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General Category => Hackensack Discussion => Photography...........the way I see it (Moderated by BLeafe) => Topic started by: BLeafe on April 18, 2021, 05:05:53 PM

Title: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot
Post by: BLeafe on April 18, 2021, 05:05:53 PM
NOTE: Title has been changed.

1-16. Last Thursday, I saw someone in the E lot behind my building surveying the entire lot and spray-marking everywhere, including Ward and State streets. It looked serious. "Oh no - they're gonna put up a twin 389 Main right behind the original in the E lot (and 20' from my living room window)!"

The next day, a couple of Bobcats were parked in the lot, ready to start digging it up.

Time to check in with The Editor: "What's going on?"

The reply: "Refresh: New curbs, paving, drainage, pay station. (No more meters)."

Phew!

By the end of the day, 3 Bobcats and one police electronic sign were tucked into the SW corner of the lot.

17, 18. Yesterday, another piece of equipment was added.

19,20. I decided to go outside and see if the sign was functioning yet. It was, telling everyone that the lot will be closed on the 20th and that all cars must be removed. I think a lot of people will either not see that sign or read it incorrectly, so their defense might be, "But your Honor - the sign said 'TUSDAY'.........I thought it was missing two letters and meant to say 'THURSDAY'."

ALL PICTURES AND TEXT IN THIS THREAD ARE COPYRIGHT BOB LEAFE

Click horizontals and 3-photo sign stitch to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot Day 1 - 4-20-21
Post by: BLeafe on April 24, 2021, 11:40:03 AM
1. Two days before TUSDAY, I thought I should take a couple of "before " shots. so I walked across State St, turned around and took the E lot's final portrait stitch, just in case this turned into a photo project.

2. I also took one last shot of the main part of the lot from my apartment.

3. As I started taking a LOT of pictures of the actual work two days later, I realized that I DO have another start-to-finish project right in front of me, so I changed the post's title to make it more accurate. The rest of the pictures in this post are from Day 1 (4-20-21). The first thing they started on at 7am was the western end of the center island, nearest to me (there will be no sleeping late on weekdays for a while).

4. Save for the parking lot light pole, the takedown of Center Island progressed to State St.

5. More blueprints and white spray

6. Some of the supplies from a D. S. Meyer Enterprises truck (DSM is doing the makeover)

7. The center island has become a broken concrete hill.

8. All the island pieces are pushed together to be carted away later.

9. The larger pieces of the island closest to Ward St get broken up. Not a bad shot for 7 floors up (he says modestly, as he hurts his arm from patting himself on the back).

10. First look at the demolished islands

11. Looks like fun in the playground

12. The Ward-side island is cleared of concrete pieces.

13. This is how these items were trucked and rather unceremoniously dumped.

14. More added dirt piles from the Ward-side island

15. Start with a stitch and finish with a stitch. Minus my, uh......adjustments, this is how things looked at the end of Day 1. Late additions: some unusual carve-outs at the near ends of the two former islands and breakup of part of the third island (on the far right).

Click to enlarge - especially the stitches.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot Day 2 - 4-21-21
Post by: BLeafe on April 25, 2021, 05:01:59 PM
I'm posting these in the order I shot them.

1. Not sure what these co-workers are doing at 7:03am.

2. Truck took a perfect dump at 7:10am.

3,4. The carve-outs get deeper.

5,6. The corners are becoming rounded.

7. Balancing act

8. The center island pole and lights came crashing down. I didn't see it nor did I hear it, but the smashed pieces tell the story.

9. Double dump

10,11. The center island pipes that I think contain the electrical wiring get covered up.

12. The Ward-side island - getting dug out - awaits the to-be-connected electrical pipe pieces near the top of the pic. The pipes will only reach as far as the back end of that white car and then take a sharp left in front of that small curb you see by the car. That curb is the dividing line between the parking spaces of the business that's on the corner of State and Ward and the Ward Street side of the E lot. Various flavors of rock and dirt take up most of the rest of the image.

13. This is a closeup of the pipes being put together next to the dividing curb of that business's parking spaces.

14. Pipes are covered by red tape, but I can't read what it says.

15. Between my building and the western edge of the lot were curbs for the spaces located there. They've been dug out and are now being pushed across the lot to an area where they'll be loaded into a truck and carted away.

16. Busy guy..........

17. The end-of Day-2 shot. You can see where that business on State and Ward is, their spaces and even that white car in the upper left corner,

18. I had to go outside for a minute and later walked over to the E lot to see what that red tape said on it.

19. Here is where that curb between the lot and my building was.

20. I had no idea how long a project this might be.................maybe a week or two? As I was leaving the lot, I saw this sign (I was a little off).

