under the boardwalk are vacated.

This year, Coney Island's off season has been particularly harsh. Many well-known businesses are not expected to reopen in the summer. Cha Cha's and Ruby's have served their last drinks and have, in turn, been served with eviction papers. Demolition crews are busy tearing down landmarks like the Bank of Coney Island. And in December 2010, Shoot The Freak was destroyed in a surprise attack by its landlord. “They came like thieves in the night,” the booth's owner told The Brooklyn Paper. “Those little sneaks emptied out the place and there is nothing left, except for the Shoot the Freak sign.” The cyclical nature of destruction and rebirth in Coney Island is currently in a valley of annihilation, as the city moves towards a sanitized version of the boardwalk.

Perhaps the best remaining symbol of how Coney Island's colorful past is being left behind is the Playland Arcade. Built in 1935, it "evolved from a Silver's Penny Arcade and remained open year-round until 1981," according to Forgotten New York. The arcade once faced the legendary Thunderbolt roller coaster, which was famed for the 1895 hotel located beneath its tracks. The Thunderbolt and the Kensington Hotel were torn down in November 2000, during another off season "surprise attack," according to The Journal of New York Folklore, demolished by the city to make way for "waterfront development plans for a new, more profitable Coney Island."

Thunderbolt and Kensington Hotel (2000)

Today, the Playland Arcade faces a broad empty field and has been abandoned for many years. Inside the arcade, an army of raccoons and cats has taken over. If not for the freezing winter weather, the stench of their urine would be overwhelming. Hundreds of empty cat food containers litter the floor. Large sections of ceiling have come down, allowing rain and snow to rot the interior. Collapsing walls are propped up by police barricades. Trees grow in the squalor.

Lining the walls of this forlorn structure is an impressive artifact from Coney Island's history, in the form of dozens of hand painted murals. Though badly deteriorated, there are many colorful scenes remaining. Presented almost as panels in a comic book, these are portraits of a different Coney Island era, long past. Strip poker, naked hunting, shotgun weddings, Sasquatch, moonshine, skeeball, mermaids and cartoonish gun violence. This is Coney Island's lost soul, a forgotten and crumbling old arcade full of cat piss, ruinous decay and dark carnival whimsy.

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For other photo essays from Coney Island's off-season, visit The Freak's Domain (2008) and Under The Boardwalk (2009).

Inside Playland

Playland of the Mind

Collapse

Naked Hunting

Dark Murals

Shoot

Disco Ball

Carnival Prize

Rules of the Game

"Be Happy, Stay and Have Fun"

Strip Poker

Arcade Tree

Cat Food

"More Fun"

The Playland Arcade

Sunset Park: 68th Police Precinct

2011-01-23T15:05:00.036-05:00

January 25, 2011 -

A ruined 19th century police station looms over the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park. Facing the busy traffic of 4th avenue, its windows are tightly boarded up and its facade is wrapped in protective scaffolding. Abandoned since the 1970's, this is the "68th Police Precinct Station House and Stable," according to a NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission report, "a handsome and imposing civic ensemble" designed in 1886 by Emile Gruwe, who created a "powerfully massed Romanesque Revival" building with Venetian elements and Byzantine influences. The building opened on March 8th, 1892, according to the NY Times, and served as "the castlelike stationhouse of the old 18th Police Precinct" of the Brooklyn Department of Police. On opening day, the Brooklyn Police Commissioner stated "a man about to commit a crime would stand appalled at the sight of a stationhouse such as this."

Today the station house is in poor condition. Its exterior still retains many evocative architectural elements, however the interior has been almost completely destroyed by fire and decay. Snow sifts through large holes in the roof. The upper floors have collapsed, while lower floors are missing, warped or dangerously unstable. Feral cats and pigeons roam the hollow space. A squatter's mattress rots in a dark corner. In several pitch-black back rooms, sealed off from the sunlight, hundreds of handprints climb the walls.

When landmarked in 1983, the station house and stables had already "been vacant since the mid-197os," according to the NYC Landmarks Commission, and a 1980 fire had gutted much of the precinct building's interior. Shortly after receiving landmark status, the buildings were sold to the Sunset Park School of Music for $15,000, according to the NY Times, and in 1988, the music school received a $67,500 grant "for exterior restoration and interior renovation... for offices, teaching and performance space," according to the NY Times. More then 20 years later, there are few signs of progress on this renovation. Instead, a stop work order has been placed on the property for a variety of safety violations, and the station house has been placed on the New York Landmarks Conservancy list of "at risk" historic structures that are deteriorated and endangered. Without prompt attention, this neglected landmark may soon crumble away and vanish, despite being within plain view of thousands of daily passersby.

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For more photo essays from Brooklyn's Sunset Park please visit Bush Terminal (2007), the Brooklyn Army Terminal (2008), the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (2009), Empire Electric (2009) and S & S Machinery (2010).

Pigeon Entrance

Arch Entrance

Stable Arch

In the Stables

Brick and Desk

Door and Mattress

Sports Clinic

2nd Floor Collapse

Interior Ruin

Collapsed Arch

Backroom

Handprints

Chicky

The Bloomberg Era, Part Two

2010-12-19T16:15:00.103-05:00

The Bloomberg Era, Part Two:
Forced Change
December 31, 2010 - At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, this multi-part photo essay examines how New York City's built environment has changed over the past 10 years, and what the future of New York's skyline might be. Part one of this essay can be seen here.

