Ravenswood Power Station (“Big Allis”), Queens, NY, 2024.
A gigawatt of pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53732990785
#photography
This is a composite of two side-by-side images, each captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/5.6), shifted left and right +/- 12mm to produce a 205MP 2:1 aspect ratio final image.
The Ravenswood plant, along the East River in Long Island City/Astoria Queens, was built by Con Ed in stages during the early- and mid- 1960’s. When opened, it had capacity for about 20% of the city’s electricity demand, as well as producing co-generated steam for the city’s steam loop.
Known locally as “Big Allis” (after Allis-Chalmers, the manufacturer of the largest of the four generators in the plant), Ravenswood is fired by both natural gas (now the primary fuel) and oil, and also has the capability (never used, as far as I know) to burn coal.
Ravenswood has been linked to a spike in asthma and other respiratory disorders among local residents. There is pressure to decommission the generators and replace them with battery banks to store renewable energy from upstate.
For industrial subjects especially, I usually end up preferring the most straightforward and boring perspective I can find that just lets the subject speak for itself. The masters of this approach were Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose “Basic Forms” work richly repays your attention if you like this kind of stuff. https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Bernd_and_Hilla_Becher/
(They would have undoubtedly waited for an overcast day to shoot Big Allis, but I liked the clouds.)
@mattblaze@federate.social That’s currently a 404 link.
@NeadReport@vivaldi.net Hm, I’m seeing the page when I clock on it. No idea why you aren’t.
@mattblaze@federate.social Yeah, see @todwest@beige.party reply above. That was the fix –> click the link not the ‘preview link’ (which didn’t work). No worries.
@NeadReport@vivaldi.net @todwest@beige.party Interesting. Yeah, I just saw that. But when I click either the preview or the inline link, it works for me. Must be something to do with instance-specific preview generation, making this sort of stuff very hard to debug!
@mattblaze@federate.social @todwest@beige.party I think you are correct in how the link is processed per-instance. Not something you would need to debug. Just another side note as we traverse the Mastodoniverse!
@mattblaze@federate.social That plant is huge. I used to see it looking down 66th and 67th streets in Manhattan when I used to work on the UES. Absolutely massive, pumping out a lot of steam in the cold months.
@mattblaze@federate.social You had good sky that day.