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot Day 3 - 4-22-21
Post by: BLeafe on April 25, 2021, 06:00:00 PM
1,2,3. Lubing, connecting, dumping

4,5. Overview + new cuts by the main entrance (stitch)

6. Wider near shot

7. Trucks in the day (vs. ships in the night)

8. CLEAN cement

9. Former island

10-13. Creating new cement curbing between wooden boards

14. Dust-dumping (looks that way, right?)

15. Leveling

16. Healthy lunch(?) from White Castle

17,18. Removing the wooden boards from the hardening curb

Click to enlarge.

Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot Day 4 - 4-23-21
Post by: BLeafe on April 25, 2021, 06:37:47 PM
1-3. Scraping cement off the wooden boards so they can be used again

4. Measuring/leveling the curbing

5. The digging never ends.............

6. .............until the pizzas are delivered.

7. Updated near view

8. Guard doody

9. The new curbing on the Ward St side

10. Cement in the SW corner of the lot

11. Clean cement meets old cement

12. Smoke break on what looks like a very large Dr Seuss hat

13,14. Removing and scraping wooden boards

15. Old concrete appears to have a weak bladder.

16. Where one of the many lot lights will go - I'm told the lighting units will be flat and parallel-to-the-ground, so none of the surrounding apartment tenants will be affected. Yay!

17. The catch-the-board-in-mid-air shot

18. The end-of-Week-1 shot

19,20. Two after-the-rain-on Sunday-morning shots (4-25-21)

Click to enlarge.

Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 4-26-21
Post by: BLeafe on April 27, 2021, 05:27:02 PM
1,2,3,4. New lot curbing along Ward St

5,6. Wooden boards come off newly-hardened concrete curbing between the lot and the business on the corner of State & Ward.

7. I don't know its formal name, but it looks like a giant nail.

8. Setting up the wooden boards before the concrete pour

9, 10. I don't know what these rolls are, but they're obviously very light.

11, 12, 13. Digging around and under the new curbing that's between the lot and my building, where it appears a light fixture will be placed.

14. Dead sign and meter pole

15. Picking up old curbing on the lot's southern border

16. End of the day shot

17. Is this REALLY the place where this portable sign is needed the most? ("Oh, darn - I had my heart set on parking on that pile of concrete chunks!")

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 4-27+28-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 02, 2021, 05:52:16 PM
April 27

1-3. Various scenes around the periphery

4. Breaking up all the old curbing pieces from the lot's southern end

5. Creating new curbing between the wooden boards on the Ward St side

6. The little monster that digs into the lot's surface to make grooves for electrical lines and islands

7. Smoothing out the top of the new curbing

8. Future light fixture has to wear a hard hat.

9,10. Cement activity by State St

11,12. Cement activity nearer to my building

13. Cement work by Ward St as Officer Squillace walks past a car that appears to have been ticketed. I think it was parked there most of the day, but I don't know if it belongs to someone who works in the E lot.

14. It appears that the wheelbarrow died from carrying all that old curbing.

15. I would almost consider this to be an artistic scene. It looks like one of the big toilet paper cardboards contains some wooden stick matches (says the laughing mouth in the upper left corner).

16. Almost every day, I try to create a two-photo stitch that shows what the whole lot looked like at the end of the work day. They almost always fail because the near part won't line up the same way the distant part does (or tries to) and I wind up just using a single photo that covers most of the lot. One day the near end looked OK, but the far end had 389 Main collapsing in the middle as if a bomb went off. In this one, 389 survived, but the near islands - which should be a straight line - aren't...............but not disastrously so............so the image is passable.


APRIL 28

Since this project started, I've been woken every morning between 6-6:30am - if not by actual heavy machinery, then by the incessant beeping of various vehicles in the lot as they hit reverse..............over and over....................but not this morning!

I looked out my window. No one was around. Was it a holiday? No. So I just enjoyed my good fortune of a little extra sleep.

17. Later on, I saw two workers just off the lot on the property of the business on the corner of State and Ward. Their lot borders the E lot. I think these guys work on the E lot, but I'm not certain..............and I could see no activity on the business' lot.

I did see Officer Squillace and a couple of lot workers having a discussion on Ward St, but I have no idea what that was about. In any event, no work appeared to be done on this day..............EXCEPT for:

18. Whoever got there early in the morning and removed the city's movable electronic "No Parking" sign, whose usefulness I questioned in this thread on the day before: April 27.

Click to enlarge (especially the stitch).


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 4-29+30-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 02, 2021, 07:33:35 PM
APRIL 29

1. Another early morning break on the corner business' lot (that business has been closed during the pandemic).

2. A break on the south side

3. Making a dent in that huge pile of old curbing pieces

4. Making a few dents in the truck's bed

5-7. Preparing, delivering and lining up the wooden boards to start the curbing-creation process

8. Dead "Pile Snow Here" signs litter the lot from State St to my building.

9. End-of-the-day lot shot


APRIL 30

10. From 7 floors above, this initially looked like an open-window food truck. Then I zoomed in............oops!

11. How the area behind my building looked as of last Friday at ground level. Note the two trees standing together in the upper middle (you'll know why very soon).