On January 1st 2010, Michael Bloomberg was sworn into office for a nearly unprecedented third term as the Mayor of New York City. Bloomberg, the 23rd richest person in the world, is only the fourth mayor in the city's history to serve a third term in office, and accomplished that goal by running "the most expensive self-financed political campaign in U.S. history," according to the Huffington Post. During his tenure, Mayor Bloomberg has "amassed so much power and respect that he seems more a Medici than a mayor," according to The New Yorker. He has used his power and wealth to enact an agenda of post-9/11 development that has radically changed the city's landscape. As described in part one of this photo essay, "not since Robert Moses has a single individual presided over such a large-scale transformation of New York City's built environment."

Like Robert Moses, the legendary Power Broker, Mayor Bloomberg currently exerts a stranglehold of power over New York City. In 2009, New York Magazine bluntly declared "Mike Bloomberg owns this town," and "in the past seven years Michael Bloomberg has become the only powerful figure in New York who really matters.... The mayor is not a dictator... but Bloomberg gets what he wants more than any mayor in modern memory." Also like Robert Moses, who was called New York's Master Builder, much of Mayor Bloomberg's work has focused on constructing a new version of the city. In 2009, Bloomberg drew comparisons between his accomplishments and Robert Moses', telling The New Yorker that "we’ve done more in the last seven years than—I don’t know if it’s fair to say more than Moses did, but I hope history will show the things we did made a lot more sense." Unfortunately, the parallels between Bloomberg and Moses also include the use of controversial methods to force development projects through, often at the expense of New York's unique fabric of small neighborhoods.

The Bloomberg Era (2009)

One of the most controversial tools Mayor Bloomberg has utilized in his quest to transform New York City is eminent domain, a practice whereby the state seizes private property to clear the way for an impending development meant for civic and public improvement. This was a favorite tool of Robert Moses, "who rammed highways through dense urban neighborhoods with a 'meat-ax' and became the unstoppable engine of 'slum clearance'," according to Metropolis Magazine. Moses' methods were often vilified, but he created the infrastructure for present day New York City, building highways, bridges, tunnels, parks and institutional landmarks like the Lincoln Center and the United Nations that have been freely used by countless millions of people. Michael Bloomberg, on the other hand, has approved the use of eminent domain for private development projects that include luxury residences and retail shops, college campus facilities and a sports arena. When completed, none of these developments will be open to the general public. They include several neighborhoods documented on this website: Willets Point (aka The Iron Triangle), Manhattanville and the Atlantic Yards.

The Atlantic Yards (2006)

The Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn is the best known example of the Bloomberg administration's use of eminent domain. Announced in 2003, this project threatened residents and business owners in Prospect Heights with property seizure to make way for a basketball arena and several luxury residential towers. Years of court battles and street protests delayed the plan, which was critically examined in the award winning documentary films Brooklyn Boondoggle (2009) and Brooklyn Matters (2007).

This year, however, the Atlantic Yards project cleared most of the major hurdles in its path. In April 2010, the last residential holdout in the development footprint cut a $3 million deal to move out, and in August 2010 Freddy's Bar and Backroom - a hub for neighborhood protests and a local institution dating back to the prohibition era - was completely demolished, although not before being immortalized by the documentary Freddy's (2010). Construction for the arena is now underway, but with the current recession the entire project may take as long as 25 years to complete, placing an immense strain on a neighborhood now blighted by empty lots where homes once stood.

No Forced Displacement (2008)

In the upper west side neighborhood of Manhattanville, eminent domain has been used as a threat to force independent business owners out of a mostly industrial area. Seventeen acres, including Cuban restaurants, storage warehouses and gas stations, were declared blighted by the city in order to clear the land for a $7 billion extension of Columbia University's campus. After several years of legal battles, this year the New York Court of Appeals upheld the use of eminent domain in the neighborhood, according to the NY Times, with a June 2010 ruling that "cited a decision in a similar eminent-domain case last year involving the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn." Using questionable logic, the judges declared that "if we could rule in favor of a basketball arena, surely we could rule for a nonprofit university." In December 2010, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the decision, and "work is expected to start next month on the first building at the new campus," according to the NY Times.

In the Shadow of Citi Field (2008)

In the Iron Triangle, otherwise known as Willets Point, eminent domain has been used to scare business owners out of a bustling car-repair neighborhood which employs over a thousand people. Long neglected by the city government, Willets Point is laced with flooded dirt roads that sit in the shadow of Citi Field, the new Mets stadium. Mayor Bloomberg's administration hopes to demolish the neighborhood's businesses and replace them with a $3 billion development including luxury hotels, residences and retail shops. After years of protest, this year the NY Times reported that the city controlled roughly 80 percent of the land needed for the first stage of development, but "opponents included a Willets Point homeowner, 18 businesses and a group formed to fight the project."

Lake Willets (2008)

Eminent domain may be the most controversial weapon of change in Bloomberg's arsenal, but his most effective tool for transformation has been rezoning neighborhoods. "Zoning shapes the city," according to the Department of City Planning. "Zoning determines the size and use of buildings, where they are located and, in large measure, the densities of the city’s diverse neighborhoods. Along with the city's power to budget, tax, and condemn property, zoning is a key tool for carrying out planning policy."

By 2009, Mayor Bloomberg had instituted 100 zoning changes throughout the city, creating a map of new uses for city neighborhoods stretching from the South Bronx to The Rockaways. "Sections in all the boroughs were rezoned to boost their development potential," according to the NY Times, a rezoning equal to about 8,400 blocks or "one-fifth of the city" which is "the most extensive rezoning in modern city history." In 2009, The New York Observer stated that "zoning reform of the type we have had in New York City these past eight years typically has a profound and long lasting impact on the physical contours of the city. There is little doubt... that the impact of this visionary zoning reform will be felt in New York for decades to come."

