Getting High, in LIC

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the roof deck at the Pearson LIC, some 16 stories above Court Square here in Long Island City. The views from this spot are unparalleled, as it’s location next to the Sunnyside Yards allows for a seamless view of the horizon in any direction. I’ve gotten high in Long Island City before, by the way, last time it was with Melinda Katz.

As is my habit when presented with such vistas, I decided to shoot “stitched panorama” components. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s a “photoshop thing” which allows one to combine multiple images into singular wide angle ones. The odd shape of the frames in these shots is caused by me twisting about while trying to maintain the horizon level. Clicking on any of the shots in today’s post will take you out to my Flickr page, where progressively larger iterations of them can be accessed, all the way up to the originals, which might be as large as two to three feet across.

Center frame in this one is the mouth of Newtown Creek and the Freedom tower.

More after the jump…

Looking west, towards the shield wall of midtown Manhattan – Empire State, Chrysler, United Nations buildings are all at center, and the Queensboro Bridge is just sneaking in the edge at the right. This one covers the roughly 14th Street to 59th Street sections of the city, strictly for a geographic reference. In the foreground is LIC’s 21st Street as it heads towards Jackson Avenue, with the Hunters Point neighborhood filling the lower section of the shot.

Nearly all of Queensboro is in this image, and the Citigroup building at Court Square is framing things at far right. Not noticing or mentioning 432 Park Avenue rising, over in Manhattan, has become impossible. The smoke stacks of the Big Allis plant rise from Vernon Boulevard over in Ravenswood.

Looking South, towards Brooklyn, past the still quite industrial sections of LIC found along Hunters Point and Borden Avenues. A 640,000 square foot NYCHA warehouse – formerly the Bloomingdales Warehouse – is at center. At far right is the Paragon Oil building, which was once Queens Borough Hall and known as the “Subway Building” and at the left is the start of the Long Island Expressway in the part of LIC which I’ve christened as the “Empty Corridor.”

Click here to see these individual panoramas assembled, as an enormous “stitched panorama” which encompasses around 200 degrees worth of POV and incorporates some thirty individual shots into one mega photo – this is a HUGE image, I warn you.

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