Wiggle time
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Yessir, here we are back on Polish Hill in Pittsburgh, continuing with the longest walk undertaken since the ‘orthopedic incident’ that shattered my left ankle. This one started in the East Liberty section, proceeded across Bloomfield’s Baum Blvd., through Skunk Hollow, and now – so did your humble narrator march on.
There’s a section of the city which is called ‘The Hill District.’ The terminology is usually used, by the TV news and local Government, to refer to a majority African American neighborhood more specifically referred to as ‘the middle hill,’ which mirrors this landform on the other side of Bigelow Blvd. – and this particular prominence i was walking upon is called Polish Hill. I’m ignorant of specifics.
My initial understanding was that – technically – the entire section between downtown and Bloomfield is ‘the Hill District,’ including Polish Hill. It seems my presumption was incorrect, but as I’m still new to Pittsburgh… Saying all that… Polish Hill.
Go ahead, guess… why do you think they call it Polish Hill (Wzgórze)?
Yes, it’s a pickle soup and pierogi zone up here. Na zdrowie!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It is quite steep up here, and the roads are narrow. One became fascinated watching vehicle traffic as it snaked along one of the switch back roads leading down off the hill, in the manner of an inhuman thing.
The housing stock here is disturbingly heterogeneous, as a note.
Must really suck to live up here during snow and winter storm events. This post is being written on January 24th, incidentally, the morning before the ‘Snowpocalypse’ that’s meant to set the country into a deep freeze. Wonder what happened?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is a bus route, it should be mentioned.
Everywhere you look, there’s infrastructure accommodations for the terrain that are built into this neighborhood. Retaining walls, city steps, concrete safety barriers around the sidewalks, fencing. Lots of underground structures as well, I’d imagine.
This place is, in a single word, incredible.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These downward paths make for great exercise, I should mention.
All of your body weight is being carried in the front of the thighs and calves, and the belly. Several hard to access muscle groups receive a sound flexing. The trick is to not allow yourself to speed up as you’re heading downhill, which requires a bit of conscious muscularity.
My head was swiveling. The brain was categorizing. The camera was whirring. If a creature like myself is capable of joy, I was feeling that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Long flights of City Steps were observed, but not explored. That’ll be for subsequent visits.
The entire point of this exercise, beyond these photowalks being good cardio, is to continue building my familiarity with the various avenues and byways of Pittsburgh. I drive around a pretty fair amount. It’s an automobile based city, after all. As is often repeated, however: you can’t really ‘see’ or ‘notice’ anything from a car, or even a bike, because you’re moving too fast. Walking speed or even strolling speed, that’s how you want to experience an urban space, or at least I do.
Saying that, as usual, I was literally the only pedestrian in sight for miles at a pop. This is a marked difference from NYC where, even at Newtown Creek, you’d always see people walking to and fro.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My next cross street turn would occur at the bottom of this hill, which would then lead onto a street carried by a bridge overflying one of the busways, and the RR tracks leading to the Amtrak station, and the Fort Wayne Rail Bridge. Exciting stuff, for me at least.
Back tomorrow.
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You hip, you hop, you don’t stop
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
About an hour and change in for this particular scuttle, and your humble narrator could be observably noticed as loping along the steep streets of Polish Hill, here in Pittsburgh.
Along the way, several sets of ‘City Steps’ manifested themselves, and photography was committed, but the steps were passed by. Future walks in this ‘zone’ will be somewhat granular, and likely involve these pathways, but this time around the goal was to keep moving.
Gosh, what it must look like to normal people… a decrepit and gray haired thing, encased in a swirling amalgamation of black sackcloth… lurching along in some herky jerky impression of human locomotion… with a camera and flash orange ball cap sticking out of the ebon maelstrom clothing it. Children cry, dogs screech, old ladies clutch at their purses. Men are gathered by Priests to form posses, they gather and light torches, arming themselves with pitch forks… all I can do about it is wave my arms about and snarl.
I have to be careful not to end up trapped at some old mill, lest I be contained within, while the surrounding mob of villagers sets it alight.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The old mill thing is a problem, because… Pittsburgh. About 40% of the building stock here is basically an old mill. I’m so screwed.
Another set of steps popped up, but other than mentally noting where they are, one stayed in motion. Drapes and Venetian blinds would energetically close as I approached residential areas.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The landmark for Polish Hill is the 1905 vintage Immaculate Heart of Mary RC church. Visible from large swaths of turf in Pittsburgh, it’s not quite the navigational aid that the Empire State Building back in NYC is, but it’ll do as far something to measure your geographic position against.
The plan for the rest of my day revolved around ‘leaning into it.’
The sections which I was headed for offered a bit of novelty, but within a half hour I’d be pounding pavement which has been described several times over the last few weeks, so it was less of a photowalk and more of ‘just a walk’ for a bit.
That all plays out here next week, so get ready. Whew.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One giggled out loud, due to this randomly encountered topiary.
If my pre-planning for this scuttle worked out correctly, I’d soon be encountering a cross street which would deposit me at the border of Bloomfield and Lawrenceville.