The Desertification of Brooklyn (2010)

Zoning changes instituted by Bloomberg's Department of City Planning have already significantly altered the landscape of the city. The 2005 rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, for example, allowed large portions of Brooklyn's historic industrial waterfront to be transformed into new residential towers. A wave of luxury housing swept through these neighborhoods, before being crippled by the recession, which has left the area scarred with empty fields and abandoned construction sites. The same boom and bust has affected other neighborhoods rezoned for development, including Harlem and Gowanus.

In the past decade, every neighborhood in New York City has seen new residential towers built. "Across the city, residential construction doubled under Mr. Bloomberg, to more than 30,000 units a year from 2004 through 2008," according to a 2009 NY Times assessment. "Construction spending has also doubled since he took office, reaching a high of $32 billion in 2008" However, after the development bubble burst in 2008, every neighborhood in New York City has been blighted with empty lots and abandoned buildings. Bloomberg's ambitious rezoning and pro-development policies have led to widespread Bloomblight in the form of hundreds of stalled construction projects throughout the five boroughs.

Demolition on the Waterfront (2008)

The Department of City Planning states that their rezoning work is focused on preserving New York City's diversity. "New York City’s neighborhoods are its greatest treasures," writes Amanda Burden, the DCP commissioner. "Our innovative use of zoning is making a real difference in our neighborhoods, providing for new jobs and housing opportunities and ensuring the diversity and vibrancy that makes ours the most unique city in the world." A recent report by NYU somewhat agreed, finding that "in an era of unprecedented rezoning across New York City... the vast majority of the changes preserved neighborhoods the way they were, protecting them from denser or out-of-scale development," according to the NY Times.

However, the last decade has seen many New York City neighborhoods become less diverse and less vibrant. The 2010 census found that "New York's black and hispanic areas [have] become more white," according to the NY Times, "as blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants surge into the suburbs." Meanwhile, the city has lost much of its vibrant street life due to city policies. More than twelve percent of the city's small businesses closed in 2009 as small business loans "plummeted," according to City Limits. "Owners complain about... rezoning and redevelopment initiatives that favor larger retailers over small stores or residential over commercial uses."

The Glass Invasion (2009)

At the same time, new construction spurred by Bloomberg's policies has changed New York's traditional architecture of brownstones and brick. The city has been overtaken by "The Glass Stampede," according to New York Magazine. "New York is shucking off its aging walk-ups, its small and mildewed structures, its drafty warehouses, cramped stores, and idle factories. In their place, the city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel." Glass towers have not only invaded the rezoned Brooklyn waterfront, they have infiltrated the skyline of historically low-rise neighborhoods like the East Village and the Lower East Side, replaced bungalows in Brighton Beach and The Rockaways, and soared over formerly industrial neighborhoods like Long Island City and the Meat Packing District. The dominant theme in New York architecture over the last decade could largely be summarized in a few words: taller, with more glass.

Lower East Side Tower (2009)

East Village Tower (2009)

Far Rockaway Tower (2009)

Unlike Robert Moses, Mayor Bloomberg does not appear to have a grand overview for the transformation of New York City. Instead, his administration has relied on private developers and zoning changes to allow change to happen. "Real planning is not something New York City has ever done," according to a 2011 article in City Limits. "Other major cities have drafted comprehensive plans that linked land development to transit improvements and government services. But New York has always relied on zoning, which creates rules for what the private market can build, rather than planning."

At the end of 2010, many of the major development projects started under Mayor Bloomberg's administration remain unfinished. "Who knows how long it will take before Mayor Bloomberg's legacy-making checklist—Hudson Yards, Moynihan Station, the World Trade Center, Coney Island and Willets Point—even show significant progress, let alone get completed," Curbed wrote back in 2008. "Perhaps during a third term?" The future of these projects and many others remains uncertain.

Coney Island Development (2008)

In the past decade, opposition to many of Robert Moses' controversial projects has mellowed, especially after a major retrospective in 2007 that reevaluated his contributions to the city. In years to come, how will the public evaluate Bloomberg's contributions to the city skyline? Will New Yorkers embrace the hundreds of luxury condominiums which have been constructed? It remains to be seen what Michael Bloomberg's final legacy will be, however the NY Times summed up the feelings of many New Yorker's in a 2010 editorial written for his third inauguration: "The next time some bigwig wants a stadium or a fat new zoning change, the mayor should take care to demand more parks and public facilities as part of the deal. The bottom line for any development should be that it helps out more than the developer’s bottom line."

Iron Triangle Warning (2007)

Hammels Wye

2010-12-12T18:01:00.057-05:00

December 16, 2010 -

Hammels Wye is where the A train splits east and west along The Rockaways after crossing Jamaica Bay. Elevated trains rumble overhead through the surrounding neighborhood of Hammels, an area which was once crowded with grand hotels, restaurants and bungalows. Today, Hammels is pockmarked with empty lots and abandoned buildings, and dominated by the Hammel Houses, a 14-acre NYCHA housing development which is embroiled in a decades-old gang war with nearby complexes in Edgemere and Far Rockaway.

Hammels Wye sits in the shadow of the Hammel Houses. It is flanked by the shoreline of Jamaica Bay, where fenced-off blocks and empty beaches are covered in trash and abandoned boats. To the west, an undeveloped park sits on the water, covered with bricks and bottles. It was "sort of" opened in August 2010, according to The Wave, but currently the only access point is through a hole in a fence. On the east side of Hammels Wye, a solitary dead end street runs into the bay. The discarded remains of a young girl's bedroom rot in the middle of the road, while a nearby empty lot contains a reedy marshland the size of four city blocks. A faded sign promises that a new marina is on the way, but for now local fishermen must climb a fence to reach the water.