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-1-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 02, 2021, 09:42:21 PM
Why am I writing about activity in the lot on May 1 - a Saturday? These guys are off on weekends.

1-3. Well, for one thing, three trucks showed up on Saturday morning.............but they said "Tree and Lawn Service" on them. Neither of those things existed on the lot and one of the workers was carrying something toward State St, so maybe it was just convenient to park there. Before I knew it, they started to trim a tree that was right next to the SE corner of the lot, but on the street side of the sidewalk.

4. Remember this "Before" photo stitch I posted on Day 1 (4-20-21)? The tree they're working on is on the far left.

5. This video covers what happened next. I thought they were just pruning some branches, as they do periodically, but then the branches started getting bigger and thicker. Before I knew it, the tree was down to a 6'-tall stump and a few minutes later, THAT was gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r90Ygmt0eGw

6. And just to reinforce the final image of the tree, here's the still shot:

7. But they were not done yet. I saw the trucks starting to head in my direction. Apparently, no trees were to be near the perimeter of the lot and there are two trees that are on city property just beyond my building's property line. They reach up to about the 6th-floor (I'm on the 7th) and have been a great source for bird (and squirrel) photography for my entire 32 years here.

I've photographed red-tailed hawks, kestrels (the smallest American raptor), blue jays, cardinals, mockingbirds..............even stupid fish crows (and squirrels) at the top of the tree that was on the left. I think that tree was dead, but the branches made great perches for all of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj502HThpRM

8. Believe it or not, it was less than two weeks ago that I watched cement being poured in the lot below as a squirrel was watching the same thing from the tree branch. It felt like COVID-spacing in the upper deck of a game at Yankee Stadium.

9-12. The tree on the right gets taken down first.

13. The top (perch) part of the tree on the left is cut and tossed.

14. When they made the big cut at the bottom, I had to hold my camera out the window. Since I now couldn't see through the viewfinder, I thought I had it properly framed, but..................

15. The two trees are temporarily reunited in their proper left/right positions by their stumps as Lefty gets cut in half. The fence separates the City's property from my building, so you can see how close they were.

16. This might be the last view of the trees.

17. The stumps and other lot detritus

18. The trucks leave.

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-3+4-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 06, 2021, 11:30:54 AM
1-3. Digging in the NE corner of the lot

4. Adding a gravel layer on the south end of the lot

5-7. Connecting electricity to a light on the Ward St side

8. Men at work, kids at play

9,10. Dirt fill-in

11. Dunno if it's related, but two Verizon trucks get added to the mix.

12,13. Red tape over the electric pipe and a fine fill over the tape

14. The little monster strikes again near the State St entrance.

15. Interesting collection of shapes

16. Before I saw what it was, I thought this tamper/thumper (how technical!) sounded like a helicopter - it was that fast.

17. Digging in the NW corner

18. The cement post-delivery wash-down

19. Not sure what these are

20. Smoothing out the recent pour on the southern end

Click to enlarge.

Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-5+6-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 06, 2021, 06:22:04 PM
MAY 4

For the second consecutive Wednesday, there were zero workers on site. Great way to break up the week, I guess.

1. I take that back. There was ONE worker on site on Wednesday - probably because of his special skill - but I haven't seen him there before (we could have used him at Woodstock!).


MAY 5

OK - back to work, right?

Nope. Another day off.

2-12. I take that back. There was ONE guy who came down from his lofty perch to utilize his "skills" and take some ground-level shots for a change.

13. So it's been half a month - still have no clue as to what this will eventually look like, so here's the next street-level progress report photo stitch.

Click to enlarge.




Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-7 to 5-12 (part) 2021
Post by: BLeafe on May 16, 2021, 04:36:22 PM
May 7

1. Some now-unneeded equipment gets secured for a trip elsewhere.


May 10

2,3. Cutting & carrying

4. Parts of parking spaces

5. This guy looks jet-propelled.

6. These boots might belong to the jet-propelled guy after he took off from the top of the truck (it WAS the very next picture I took).

7. Downhill cement is NOT jet-propelled (big pic - click it)


May 11

8-12. They're building something in the SW corner of the E lot (behind the First Presbyterian Church), but I have no idea what it is (there's a bit of loose cement caught in mid-air, fresh off the trowel in IMG_9526).


May 12 (part)

13-18. The sidewalk along State gets ripped out.

19. This guy's carrying parking sign poles, but cardboard coffee cups appear to have replaced the signs. There's another view of this on May 15.

(May 12 is continued in the next post.)

