Rock On, LIC, Rock On

There aren’t all that many places in Western Queens, let alone Long Island City, where you can actually spot a patch of ground that is “As God made it.” One of them can be found at 12th Street’s intersection with 43rd Street, right at the border of the Hunters Point and Ravenswood sections. There’s a glacial erratic, basically a giant boulder left behind by the glaciers which formed Long Island in the first place, protruding from the street there.

Past observation has reveled it to be a favored spot for skateboarding and mountain biking aficionados, who use it as a sort of ramp. When I was down there last week, it was being used for parking. To be fair, the rock does protrude out of a private parking lot, so there you go.

While I was impressed with the way that the pickup truck was posed, looking almost like something that Detroit would favor for an advertisement, it was actually the giant rock that had drawn me here. A glacial erratic is a giant hunk of rock deposited in place either by the melting of or the motive power of a glacier.

From Wikipedia:

Large erratics consisting of slabs of bedrock that have been lifted and transported by glacier ice to subsequently be stranded above thin glacial or fluvioglacial deposits are referred to as glacial floes, rafts (schollen) or erratic megablocks. Erratic megablocks have typical length to thickness ratios on the order of 100 to 1. These megablocks may be found partially exposed or completely buried by till and are clearly allochthonus, since they overlay glacial till. Megablocks can be so large that they are mistaken for bedrock until underlying glacial or fluvial sediments are identified by drilling or excavation.

The striations in the rock were created by the glacier itself, and my understanding (I am no geologist) is that the substance of the thing is Gneiss. Apparently, the East River coastline of LIC is underlain by large deposits of this material, which is what makes building the tall structures in Hunters Point possible. Current scientific opinion seems to be leaning toward there having been several glaciers, rather than a single monolithic one, credited with scattering these large boulders and carving up the archipelago of islands which we know as New York City.

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