Beach 88th Street Park

Beach 80th Street Marina

Between these empty spaces, Hammels contains few reminders of its past as an immensely popular resort village, which began in the 1850's with just "a small chowder house and saloon for boaters and fishermen on the bay," according to The Rockaways by Emil R. Lucev. The chowder house soon transformed into Eldert's Grove, a hotel and restaurant which was leased in 1869 by Louis Hammel, a German immigrant. Hammel purchased land nearby to build "Hammel's Hotel and a steamboat dock out to Jamaica Bay," according to The Rockaways. When the cross-bay train trestle was built in 1880, linking The Rockaways to the mainland, it landed at Hammel's Hotel, at a train station named for Hammel.

"Within a few years of the opening of the railroad, the real heart of Rockaway Beach became the Hammels-Holland-Seaside area," according to Old Rockaway, New York. "From its early beginnings in 1870 until about 1920, this section housed hotels, boardinghouses, saloons, rental-cottage colonies, stores, amusement arcades, restaurants, food stands, bathhouses, and all kinds of rides, from Ferris wheels to roller coasters." Huge tent cities were also created to house vacationers, and in 1908 over 40,000 spectators came out for a parade celebrating the "King and Queen of the Tent City carnival," according to the NY Times, in which "the prettiest girls of Tent City" rode in a float "drawn by six white horses" in a parade that ended in Hammels.

These same streets are now largely deserted. "The bay side of Hammels was filled with long rows of summer facilities for fishermen and summer renters," according to The Rockaways by Emil R. Lucev, but "over the last century, storms and fire have reduced the bay front clusters to a handful on the west side of the bay trestle. These are surrounded by empty pile foundations standing upright in the bay waters." Despite the isolation, one resident living on the shore near Hammels Wye described his home as a "ghetto paradise," complete with private beach, dog run, and panoramic views of the Cross Bay Bridge. Next to his new home stood four old summer bungalows, built on pilings above the bay and shuttered for the winter season.

Summer Bungalows

Built on Pilings

"Empty Pile Foundations"

The Rockaways gradually declined in popularity as a vacation destination, and "by the 1930's, a sizeable section of Hammels a block or two away from the beach already consisted of substandard housing," according to Between Ocean and City by Lawrence and Carol Kaplan. Newspapers referred to this area as "slum town" and "not surprisingly, health officials were alarmed by the growing rate of tuberculosis in Hammels, which was now said the be the highest in all of New York City." Like Edgemere, much of Hammels' summer bungalows were demolished during in the Robert Moses era. Some land was used to build the Hammel Houses, which opened in 1955 and now have over 1,900 residents. However, the "low-income developments in the Rockaways contributed to the expansion of residential decay... Instead of ending the dreadful conditions that had existed for decades, the projects served, indirectly, to expand them," according to Between Ocean and City.

Today, the Hammel Houses are engaged in "a gang war between housing projects," as reported in the NY Times, which stretches back for decades. The complex is also in conflict with the nearby residents of Arverne By The Sea, a massive new beachfront community located just across the street. Arverne has been described as "New York City’s newest and most improbable neighborhood" by New York Magazine, perhaps partially due to its proximity to the violent Hammel Houses. In 2007, a local councilman accused Arverne developers of “trying to build a self-contained city,” according to the NY Times, "while ignoring the surrounding community and its ills: unemployment, gangs, guns, drugs and troubled schools." In the process, he claimed, "they’re creating the conditions for a perfect storm of racial discontent and possibly more violence." As recently as October 2010, Arverne residents were reporting "being pelted with rocks from Hammels," according to The Wave, prompting one commenter to ask "who in their right mind would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house or condo in the Hammels area and not expect to be vandalized in one of the worst crime areas in the country?"

In the meantime, the omnipresent trains of Hammels Wye trundle along overhead, past the boarded up remains of a forgotten era. Their schedule is as regular as the tides of Jamaica Bay, and as ceaseless as the decay of The Rockaways.

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For more photo essays from The Rockaways, please visit The North Edgemere Shore (2010) The South Edgemere Wasteland (2010), The Edgemere Landfill (2010) and Far Rockaway: Abandoned Bungalows (2009).

Under the Wye

"Ghetto Paradise"

Eldert's Grove: Abandoned Boat

Barge Wreck

Last Marina

Bayside Dock Bungalows

Private

Hammels Edge

Doll and Fence

Bedroom Remains

Rotting in the Road

Rat Poison

Flats Fixed

Sunset Wye

The Greenpoint Terminal Market Revisited

2010-11-27T12:55:00.052-05:00

November 30, 2010 -

The Greenpoint Terminal Market is a historic complex of warehouses on the Brooklyn waterfront. Once home to the largest rope making factory in the United States - the American Manufacturing Company - the complex covered 14 acres and six city blocks, with buildings dating back to 1890. At its peak, American Manufacturing employed over 2,500 workers and - like the nearby American Sugar Refining Company (aka The Domino Sugar Refinery) - was an important part of the struggle to unionize the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1910, one century ago, striking employees battled police in a huge riot outside the warehouses. "The streets surrounding the factory were a miniature battlefield, upon which nearly twoscore policemen and 500 to 1,000 men and women fought. Stones were hurled and heads broken. Men and women had their clothes torn nearly off them. The policemen had to fire their revolvers to keep the mob back," the NY Times reported.