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-12 (continued) to 5-13, 2021
Post by: BLeafe on May 16, 2021, 04:52:29 PM
May 12 (continued)

1. Closeup of cement pour on the Ward St side from my living room

2. A wider shot of the same cement pour and what it looked like 2 hours later.

3. I like the shadows from two angles.

4. Still building in that SW corner - laying bricks over a 5+ hour-long period (see times on right side).

5. Starting to remove the sidewalk on the Ward St side

6. You may recall back on April 28 when I showed two workers sitting on their coolers in the lot of the business on the corner of State and Ward (whose lot borders the E lot). I wasn't sure if they were E lot workers or not, but since nothing was going on at that business, where else could they be working? I still see them there every day at break/lunch time, but on THIS day, I saw them leave and walk across the E lot...............and continue onto the lot of the apartment building on the corner of Passaic and State streets, so these will be the last shots of those guys.

7. Half of the Ward St sidewalk is gone.

8. Some dirt being dumped straight down from my window

9,10. Sitting precariously on one slab of unremoved sidewalk and later removing it.

11. Sign-on-sign

12. A parking sign gets pushed, falls and is carried away.

13-15. More Ward St sidewalk work

16. Meanwhile, over on State St.................

17. The suns sets on a pile of dirt and some equipment.


May 13

18,19. Work continues in that SW corner of the lot

Click to enlarge.





Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-14,15-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 16, 2021, 05:07:08 PM
May 14

1-8. Except for the second picture, here are various workers doing various things. The second image shows what became of the Ward St sidewalk (there may be some State St sidewalk mixed in).


May 15

9-20. May 15 was a Saturday, so nobody works on the lot...................except me.

It's nice to get a little different perspective.


Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-18 to 5-23-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 29, 2021, 12:01:27 PM
5-18-21

1. Just Another Brick In The Wall

2. Cement: hammer out, rinse, dump


5-19-21

3-12. Lots of cement work on the Ward St side


5-22-21

13-15. The 2 stitches (3 images and 2 images) wouldn't line up, so here are the components that you can stitch together in your head. Fortunately, I found a cure for stitching problems the very next day.


5-23-21

I recently got a new iPhone and am starting to fool around with the camera - especially the panoramic function: hit the PANO button and steadily move the phone from left to right...........done! No stitching multiple pictures together that may or may not line up, no muss, no fuss. It DOES take a few tries to get it right, but the results are.................well, see for yourself.

16. The whole lot (well, most of it) from my living room (I'm still working on my technique).

17. This is the prize of the bunch. The only way to make this better would be to have some elevation.

18. Left to right: Second Reformed Church (part), 435 Main, 22 Ward, 417 Main, 407 State, 389 Main, 40 Passaic, 50 Passaic, First Presbyterian Church (part)

19. I have to take back that "no stitching multiple pictures together" statement. Of course, the camera is doing that digitally, but if your left to right movement is off, there may be a glitch in the finished product. There's one in this image, but I still like what I was able to cram into it.

I think I found a new toy to play with. Expect to see more of these.

These panos are big images, so click to enlarge and start scrolling.

(and all images are ©Bob Leafe)


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 5-24,25,27-21
Post by: BLeafe on May 29, 2021, 01:45:07 PM
There hasn't been any full-scale work going on during the last week, but occasionally someone comes by to either pick up no-longer-needed things or drop off large vehicles needed for the next stage. Since it's Memorial Day Weekend, I'm guessing that that next stage begins this Tuesday, June 1.

5-24-21

1-5. A two-man crew drove a truck in to pick up all the items used to create all the curbing and other cement components.


5-25-21

6. A slightly better attempt to get the entire lot in an iPhone panoramic image. I'll get there.


5-27-21

7-19. I saw an unusual vehicle on a truck parked on State St at the far end of the lot. I had never seen this type of vehicle here before, but I knew it was coming into the lot. This thing was huge and it looked like quite a job for one guy to get it off the truck and into the lot. Once I could read the side number on the vehicle, I looked it up. It's a 51', 80,000+lb cold planer (it mills asphalt). Apparently, it's time to get rid of the old parking lot surface and put in a new one.

I shot a video of what I thought would be the critical part of the move: getting the vehicle off the truck and having it make a sharp right turn into the lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJJsFOTGXOI

The stills show before, during and after what the video shows. I went out during the afternoon to shoot some closeups, including an iPhone Pano shot (next-to-last image). The last image shows the vehicle's specs.

Click to enlarge.



Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 6-1-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 04, 2021, 03:21:31 PM
They got real busy the day after Memorial Day. So did I. I was shooting and editing non-stop, all day long (and into the evening):

1. I took this at 6:36am - who can sleep when metal is LOUDLY scraping metal at that hour?

2. And look what came tumbling out of the bottom............standup mannequin legs!

3. Secret stash in a hidden compartment of the RX-700e

4. Suddenly-non-horizontal pieces of the E lot

5. The shovel brigade has its own water boy.

6. The giant toilet paper cardboard tube toss

7. This doesn't seem to be very productive: they took a securely-wrapped quantity of bricks and spent a lot of time moving them one by one onto a wooden pallet which was then transported to the sidewalk on State St, where they've been sitting unsecured all this week by the Porto-Potty which also is now on that sidewalk.

8. The monster RX-700e makes a break for it onto State St. Is it a British product? The driver IS on the right side.

9. The aforementioned Porto-Potty gets moved onto the new State St sidewalk, where its brickly new friend will later move next door (or "next sidewalk slab").

10. It's amazing the shots you can get from 7 floors up..........

11. No idea what's going on here, but it's not a shot you see every day.

12. The Unusual Shapes and Sizes Break Area

13.  The milling gets off to a good start between the cold planer and the receiving truck when all of a sudden..........WHOOPS! It looks like a big mistake, but I was thrilled to get that second shot. I don't think I've ever seen something like that happen before, but to be in position - from my bedroom, no less - to get this shot just amazes me. It might be my favorite shot of this event..............so far.

14. More fooling around with the chewed-up asphalt flow................the first one's going into a truck, but what's the purpose of spewing it all over the ground?

15. The cold planer and its receiving truck take a break after the center stripe initial milling of the lot's asphalt.

16. A different angle from above..........

17. I saw the RX-700e driver throw empty gallon plastic bottles from his machine - what the hell was he doing? House-cleaning, apparently. He climbed down and proceeded to pick them all up, walk over to the western perimeter and deposit them all in what appears to be a plastic bag.

18. I took some PANO (panoramic) shots with the iPhone and am including two of them here taken at different stages of this busy day. The cold planer is on the far left getting ready to start milling the asphalt at 10:10am. The large number of trucks lining up assure a steady flow of receptacles, so the milling process is uninterrupted. The truck at the bottom is receiving dirt from the piles behind it.

19. At 3:48pm, everyone's gone for the day, but there's LOTS more to do tomorrow.

Click to enlarge...............especially the PANOs.



Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 6-2-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 05, 2021, 01:00:09 PM
1,2. Is this the gardener? The car wash guy?

3. No, it's the guy who drives the RX-700e, which has a huge water tank that was leaking like crazy when I got my first up-close look. Why does it need a water tank? Apparently, it's so the driver can hose down the lot - I'm guessing to keep the dust down (and to keep his friend's truck nice and clean).

4,5. Not sure what this is called, but it pounds the surface to  get the air out and compact it (the compacter?). All I know it that it sounds like a helicopter and it got me away from the computer more than once when I thought a chopper was overhead. In 5's background, it looked like someone had a yard sale table set up in the parking lot behind the 50 Passaic St business, but it turned out to be an impressive array of tools for the man in the purple shirt to work on his car with.

6. The red truck dumps a hot load.

7. You think I was kidding about it being HOT?

8. Shovel and rake it.

9. Throwing a shovelful to a needy area

10. Lunch time

11. Back to work

12. Two monsters on the sidelines

13,14. The truck dumps asphalt into the third monster, which deposits it and the crew evens it out.

15. The driver takes a break.

16. At the end of the day, look at the formation they left for me to shoot!

17,18. Can't resist a closer look at all this power.

19. The formal, end of the day PANO shot

Click to enlarge.






Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 6-3 to 6-6-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 06, 2021, 05:20:08 PM
These were taken over the last 4 days and bring things up to date.

June 3

1-3. Scrape, fill, move over one vehicle's width, rinse and repeat

4. A visit from the vehicle's dentist

5. Scrape and fill by State St

6,7. A new vehicle arrives. It's kinda like a street sweeper, but with a twist.

8. The sweeper brush directs the particles into an internal bin that rises into the air and tilts to the side to dump everything into a truck.

9. I think he's trying to scrape the top edge with the shovel.

10. Just before exiting the lot, the cover is brought up and over the contents.

11. As you can see it's been raining, so this looked slightly redundant.

12. After the dental appointment, the big red monster heads for its overnight parking spot.

13,14. I took a couple of PANO shots during the day (8:40am) and after everyone left (by 1pm).

15. A couple of hours later (3pm), the surface started to dry and it looked QUITE different.


June 4

16. The big red monster ships out just after 9am. No work on the lot today.

17. End of the day PANO shot taken just after 4pm when a nasty storm front moved in. You can tell that it's raining and that the front is moving from right to left (south to north).


June 5

18. Saturday - time to take the State St PANO shot


June 6

19. Sunday - I wanted a closer PANO shot. There appears to be only one vehicle on the lot.

20. Actually, there are two (one blocked the other from view). It appears that lot paving probably begins tomorrow.


Click to enlarge.



Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot - 6-7 to 6-11-21 (part)
Post by: BLeafe on June 15, 2021, 04:30:19 PM
It appears that lot paving probably begins tomorrow.


I have to stop making predictions about things I know nothing about.

1. Not only was there no paving the next day, but those two remaining pieces of equipment were removed early in the morning.

2. This is what the lot looked like that entire day as nothing got done.

3. Here's all the activity that occurred on the 8th.

4. And then the rains came...............

5. This is everything I saw going on on the 9th.

6-12. Finally, work resumed on the 10th.

13-20. On the 11th, all work seemed to revolve around all the lot locations where I was told lights would be placed. Cylindrical molds were cut, put in place and filled with cement.

I've reached my 20-picture post limit and will resume the 11th in the next post.

Click to enlarge.




Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 6-11 (con't) to 6-16-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 20, 2021, 06:17:21 PM
6-11-21 (continued)

1,2. The cement-related activities continue.

3. End-of-the-day PANO shot


6-13-21

4-6. Three on-the-ground Sunday shots


6-14-21

7-12. So the long cardboard-looking rolls were cut into sections and used as cement molds. When the cement dried, the rolls were ripped off and cut up.


6-16-21

13. Pieces of our old fence and some old "Reserved Monthly Parking" signs

14. The landscapers show up and deliver trees that look just like the ones on Main St.

15. New pieces of fencing to be placed between the lot and our building are unwrapped.

16,17. Preparing to hoist the tree into its just-dug hole

18. Not sure what this is, but it's an interesting look from above.

19. New trees cast their first shadows.

20. A PANO shot from earlier in the day showing the new trees, the new fence and our old garbage

Click to enlarge.

Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 6-18 to 6-22-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 27, 2021, 05:34:07 PM
6-18-21

1. Cutting up new concrete for some reason

2,3. Out with the old and in with the new

4. Lowering the heavy pipe? (I didn't see what transpired before this)

5. Chowin' down


6-19-21

6-8. Gardening duties


6-20-21

9,10. PANO shots from State St - wide and tight

11. Straight-down PANO shot


6-21-21

12-14. The old fencing between my building and the lot gets crunched into a container.

15. The fencing gets covered by old parking meter poles and other lot garbage, ready to be covered and carted away.

16. From a distance, it looked like there was some traffic at the Port-O-San, but it appears that it was just one guy who was driving a truck that was towing a piece of equipment.


6-22-21

17. The aforementioned container - now covered - gets hauled away.

18, 19. If I didn't know better, I'd say this guy was burning rubber.

20. Now he gets to clean all the dust out.

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 6-23 to 6-24-21 (PART 1)
Post by: BLeafe on June 27, 2021, 05:55:43 PM
6-23-21

1,2. The landscapers are back.

3. Press conference at the pipes

4. Wait............what's all this yellow stuff?

5. Closeup.........another picture showed the name on the bag - EZ-Straw Seeding Mulch (with TACK!). Google tells me : "EZ-Straw Seeding Mulch is processed straw with a bonding agent for tackiness which holds it together. Protecting grass seed from heavy washout and windy areas, this seeding mulch speeds up germination."

6. The overhead PANO shot..........looks TACKy to me

7. Done for the day

8. Two lone piles of crushed rock



6-24-21 - Part 1

PAVING DAY! Plus I had the Isley Brothers tribute ceremony to shoot that day (and a couple hundred images to edit that night).

9-11. Wait..........so that wasn't a pile of crushed rock?

12. Death and destruction right below me...........well, it kinda looks like that..............maybe?............no?

13. Return of the cement truck

14. Gotta keep your gaping maws clean...........

15. The first actual paving of the lot took place on the Ward St side..........

16. ............and then they made a left turn.

17. Looks like they took this corner a little too fast........

18. ..........or maybe I held the camera at that angle for dramatic effect. This looks a bit more normal.

19. Tracks

20.  Oops! You missed a spot........

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 6-24 (PART 2) and 6-25-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 27, 2021, 06:36:27 PM
The rest of paving day......

6-24-21 (Part 2)

1. At the Truck Wash

2. Almost half-done!

3.4. Working around tight (and wide) spots

5. In the home stretch?

6. No! A second layer is applied.

7. The fire only flashed for a second, making it hard to capture.

8. After everyone left for the day, this guy stayed until about 6pm going over the ENTIRE lot with his not-very-wide roller, going straight ahead for the full width of the lot and then driving backwards over the full width, but just a couple of feet from the previous run. It must have seemed like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket...........but he did it.

9. This was something that I had never seen before: the sun reflecting off the windows of 389 Main onto the lot. It only lasted for two days: this day and the next (you'll see why later).

