Uploads from Hobo Matt

Classic

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:14 -0700

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Looks like someone's in the driver's seat

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:13 -0700

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Let's take a peek.

A straight shot

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:11 -0700

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Bayside LIRR station

Bayside Story

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:10 -0700

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by Ed McGowin

The beginning and the end

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:07 -0700

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Montauk

Dame's Rocket?

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:06 -0700

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Jackie Robinson Field

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:04 -0700

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at Forest Hills High School

The Parkway Hospital

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:03 -0700

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Closed since 2008 — not even a nice fat bribe could keep it open.

Rounded

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:02 -0700

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Long way home

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:46:00 -0700

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Employee entrance

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:57 -0700

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to the Jamaica Yard

Beneath the Van Wyck Expressway

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:54 -0700

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Van Wick or Van Wike?

Portal of the day

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:53 -0700

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An awfully expensive way to keep people out of the park

Coupla flowers

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:48 -0700

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Painting the Tent of Tomorrow

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:44 -0700

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Unfortunately, this doesn't mean they're preparing to reopen the place to the public. The guy standing on the old escalator said they're just trying to pretty up the areas visible from the adjacent Queens Theatre.

Tent of Tomorrow

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:42 -0700

Hobo Matt posted a photo:

This abandoned structure, originally covered by an enormous, multi-colored, translucent suspended roof, was part of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair. Inside, sprawling across the floor, is a 130-by-166-foot terrazzo road map of New York State, heavily deteriorated after decades of neglect. (Here's a photo from the map's glory days.) A few years ago, there was talk of conserving what was left of the map, but I'm not sure how far that plan went. Today the map is entirely hidden from view, covered by a protective liner and a layer of gravel, as far as I can tell.

Flushing Meadows Park was the site of not only the 1964-65 World's Fair, but also its 1939-40 predecessor. Before that, however, the park wasn't a park at all, but rather a vast ash dump run by a Tammany crony named Fishhooks McCarthy. This befouled landscape was immortalized in the pages of The Great Gatsby:

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally, a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Realizing that a tremendous amount of money would be required to convert the old dump into parkland, Robert Moses seized on the idea of holding a World's Fair here in 1939, using the financial resources available for the fair to level the ash mounds, dig out lakes, and lay down topsoil, turning what Moses described as "a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night" into one of the largest parks in New York City.

Unisphere as jungle gym

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:40 -0700

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The Unisphere

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:37 -0700

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Centerpiece of the 1964-65 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows

Meadow Lake

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:34 -0700

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The largest lake in New York City

Silence

nobody@flickr.com (Hobo Matt) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:29 -0700

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