It is difficult to reconcile these scenes from America's labor history with the desolate quiet that occupies these streets today. By the end of the 20th century, the Greenpoint Terminal Market was largely abandoned and known as "the Forgotten City," according to the NY Times. "The derelict warren of buildings was an example of how New Yorkers can be creative in turning the city's faded industrial past into a playground," the NY Times reported, with empty warehouses hosting punk rock shows, skateboarding bowls, graffiti murals, and squatters like Ra, who "lived in the complex for six years." Much of the Forgotten City was destroyed in 2006 by a catastrophic 10-alarm fire. The surviving buildings have remained largely unused, despite the skyrocketing value of land in Greenpoint.

Abandoned Warehouse #1

Abandoned Warehouse #2

The Greenpoint Terminal Market had a long history of fires and explosions before the blaze of 2006. During the American Manufacturing era, the complex processed and stored jute, hemp and cotton to make cordage, rope and twine. Because of the volatile nature of these raw materials, accidents were common. In October 1910, a massive explosion killed least six workers at the factory. "So great was the force of the explosion that a boiler weighing 40,000 pounds was lifted three stories through the roof... and then hurled several hundred yards into a vacant space on the river front," according to the NY Times, with victims including the chief engineer of the plant, who was "torn to pieces and when found was in a patch of clear ground 50 yards from where the boiler had stood." The body of another worker "was hurled through the side of a frame building that stands opposite the factory in Oak Street. It was found on the far side of the building an hour after the explosion."

Fire Warning

Fires were a common occurrence at the factory, and warnings can still be found posted throughout the remaining warehouses. In 1902, a fire in Storage House No. 2 destroyed $150,000 worth of jute. "Nearly a dozen firemen were more or less overcome by smoke, and some narrowly escaped suffocation... the fire is believed to have been caused by spontaneous combustion," reported the NY Times, which notes that another fire had occurred just 18 months before, causing $200,000 in damage (roughly equivalent to $5 million today). In 1904, fire struck again. "Two firemen were killed and fourteen others were overcome by smoke," according to the NY Times. "The whole floor was filled with the dense smoke from the burning jute. The firemen's lamps were put out by the fumes, and they groped about in the darkness trying to turn their hose in the fire, but soon succumbed and fell unconscious to the floor."

Post-Fire Ruins (2007)

Taken in this context, the 2006 conflagration was not a surprise, especially after an exploration of the fire-scarred ruins of the complex in 2007 revealed that many rooms contained mountains of charred cotton rags, perhaps leftover from the rope making process. According to police, the Greenpoint Terminal Market fire was caused by a Polish immigrant named Leszek Kuczera, who had descended into a life of alcoholism and petty crime because of the horrors he had witnessed while cleaning up Ground Zero, the NY Times reported. He led "a life of homelessness, begging and selling stolen copper as scrap metal for vodka money," according to the NY Times, and initially admitted he had caused the fire while "trying to melt the insulation off a long length of copper wire inside the vacant warehouses, using a pile of eight flaming truck tires."

However it began, the resulting blaze was enormous. Visible for miles, it clouded the sky above New York City with black smoke. "More than 350 firefighters from at least 70 units spent all day at the fire, those in front retreating to safety when entire walls crumbled and launched smoldering red bricks 100 feet down the narrow streets of the waterfront. At 10 alarms, it was called the city's largest fire in more than a decade, excepting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," according to the NY Times.

Greenpoint Ruins (2007)

Rags Inside the Ruins (2007)

The burning of the Greenpoint Terminal Market immediately raised suspicions from all parties. The owner of the buildings, Joshua Guttman, had recently seen a $420 million deal to sell the property fall through, according to New York Magazine, and the Municipal Art Society had been calling for the entire complex to be landmarked, leaving many to wonder if arson had been used to quickly clear the land. "Do development and Brooklyn Fires go hand in hand?" asked New York Magazine. "The market blaze was only one of the many, many “suspicious” fires to hit the Brooklyn development zones of late... This was part of a larger pattern. According to FDNY stats, 2005 was the single busiest year in Fire Department history, with a total of 485,702 calls answered." In the meantime, Leszek Kuczera rescinded his confession, claiming he was "hungover when the police questioned him," according to the NY Times. Despite pleading not guilty, he was sentenced to rehab and probation, and has since been deported to Poland, where he was happily reunited with his wife and family, the NY Times reports.

In the years before the fire, several plans had been made to develop the Greenpoint Terminal Market, including "Greenpoint Common on the River" - a 1990 plan to create a "13-building, 3,324-unit co-op and rental apartment complex" on the site, according to the NY Times, which was soon followed by a proposal to build "a 500-megawatt power plant" on the waterfront, according to the NY Times. Since the fire, however, the majority of the complex has remained empty. Two large warehouses to the east appear to be completely gutted and abandoned, while the rest of the warehouses along the East River contain a few small businesses, including a new gallery space called Fowler Arts Collective. Even in these active buildings, though, the majority of the spaces remain empty, with floor upon floor of unused rooms. And at the top of these buildings, dark, empty halls are left open to the elements.

It is unclear what the future of the Greenpoint Terminal Market is. There are currently no plans to landmark its remaining historic buildings. Like much of Brooklyn's industrial waterfront, it may soon be demolished and turned into luxury condominiums.

Open Space

Fl. 7 - Dark Room

Open Hall

Fl. 5

The Book

Hollow Frames

Fl. 3 - Refrigerators

Unnecessary Lights

Exit

In the Stairwell

Rooftop Lines

Save the Palestine Water Tower

Last Building on the Water

The Edgemere Landfill

2010-11-01T19:05:00.064-04:00

November 10, 2010 - This photo essay is part of a three part series exploring Edgemere, an isolated waterfront neighborhood in The Rockaways. Each photo essay focuses on one of Edgemere's three distinct geographic areas: The South Edgemere Wasteland, The North Edgemere Shore and The Edgemere Landfill.

