Because I missed my stop coming home from a birthday party on Mulberry St. last Friday, the 13th, I wound up having to take the G to the F, which meant waiting at the elevated Smith-9th station.
Have you ever stood there on the South side of the platform and watched the scrap metal claw at work on the side of the Gowanus? I had never seen that before. I'm not sure why they were at it so late, Friday at around 10:30 pm. Maybe because the metal heap is so enormous they have to do it when they can, before it all slides into the canal. The claw rig has floodlights on it so the operator can see what he's doing as he grabs heaps of metals parts and drops them onto the barge floating in the canal. You can see the lights in the picture above, to the right of the Lowe's sign. The canal is the void of black beyond the parking lot. The distance from the platform to the metal heap reduced the impact of all the sharp edges in the scene, even the brutality of the claw as it tramped down the metal on the barge over and over again.
The scene had that aesthetic of grand scale industrial decay Spielberg drew from in Star Wars. And where did he get it from?
1 comment:
Hi -- my family is in the scrap metal business and I can tell you that we are all working 24/7 these days! Global steel demand (and therefore prices) have been at all time highs for a few years now. That yard fascinates me too ... they do so much volume on such a sliver of land!
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