I was starting to think I never actually made this recording. It took hours to find among hundreds of untagged and unorganized .WAV files.
I spent an afternoon at Calvary in March, 2011, with a Sony PCM-D50 field recorder and a Sony ECM-MS957 microphone, recording the rickety, fragile sound of the Kosciuszko Bridge portion of the BQE (Brooklyn Queens Expressway). This bridge is being replaced, so this sound will not be with us much longer. When I heard of the bridge’s impending destruction I made a project of capturing its sound, not knowing how long it would still be standing. I still have plenty of time to get more sounds, though sounds of today’s bridge might be drowned by noise from construction of the new one.
This was recorded from the grounds of Calvary Cemetery, which abuts the BQE via Laurel Hill Boulevard. I have attempted capturing other sounds at Calvary, but to no real effect. There is an acoustical phenomenon at Section 1 that I find enchanting. If you sit at just the right spot you can hear sounds of traffic on the Kosciuszko ricochet off the tombstones. The sound itself is something but the physical experience of being there with your eyeballs darting around looking for the tombstone off which the sound deflected is like a game of aural pinball. I once heard the voice of Yankees radio announcer John Sterling bounce off one of those tombstones. Someone was listening to a baseball game in their car while stuck in traffic on the Kosciuszko.
Sound is the blood of a society. It is the element of a place in time which most easily evaporates not only in substance but in memory, never to be reborn or even reconsidered. I’ve been sorting through the hours and hours of such sounds I recorded since 2010, surprised at how often I can pinpoint a location without any accompanying notes or meta information to give me a clue where it was.