Edgemere is a Queens waterfront neighborhood divided. To the south lies a vast oceanfront wasteland. To the north, residents live along the shores of Jamaica Bay in a community troubled by a recent history of government neglect and gang warfare. Bordering this community is the Edgemere Landfill, a remediated toxic Superfund site. Situated on a peninsula of land between Norton Basin and Sommerville Basin, this former marshland was "once a resort for the well-heeled of New York" according to the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. Today it is an ecological disaster zone, filled with explosive gasses, littered with abandoned trailers and boats, and leaking antiquated debris from all sides.

Opened in 1938, the Edgemere Landfill was once "the longest continuously operating dump in the United States and perhaps the oldest," according to the NY Times. Locals called it Mount Edgemere because "the garbage mound had risen 70 feet above Jamaica Bay, occupying 178 acres and more than two miles of shoreline." In 1983, city officials discovered "3,000 55-gallon drums - some of them crushed, some badly rusted," which had been illegally buried in the landfill, according to the NY Times. The drums contained "paint-manufacturing products, chemical solvents and petroleum distillates," raising concerns about possible "ground-water contamination," according to the NY Times. Shortly after this discovery the Edgemere Landfill was declared a Superfund site, and in 1991 it was permanently shut down. A decades-long remediation process ensued, including the relocation of "over 500,000 cubic yards of trash and debris" by the Yonkers Contracting Company. By 2003, the Department of Environmental Conservation claimed the Superfund site had been "cleaned of all toxins, capped, and closed," according to The Wave.

Mount Edgemere Cap

Edgemere Trench Road

Cap and Motor

Today the Edgemere Landfill is part of the 253-acre Rockaway Community Park, "an unspoiled getaway for all New Yorkers," according to the Department of Parks & Recreation. Inside the former landfill, abandoned Sanitation Department trailers have been taken over by squatters and rusted methane harvesting equipment sits in the bushes. The top of the landfill is covered in short grass and punctuated with dozens of hatches labelled "Danger Explosive Gas." Unlike the Fresh Kills Landfill, there are no signs of passive vents or extraction wells to relieve the gas building up under the landfill cap. At the edge of the landfill, along the shoreline, the cap appears to have been breached on all sides. Debris tumbles into Jamaica Bay from 10 foot high holes. Thousands of bottles, bricks, shoes and plastic toys litter the coast. In some sections, the waterfront is so densely covered in trash that the ground below is invisible, with "bottle beaches" exponentially more intense than anything found at the breached landfill of Dead Horse Bay.

Nothing can be constructed above the Edgemere Landfill until 2021. "The site is being environmentally monitored, required for 30 years after a landfill's closing before any permanent structures may be built on it," according to the NY Times. However, in 2009 a plan was hatched to cover the landfill with a solar panel field, according to the NY Daily News. That proposal remains undeveloped, as does a park planned for the former landfill. "Rockaway can't expect the Edgemere park to open until at least 2019, officials estimate," reports The Wave. In the meantime, Mount Edgemere's cap remains untouched, offering panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, Jamaica Bay, JFK's runways, and Edgemere's ever present housing projects.

Landfill Road

Abandoned Trailers

Squatter Couch

Sanitation Office

Abandoned Boat

Boat Interior

Landfill Breach

Beach Chair in the Breach

Metal Shard Roots

Doll Head

Barnacle Bottle

Bottle Beach

To The Breach

To The Shore

Greenpoint Hospital: Nurses Residence

2010-10-23T13:55:00.048-04:00

October 27, 2010 -

The Greenpoint Hospital was built in 1914 and served North Brooklyn for more then six decades before closing in 1982. Located in East Williamsburg, the seven towers of this hospital campus are currently used as apartments, a homeless shelter, and a new community space. However, one building remains abandoned - the former nurses residence, which is at the center of a contentious 28-year-old neighborhood struggle. Inside this empty four-story complex are hundreds of tiny rooms, which once were used to house the homeless. On lower floors, a vanished community of squatters has left behind their belongings, including shoes, beds, and a VHS copy of "Runaway Bride." On upper floors, a huge colony of pigeons has taken roost. The air is thick with choking fumes from mountains of bird droppings.

The Nurses Residence

When the Greenpoint Hospital was open, it provided emergency care for the surrounding community, including injured police officers. On February 3rd, 1971,"Frank Serpico's inert, blood soaked form was wheeled into the Emergency Room," according to "Serpico" by Peter Maas. Serpico, a NYC policeman, had been "shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance," according to the NY Times. Three month after his suspicious shooting, Serpico, a known whistle-blower, provided the key testimony in "New York's single largest police corruption case... [in] almost 20 years," according to the NY Times. His story was immortalized in a 1973 film starring Al Pacino that, according to the NY Times, "seared the public memory with painful images: of the honest cop bleeding in a squad car rushing to the hospital, where, over months of rehabilitation, he received cards telling him to rot in hell."

Rotting Crutch

In 1981, the city closed the Greenpoint Hospital Methadone Clinic, which had been widely praised for combating the neighborhood's "growing heroin problem," according the NY Times. Soon after, the entire hospital complex was closed "due to financial struggle" and, to the surprise of residents in the area, "just five months after it was shuttered—the city began shuttling homeless men onto the premises in the middle of the night, creating a makeshift homeless shelter without community consent," according to a Greenpoint Gazette article titled "The Greenpoint Hospital Debacle."

