Just Venting Here

My neighborhood in Astoria, which is the little pocket that sits at the border of Woodside and Sunnyside along Northern Boulevard, has recently enjoyed a staccato rhythm somewhat different than the usual ones. Under normal circumstance, it’s car stereos and home improvement contractors supplying the beat, while lately it’s been an MTA construction project found at the intersection of Northern, 34th Avenue, and 46th Street.

Recently, one decided to follow the clanging and whirring to see what’s going on – here’s what I found…

Construction closed the street for several months, with a fairly large number of workers setting up shop here. Colossal mechanisms are at work, and the whole site is enclosed by temporary fences. Observationally, the project is entirely diurnal, as there doesn’t seem to be any work presence here at night other than some somnambulist security guards watching over the equipment and tool containers.

What’s going on, it would seem, is the construction of a subterranean venting facility for the E and F trains. Page 8 of this MTA RFP (Request for Proposal) from April of 2009 estimated the project as costing some $88.7 million smackaroos.

From nymtc.org:

This project is for the construction of a new below-ground vent plant on the Queens Blvd Line (QBL) between the 36th Street and 65th Street stations. This is a section of the QBL that passes below Northern Boulevard and is the bypass section for the E and F trains. The vent plant will be located under 46th Street between Northern Boulevard and 34th Avenue. The plenum will extend from the vent plant to under Northern Boulevard. No property acquisition is required

Northern Boulevard is all blocked up here, with safety cones and traffic barriers, while a steel delivery takes place. The building in the background of this shot is actually an interesting artifact of the Detroit East era of LIC, a former auto showroom on the Carridor. I’ll tell you about that one sometime in the future, but this post is about recording history rather than reporting or retelling it.

A big part of “what I do” is recording history as it happens in the attempt to leave behind some sort of cogent record.

A century ago, when Queens was undergoing momentous changes, there weren’t many people paying attention to it. Few if any images of the sudden explosion of industrial and residential real estate which accompanied the opening of the Subways are out there on the web. Whatever images there are from this era have either fallen into the hands of modern opportunists who hoard and exploit them for commercial use, or are hidden away behind paywalls and copyrighted not by their creators but by whomsoever found them in a shoebox and scanned them. Western Queens is in the midst of another age of transformation right now, and my intentions are to leave behind some sort of public record of what was observed, as it happened, for future generations.

Frankly, I don’t know what these machines are called. Presumptively, they’re some sort of pile driver, and they’re what drew me here with their clanging beats. The mechanisms seemed to be twisting and turning lengths of steel into the ground, with a crew of guys in vests and hardhats looking on in a somewhat concerned manner whenever they’re operating. The vent system will provide the MTA with a chance to correct a deficiency in their system, I’m told, and is part of a general upgrade of the century old tracks which underlie the neighborhood.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.