10-15. During the day, I took PANO shows at various stages of the paving, including one from Ward St. Here are a half-dozen of them. You'll never see the lot cleaner than it was in that last one.


6-25-21

16. So what's the first thing that catches my eye the next morning? A piece of LITTER in the distant part of the formerly-spotless lot. When I went out later, I took a closeup shot of it (inset). It appears to have been run over by heavy equipment. The crew littered its own spotless work? For SHAME!

17. Early on, I saw these 3 guys standing around the pipes while one drilled something and then they left.

18. When I went out to shoot the litter, I also shot the pipes. I don't know what the drilling was for, but it looks like the traffic cone now has a little stand.

19. During the day, stacks and stacks of something covered in clear blue wrapping were piled onto the island between the lot and the lot of the corner business. Each must have been 10' tall. I saw some of the workers walking away with some of contents, but I don't know where they went or what those contents were, so............

20.  ............during my walk, I shot a closeup of one of the boxes. They must be the lighting units for the lot (but there were SO many of them).

Click to enlarge.


Title: Re: The makeup gets applied to the E municipal parking lot 6-26-21
Post by: BLeafe on June 30, 2021, 02:22:02 PM
I woke up early on Saturday, June 26, looked out the window and saw sketches, strings and people measuring things in the lot. It was the lot's hair and makeup crew...........without the hair.

The lot got drawn on and painted. Here's what I saw, beginning at 705am:

1-3. A man and a woman use string to measure lengths having to do with parking spaces.

4. I won't pretend to know what this guy is doing (what's "X-HATCH"?)

5. Teamwork

6. It looks like parking will not be allowed directly in front of the iron pipes, which seem to be positioned to protect something.

7. The very first parking space stripe is laid down by the brick wall in the lot's SW corner.

8. The first two spaces take shape.

9. At this stage, I did a panoramic shot to show all the lot markings before everything gets filled-in. Click it.

10,11. Arrows get painted..............

12-14. .............and parking space stencils for numbers are laid down and painted (#18 gained a digit and #19 is running away).

15. This is the company that's applying the lot's makeup.

16. Yellow section-separators

17,18. The handicap spaces get done.

19. After everyone left, this guy came into the lot to remove a few loose boxes of lights that were on a second pallet and then put that empty pallet on top of the last (opened) stack for protection (or so it appears).

20. So here's what got done today: the parking lot in full makeup. This panoramic shot - that was taken after a light rain - should look fairly decent when enlarged........EXCEPT for the fact that there's a glitch in it............but if you forget I said that, maybe you won't notice it.

BTW - there are 144 spaces in this new lot.

Click to enlarge most of the images (not so much the verticals).


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 6-27 to 7-16-21
Post by: BLeafe on July 28, 2021, 04:47:27 PM
All dates are in the file names under each image.

1,2. Continuing in the panoramic mode............a couple of Sunday stroll shots - one from the State St side and one from Ward St, which I really like for some reason

3. Getting the money machine ready

4,5. The money machine and its closeup

6-11. This gentleman from DSM (the main contractor for this project) showed up and cleaned up the entire lot (includes 2 shots of the landscaper and his colorful hose).........

12. ...............and these two worked on the wiring for the lot's light poles.

13. Taking a break

14-18. More work in the SW corner of the lot. I originally thought some sort of structure was being built, but my guess now is that this is where snow will be dumped when the lot gets plowed (I hate to tell them, but a good snowstorm will make at least 3 piles that EACH will be twice as tall as this corner wall............should be an interesting first winter for this lot).

19. Folding up a tarp

20. How to properly exit the lot after work (have a good cone guy with you)

Click to enlarge.

Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 7-17-21
Post by: BLeafe on July 28, 2021, 05:55:11 PM
All dates are in the file names under each image

1. Finally! The men are here to put the poles, wiring and lighting units all together on a very hot and very rainy Saturday afternoon. I won't pretend to know every detail of what's going on, so I'm gonna appear intelligent by shutting up for the most part and let you geniuses be guided by my photos.

2,3. As you saw in previous pictures, there are more than a dozen bases for these lights around the lot, so these guys have a LOT of wiring to do to connect them all.

4-7. Protection from the sun and rain is needed so they can get this done today.

8. The first two are done.

9. Six..........

10. Nine......

11-13. Eleven (as the rains came).......

14. Twelve.......

15. Cover it all up

16,17. Time to take the overhead protection down........

18,19. ............and clean up all the soggy boxes.

20. A job well-done under difficult circumstances

Click to enlarge.



Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 7-21-21 INSTALLING LIGHTS
Post by: BLeafe on July 29, 2021, 09:47:08 PM
As you saw in the previous post, all the light poles were prepped and ready for installation.

1,2. A truck with a crane arrives.............it looks like today's the day.

