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A shot  acquired in 2010, when I happened to be standing in a south facing room within the Degnon Terminal’s former Loose Wiles building (LaGuardia Community College’s Building C, in modernity)… which overlooks the waters of the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek.

Dutch Kills is LIC’s ancestral waterway, which once flowed all the way to Queens Plaza, and is just a few blocks from Court Square and Thomson Avenue. Beyond the Long Island Expressway is the infinity of Brooklyn, and you are looking roughly south.

The Newtown Creek industrial district of New York City

As it happens, while attempting to research a group of heretical Quakers operating along the Newtown Creek area just before the Revolutionary War, I came across the following image in another one of those “old and out of copyright” municipal journals which have found their way onto the web via Google Books.

Entirely coincidental, the 1921 photographer and I were shooting from practically the same vantage point, albeit separated by 89 years. Notice, at the right of the shot, that the Waldes Koh-I-Noor factory is already operating. The bridge you see at center is the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge, by the way.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman blogs at Newtown Pentacle


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