#alexander nazaryan

Photo: Alexander Nazaryan, 2009

“Although most New Yorkers haven’t been there, the Hole hides in plain sight. Many pass it on the way to John F Kennedy International Airport, on a bleak road above which jets wheeze in on their final descent toward the runways along Jamaica Bay. Behind a tatty curtain of trees and weeds, there is a strange depression in the land, as if a sinkhole had opened here on the desultory border between Brooklyn and Queens. It looks less like a New York neighbourhood than an Arkansas village, only with housing projects on the horizon instead of the Ozark Mountains. Welcome to the Hole.”

“Every city has a shadow city. Paris has the catacombs. Hong Kong had the Kowloon Walled City. New York has the Hole. Places like these matter because they declare that the past is not fully known and the future may well turn out to be a shitshow”

New York’s darkest secret: The Hole is a Mafia graveyard that few people venture into
Alexander Nazaryan, The Independent, 14 August 2015