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There’s a corridor of light industrial businesses that runs through the Ravenswood Section of Western Queens. The area is bounded by Crescent and 21st Streets to the east and west, and 36th and 40th avenues to the south and north. It is home to lots of small to medium sized businesses – many of whom are involved with automobile repair.

The Scalamandre Silk building is in this zone, as is a square city block sized Consolidated Edison Electrical Substation. It’s called the Queensbridge Substation, although I’ve also seen it referenced as the Queensbridge Central Substation. This is the block found between 38th and 39th avenues, and between 22nd and 23rd Streets. The facility, and the high voltage equipment it houses, sounds like this – hmmmmmmmmm.

More after the jump…
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As mentioned, there’s an awful lot of fix a flat, body and fender, and general automotive repair shops around here. There’s also quite a few businesses that operate in the taxi industry, as you may notice from the shot above. There’s meter people, taxi medallion brokers, decal and trade dress installers – you name it.

This is the more interesting 39th Avenue side of the Con Ed substation, by the way, as the 38th Avenue side is basically a brick wall with a door in it.

From Wikipedia:

Substations generally have switching, protection and control equipment, and transformers. In a large substation, circuit breakers are used to interrupt any short circuits or overload currents that may occur on the network. Smaller distribution stations may use recloser circuit breakers or fuses for protection of distribution circuits. Substations themselves do not usually have generators, although a power plant may have a substation nearby. Other devices such as capacitors and voltage regulators may also be located at a substation.

Substations may be on the surface in fenced enclosures, underground, or located in special-purpose buildings. High-rise buildings may have several indoor substations. Indoor substations are usually found in urban areas to reduce the noise from the transformers, for reasons of appearance, or to protect switchgear from extreme climate or pollution conditions.

Where a substation has a metallic fence, it must be properly grounded to protect people from high voltages that may occur during a fault in the network. Earth faults at a substation can cause a ground potential rise. Currents flowing in the Earth’s surface during a fault can cause metal objects to have a significantly different voltage than the ground under a person’s feet; this touch potential presents a hazard of electrocution.

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On a side note, I have to say that this Boro Cab experiment really does seem to be working out.

Street hails have become far easier as you can spot these green buggies when they’re still blocks away, and I love that the price of the ride is metered (rather than the old “car service” system where you’d haggle with the driver, who would invariably try to shake you down). Most of the drivers I’ve chatted with about the green cars have offered a fairly positive review of the program as well.

Also – on a personal note – I usually have my headphones on when out and about with the camera, and every time I walk past this block a shock travels along the wires and zaps my ears. The headphones also randomly amplify the “hmmmmmmmmm” sound, I would add. While capturing the shot above, both happened.

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As far as the block that goes “hmmmmmmmmm” goes, it’s part of the electrical infrastructure which maintains the approximately ten square mile “Long Island City Network.” Researching the system has undoubtedly landed me on several Homeland Security watch lists, but I’m an infrastructure geek – darn it – and this facility has all sorts of wild equipment that is straight out of a Universal Monster movie from the 1930s.

From coned.com:

The Long Island City network serves an area with a population of approximately 350,000 people. Its population is similar to the population residing within the city limits of Buffalo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Miami, Tampa, Minneapolis and St. Louis.

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I started becoming interested in the nuances of the electrical system shortly after the Great Astoria Blackout of 2006, wherein a hellish week of fluctuating power at the height of summer was experienced. It seems that a perfect storm of trouble afflicted Con Ed that week, and many the Astorian will offer tales of flame erupting from the manhole covers on 30th Avenue or Broadway. It’s actually quite easy to get angry at the electric company – whether it be for an omnipresent “hmmmmmmmmm” sound in Ravenswood, the occasional static shock delivered to the ear, or a week of darkness and power surges at the height of summer.

Personally, I’m amazed at how seldom these sorts of things actually happen, although the lamp on my desk is actually kind of flickering at the moment.

Also from coned.com:

The Long Island City (LIC) network is one of seven networks supplying Queens County. It serves northwest Queens and includes the neighborhoods of Long Island City, Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Hunters Point. The LIC network is bounded by the East River on the west and north, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the east, and Newtown Creek on the south. It delivers power to approximately 115,000 customers.

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


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