3,4. Rainwater is dumped.......

5,6. ........and tarps are removed.

7,8. Wiring is finalized and a base is prepped to receive a pole.

9,10. A pole is picked and transported to that base.

11. Fortunately for me, that base is the nearest one to me, meaning I'll get to do my closest photography right away instead or waiting around all morning.

12,13. The pole is connected to the crane and starts to get vertical.

14-18. The pole is guided over to the base and attached.

19. Voila! The first E lot light pole has been installed.

20. And here's what the finished product looks like. It's hard to see much of a difference with skinny black poles, but it should be interesting when they turn them on at night.

Click to enlarge horizontal images.


Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot 7-23 to 7-27 THE LIT LOT, etc.
Post by: BLeafe on July 30, 2021, 02:23:19 PM
7-23-21

1. Two nights later, the lights came on. Thankfully, they're not very bright from above.. I only noticed they were on when I saw the top of this new tree illuminated by a new lot light.

2. Here's what most of the lot looks like at night. This picture is actually brighter than what I see from here.

3. This enhanced photo of the still-unopened Ward St entrance/exit shows the shadows from a nearby lot light.


7-25-21

Sunday stroll time

4. The view from State St

5. A closeup of what's at the foot of that pole

6. What the perfectly-flat lighting element looks like.............this type of second-story light should be retroactively mandatory for all lot lighting in Hackensack (and everywhere else).

7. What I'm guessing is the snow-dump corner

8. As you can see, there's still a lot of sidewalk work to be done on the State St side.


7-26-21

9. The very next day (someone must have heard me)


7-27-21

10. Today's jobs: The State St sidewalk and the center payment area protection poles

11,12. Concrete in the sidewalk and concrete in the poles (note the upside-down traffic cone funnel)

13. Lots of pole-hammering (to get the concrete to settle in them?)

14. Over half-done

15. The nice-looking pole caps are brought over to the side of the lot and cut down to proper size.

16. The Quikrete is cut open, dumped and ready to be mixed.

17,18. The poles are capped and the sidewalk is finished.

19, 20. There's just one more little detail: the trash receptacle (one of two) is attached............and almost fallen into.

Click to enlarge.

Title: Re: The makeover of the E municipal parking lot THE FINAL WEEK (IT'S OPEN!)
Post by: BLeafe on August 06, 2021, 01:50:02 PM
And, hopefully, this will be the final post. This project ran about 2 months longer that I was expecting, so I'm glad to be done with it. I suspect you are too.

July 28

1. This was taken just after midnight. This is how the new lights illuminate rain.

2. This PANO shot shows the ENTIRE project wet, clean, untouched and empty - something you'll never see again.

3. Looks like they missed a parking space line............all fixed.

4. Stop sign post-pounding

5. The bridesmaids hold up the wedding dress train.


July 29

6. This is the last worker I zoomed in on.

7. The Bobcat backs up onto its truck on Ward St.

8. This parking lot - with TWO entrance/exit points - has SIX stop signs ("abundance of caution" comes to mind).

9. The crew finishes up State St sidewalk and road work.


July 30

10.  I saw this drone flying around. At first, it appeared near the upper floors of the 389 Main project across State St, then near me and by the time I got my camera and located this small moving object in the frame, it was over by the back of 40 Passaic St (left pic), which also borders the parking lot, where it looked like it would land (right pic).

Who was doing all this snooping around the upper floors of these apartment buildings that bordered the lot on three sides?

11. I followed the drone to two men standing on the Ward St side of the lot. I think the man on the left is from DSM - the company that did all the lot work. The other gentleman is showing his power to levitate the drone - not by remote control - but simply by waving his hands above the drone, which places the hands' shadows below the drone for uplift.

12. When that failed, he packed it away. So I guess the company made a video of the finished project - a pretty good indicator that they were done.

13. I looked around from above to see if I missed documenting anything. Here's something: Is this for bicycles? Motorcycles?

14. The only reason I missed this was because it was brand new, thanks to some kids. The elongated, second-from-the-right item with the cilia (how did I remember THAT word?) is labeled, "SUN". The lot's first artwork was gone two days later after rain.


JULY 31

All cones that had been blocking lot entrances/exits were moved aside. This must be Opening Day. Apparently, no one else had noticed it, so............

15. I hopped in my car and took the first ride through the empty lot.

16. About an hour-and-a-half later, the lot had its first parked vehicle.


AUGUST 1

17. The last State St PANO shot shows the finished product with very few cars in the lot.

18. You have to stop twice to get out.


AUGUST 3

19. The first parking ticket (that I'm aware of).............yeah, we're back to normal.

20. Let's finish off this three-and-a-half-month project with some better artwork (with a better sun) from neighborhood kids on the better lot.


I'm OUT!


Click to enlarge.