The first homeless shelter was opened in 1983, according to the NY Times, with a capacity for 300 men. A second shelter for 100 men opened in 1985, according to the NY Times, "on the third and fourth floors of [the] former nurses residence." A list of shelter rules still hangs in the dining hall of the nurses residence, and includes entries like Rule #10 - "A resident shall not be restrained or locked in a room at any time." Eventually, the hospital campus "housed more than 1,200 homeless men, at which point the community decided it had had enough," according to The Greenpoint Gazette. "We were clearly overburdened,” one resident told the newspaper. “At first there were 40 men, then it escalated to 1,200. All we wanted was community control over the site, and the city wouldn’t give it to us."

In The Dining Hall

In 1996, the NY Times reported that "for more than a decade, community groups have fought to get a nursing home built for Greenpoint's growing elderly population. But their efforts to build the home on the site of the old Greenpoint Hospital campus have competed with the city's need to house the homeless... Community residents have marched in the streets and even shut down the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in their attempts to persuade the city to reduce the shelter's population to 200 men to pave the way for their nursing home plan. Now the city has promised to find alternate shelter for the... homeless, clearing a key obstacle to the groups' plan."

More than a decade later, the nurses residence remains empty. The building and an unused lot in front of it are the key elements to the neighborhood's plan to build a nursing home. In April 2010, however, the city made the "controversial decision to award the site to two non-Brooklyn development companies," according to The Brooklyn Paper, despite a competitive bid from an alliance of neighborhood groups which had dedicated "25 years of advocacy for developing the site." In September 2010 the city upheld its support for awarding this $32 million project to an outside developer, according to The Brooklyn Paper, despite protests, appeals and a rally at City Hall that "delivered 3,000 signed letters" to Mayor Bloomberg asking him to reverse his decision, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. Currently, "The Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation, a group of local nonprofits snubbed for the contract, is suing to overturn the decision," according to the NY Daily News.

At the developer's website, Great American Construction Corp, the Greenpoint Hospital is described as "the largest of the public sites committed to by the Bloomberg Administration as part of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning. The site... consists of a 59,600-square-foot vacant City-owned parcel and a vacant 4-story structure that formerly served as a nurses’ residence..." on which they plan to "build a total of 240 affordable units." There is no mention of a nursing home.

With the development of the Greenpoint Hospital site pending, these photos take a last look inside the abandoned interior of the Nurses Residence.

Entrance

Ground Floor Ruins

Grand Hall Entry

Grand Hall

Residential Corridor

1-04: Conference Room

Conference Room Shoes

313 X

"Drugs Don't Work"

409 Pigeon

1996 Office

"This Job is a Test"

Dark Passage

Squatter's Bedroom

Dead Pigeon

4th Floor Fumes

The North Edgemere Shore

2010-10-11T21:25:00.090-04:00

October 20, 2010 - This photo essay is part of a three part series exploring Edgemere, an isolated waterfront neighborhood in The Rockaways. Each photo essay focuses on one of Edgemere's three distinct geographic areas: The South Edgemere Wasteland, The North Edgemere Shore and The Edgemere Landfill.

Edgemere is a Queens waterfront neighborhood divided in two. In the south, a vast wasteland covers over 20 blocks of Rockaway oceanfront. In the north, residents live along the shores of Jamaica Bay. Once, this community was a thriving summer resort with its own airport. Today, north Edgemere is sandwiched between the wasteland and a decommissioned toxic landfill, and is troubled by a long history of floods, gang warfare, and government neglect. The NY Times once described the area as "the 'sixth borough,' an isolated place forgotten by politicians and the news media and stuck with poor schools and hospitals, as well as a lack of decent stores, jobs, transportation and youth programs. [Where] instead of attending summer programs, many young children learn the terminology of drug selling and shooting 9 millimeter pistols."

Although midtown Manhattan is visible from its shores, northern Edgemere has more in common with a rural Southern backwater. Its waterfront consists of three small inlets - Sommerville Basin, Little Bay (aka Conch Basin), and Norton Basin. Cluttered with abandoned piers, they are used as dumping grounds for boats, cars and bodies. Neighborhood fishermen trespass into empty lots to ply the waters as wild dogs roam nearby. Just inland, abandoned bungalows line muddy dirt roads and boats are stowed in backyard docks. Looming over this quiet neighborhood are two of the most notorious housing projects in New York City.

Conch Basin Shore

In 2001, a member of Edgemere's Community Board told the NY Times that "the Rockaways is really one of the furthest points from City Hall... [and] have been used as a Siberia, where the city has sent its problems.'' Current residents of Edgemere tend to agree. One described it as "like living in the Sahara. But with people," while a second called it "the bottom of the barrel." Another resident spoke of taking long train rides to Times Square "just to see the crowds," and then returning to his dirt road in Edgemere, where he was "all alone."

It wasn't always so desolate. Founded in 1892, Edgemere was originally named "New Venice, in reference to Jamaica Bay’s marshland and natural canals," according the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, and by 1925, "Edgemere began to emerge as the Rockaways’ commercial hub." By 1940, it was home to the Rockaway Airport, which "consisted of over 200 acres" between Sommerville and Conch Basins, according to Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields. Through the 1950's, summer bungalows and hotels lined the streets from Jamaica Bay to the Atlantic Ocean. "In the old days, all told, there were 6o plus hotels in Edgemere," according to "The Rockaways" by Emil R. Lucev, and establishments like "The Cozy Corner," which was "Rockaways nicest place for refreshment... situated in the shore of Jamaica Bay in Edgemere."

