Man Made Lake

Fine Wine

    Man Made Lake turns 3 years old today. This is almost retirement age in the blogosphere, and indeed many of the best photoblogs are dropping like flies. Some get lazy and turn to flickr. Some just get lazy. Others seem to run out of things to photograph. But rest assure that we here at Man Made Lake will continue to bring you that real shit until this series of tubes goes the way of the telegraph. Your attention is appreciated.

Edgemere, Queens

    I had been told that New York's ocean beaches are especially eerie in the dead of winter. My advisers probably had an empty Coney Island in mind, the rides closed and the boardwalk empty. However, on a recent trip to Edgemere, a semi abandoned neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula, the effect of the weather proved redundant; Edgemere is always creepy.

Newtown Creek

    At one time Newtown Creek was a beautiful site. Full of seafood, surrounded by wooded hills, the four-mile-long estuary was a popular swimming spot with the local Mespat tribe. Dutch explorers first surveyed the creek in 1613.

    America's first modern oil refinery opened on its banks in 1867, and before long it was home base for Standard Oil. Other industries moved in and the creek was widened to accommodate bigger barges. Over the last 15 decades, 17 to 30 million gallons of oil (Exxon Valdez was 10) have spilled into Newtown Creek, a water body that is essentially stagnant. Add copper contamination from the Phelps Dodge superfund site, runoff from unsewered industrial sites and waste transfer stations, and combined-sewer overflows of human waste. Many call Newtown Creek the most polluted waterbody in North America.

Mapped: Reading Viaduct, Philadelphia

Tour the ruins of an abandoned elevated freight railroad in central Philadelphia.

    The company itself may be evil but, cartographically speaking, Google is revolutionary.  Allowing users to customize their own maps has brought a lot of personality to an otherwise dorky endeavor.  Of course people mapped the obvious stuff: traffic congestion, earthquakes.  Esoteric maps emerged as well, like rising sea levels, proposed but never built highways, and, my personal favorite, field recordings from forests and cities all around the world.

   

    "Urban explorers," who examine otherwise forbidden parts of civilization, find the damndest things.  Many have photographed various asylums and jails in the many uninhabited islands around New York.  The rust belt, Detroit in particular, is a haven for urban explorers breaking into everything from factories to office towers.  In 1994 a group of explorers claimed to have found the Spetzmetro, a secret subway system under Moscow connecting the government centers to a far flung rural town, presumably so officials could escape in the event of a rebellion.  They don't restrict themselves to abandoned sites either: you're just as likely to find them scaling the cables of a suspension bridge or kayaking down storm sewers.

    Despite my fascination, I've actually taken up such an adventure only a handful of times.  The most successful was during a trip to Philadelphia in 2005 when Kayt and I found an entrance to the Reading Viaduct, a long abandoned freight railroad beautifully overgrown.  This is a unique find because, unlike a forested factory in the middle of nowhere, the viaduct is located in a very central location.  And yet few seem aware of its existence.

    New York's very similar High Line, in Chelsea, is set to be the next big public park and adjacent real estate has already responded.  If you walk down 10th Av you're likely to see construction crews removing vegetation and installing benches.  In Philadelphia, on the other hand, the Reading Viaduct is sitting tight.

Greenpoint Ruins

    Greenpoint got its start as a port and manufacturing hub.  150 years later most port operations are in Jersey and manufacturing is overseas. 

    The gritty blocks between Franklin and the East River have been used numerous times to film a rough neighborhood.'  But the ruins' days are numbered.  In 2005 the city rezoned vast swaths of the Brooklyn waterfront.  Thirty-story luxury apartment towers are starting to pop up in the neighborhoods to the immediate north and south.  In the mean time you can walk down to the dead end at Java Street, sit on some highway medians and enjoy the view.