Bungalow Home

Abandoned Bungalow

Even during its summer resort heyday, the neighborhood had a history of flooding. In the 1930's, "the Edgemere section flooded at the mere mention of rain," according to "The Rockaways," because it was "the low point of the Rockaway Penninsula." Flooding continued throughout the century. After a 1991 storm, "certain parts of the Rockaways and Broad Channel were under 4-6 feet of water... in the Edgemere neighborhood the ocean met the bay for the first time since the hurricane of 1944," according to The Wave. North Edgemere still floods regularly each year, according to locals, with water rising 2 to 3 feet. "The Rockaways are sinking," claimed one resident, while another stated "dig down five feet and you'll hit water." New storm drains are currently being installed by the city, which may help reduce the problem.

Street Flood

By the 1960's, the Rockaways had fallen out of favor as a summer retreat. Thousands of bungalows were bulldozed in south Edgemere and other neighborhoods, and "Rockaway's isolation and open spaces tempted public officials to regard the area as a convenient place to relocate poor minorities out of the center of the city," according to Lawrence and Carol Kaplan, authors of "Between Ocean and City: The Transformation of Rockaway New York," who wrote that "for more than two decades, public housing developments were built in the Rockaways that eventually came to be occupied largely by a welfare population... Rockaway residents frequently used the term "dumping" to describe the process by which New York City moved deprived, helpless, and troubled individuals and families to its community.... Social services were notable for their absence... Crime and substance abuse rates increased. The figures for unemployment, infant mortality, infectious diseases, school dropouts, and, later, HIV/AIDS became among the highest in all of New York City."

By 2002, there were "more than 5,000 units of public housing on the eastern end of the peninsula, one of the city's highest concentrations of public housing," according to the NY Times. The Edgemere community is bookended by two of these housing projects. To the west are the Ocean Bay Apartments, which were built on top of the Rockaway Airport in 1961. Still known by their former name, the Edgemere Houses, they were "long considered one of the city's most crime-ridden housing complexes," according to the NY Times. "Cops at one time called [it] "Edgefear" because it was the worst public housing in the city by any indicator you care to choose," according to The Wave. To the east, at the opposite end of the neighborhood, lie the Beach 41st Street/Beach Channel Drive Houses, which look out over Norton Basin. Known as The 40's, this complex has a history of violence that rivals the Edgemere Houses. "The kids drink beer, they smoke reefer, they talk trash, and then they fight," one resident told the NY Times in 2005, while another resident stated "these kids, they shoot at the sky, they go in the roof and shoot down at people, they shoot wherever they like."

Edgemere's two housing projects are rivals in a long-running gang war that spans the Rockaways. "The intramural hatred and violence among housing projects in the Rockaways goes back decades, pitting residents of one complex against another," according to the NY Times. In 2004, "it was Edgemere versus the 40's," one 15 year-old shooting victim told the newspaper. "We can't even walk through their project. It's always been that way."

Norton Basin and the 40's

Edgemere's gang activity is by no means a thing of the past. The residential area between the Edgemere Houses and The 40's shows ample sign of gang activity. Like Far Rockaway, gang graffiti covers many homes and buildings, and several abandoned bungalows have been taken over by local gangs. Two months ago, in August 2010, 36 members of "The Handsome Hustlers" gang - including a 12 year-old girl - were arrested in Edgemere for "selling crack and powdered cocaine, oxycodone, marijuana and other controlled substances," according to The Wave. And in April, 2010, police arrested 84 members of a multi-gang alliance called "Flocc" which was responsible for "two homicides, numerous gang shootings, a plot to murder police officers on foot patrol in Jamaica, Queens... 60 handguns, more than five kilograms of cocaine, 567 decks of heroin, two pounds of marijuana and approximately $50,000 in narcotics proceeds," according to The Wave. Many of Flocc's members were from Edgemere, and had "turned the seaside Queens neighborhood of Far Rockaway into a war zone."

One resident succinctly summarized the problem for the NY Times, saying "What other outlets do these kids have? Trouble is the easiest thing to get into because it's always there. It's crabs in a bucket out here. They're all climbing up over each other to get out, but meanwhile they're all pulling each other back down."

Gang Bungalow

Bungalow Interior

Despite these problems, the north Edgemere shore is relatively calm and serene in the daytime. Crab fishermen and anglers work the waters amidst wrecked boats and cars, sometimes making gruesome finds. In 2000, "a fisherman found a man's head in a black plastic bag on the shore," according to the NY Times, and "a short time later, detectives found the body that went with the head in an abandoned car nearby." Recently, neighborhood students have participated in several shore cleanups organized by the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, a local group working to "strengthen the connection between the community and the waterfront." The Edgemere bays are now a destination for birdwatching.

Abandoned Car

In recent years, the city has shown some interest in north Edgemere. At least 210 new units of housing have been constructed inside the "Edgemere Urban Renewal Area," according to the Margert Community Corporation, and "the housing authority has spent a significant amount of money renovating all the apartments, thousands of units," at the Edgemere Houses, a Community Board member told the NY Times. However, despite these signs of increased city attention and support, northern Edgemere is still a neighborhood visibly scarred by gangs, floods, and neglect.

Perhaps the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti best summarizes the neighborhood's history in his poem "A Far Rockaway of the Heart," writing "How transient these/solid ephemeral buildings/Concrete bastions/piled up brick and mortar/Wooden caravansaries/built on sand/[...]How fragile the bodies pulsing in them/(Each a temporary shell housing a life)."

Abandoned Piers

Crab Fishermen, Wrecked Boat

Head of Conch Bay

Miss Luscious in the Bushes

Norton Basin Piers

Graffiti and Bay

Empty Home

In The Clubhouse

Locked Door

Gang Graffiti

Shore Shack

Dirt Road, Shotgun Shack

Abandoned Mustang

Condemned Bungalow

Empty Courtyard

North Edgemere Sunset