As described many times, I use Google Maps’ Street View feature to figure and plan out the ‘where’s’ and ‘how’s’ of moving around in parts of Pittsburgh that are unfamiliar. I don’t ‘tie my hands’ by religiously sticking to a predetermined route, as you’ve got to factor in ‘serendipity,’ which is what I call it when something unexpected just pops up in front of you begging to be photographed.
Back in 2010, for instance, I accidentally wandered past an Andean Passion Play being performed in Blissville, while on my way to Newtown Creek. In 2016, I spotted the nose section of a submarine being transported down the East River. Serendipity.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another set of City Steps were encountered, which in addition to going up and down also went around the hill. They connect up at the other end with another staircase. One stayed the course. Plenty of time to come back for a closer look.
This is right about when I started seeing the actual horizon again, as one was looking northwards and towards the Allegheny River.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Famously, homes found on this sort of terrain display one or two stories on the street side, where the mail gets delivered, but the back of the structure will reveal three, four, sometimes five levels. Amazing.
Back next week with more from this long and productive scuttle – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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DUBBO?
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the second of its name, 1986 vintage, Bloomfield Bridge which is flying about in today’s post. The area I was moving through at this point of a quite long walk is called ‘Skunk Hollow.’
Imagine my surprise – incidentally – when leaning into my old standard of a ‘Down Under’ joke for obscure areas surrounding bridges, that somebody had beaten me to the punch on “DUBBO” or Down Under the Bloomfield Bridge Onramp.
Going to have to go check out Skunk Hollow in the future – from down below – I think.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At some unknown spot along the path, the alley street I was scuttling on which is called ‘Gold Way,’ accessed via a ‘Melwood Avenue,’ transmogrified back into being ‘Melwood Avenue’ again. It’s all very confusing out here.
This long walk is part of my larger effort to scuttle through several of the areas found on the central ‘Golden Triangle’ of Pittsburgh that has been playing out for a bit. I try to focus my efforts, and some attention has been paid to the areas directly surrounding Skunk Hollow over these last few months.
Bloomfield got mention and photographs in this series, and the only post which has any connection to Skunk Hollow was this one (and I had no real idea what I was looking at, it should be mentioned). I’ve been working my way inland, from the Allegheny River, on both its northern and southern shores in recent months. I’m the curious type, see.
If it weren’t for the orthopedic incident, actually, you would have seen many of these explorations playing out last year.
I have absolutely not been doing any sort of historic research, at all
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There was a protected path for pedestrians, noticed behind the guard rail on one side of the road, which was paved in the same asphalt as this roadway. It was covered in vegetative detritus from the hillsides, the pedestrian lane. This ground cover hid a bit of black ice, but that wasn’t any sort of real obstacle.
An opportunity for a quick sit down was realized and undertaken here, which saw me resting the ole derrière upon that guard rail. After a quick minute I stood up and rekajiggered my garments, and the straps for both camera and bag, then leaned back into it. The ankle continued to play ball and not cause me any angst, grief, or pain.
Discussing the effort with a friend afterwards, I was told that after crossing under the Bloomfield Bridge, Skunk Hollow gives way to and is associated with being a part of Polish Hill. Polish Hill offers a couple of bridges to get down from its heights into a street grid dominated by a primary artery called ‘Penn Avenue,’ which is scribed into the mostly flat flood plain areas that are defined by the Strip, and Downtown.
As mentioned above, systematic.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s part of the Bloomfield Bridge pictured above, and as you can see – it’s ‘DUBBO.’
While researching this walk, another path through Skunk Hollow emerged which I’ll be walking at some later point when the weather warms up a bit. This post is being written during the 3rd week of January, as a note, and a big winter storm is forecast to drop a Snowpocalypse on huge swaths of the country and that’s meant to be followed by some sort of Norse Apocalypse – a ‘Fimbulwinter.’
Given the spate of National and International news, it very much feels like Ragnarök is near. Listen for three roosters crowing simultaneously, that’s how it’s supposed to start.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Something which looks like paintball splatter adorns the pier of the bridge.
One continued on, scuttling along. Ever scuttling…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Residential structures signaled my arrival on Polish Hill proper. As the name would suggest, there’s a lot of Poles who live or lived here. The whole area smells like pierogis.
Just kidding… it’s actually quite lovely up on Polish Hill, with these tiny wood frame homes set along the walls of the Skunk Hollow ravine.
Back tomorrow with more.
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Gold Way, baby
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Peculiar. That’s how I’d describe the sensation of scuttling along ‘Gold Way’ here in Pittsburgh. As described previously, when you encounter a signed and maintained ‘on the map’ street hereabouts whose nomenclature includes the word ‘way,’ it’s functionally an alley.
As an aside, GPS navigation software seems entirely unaware of the nature of these alleys, and will often route you along them without a consideration as to their nature. Not too much of an issue here on Gold Way, which is obviously maintained as an actual street, but in several sections of Pittsburgh the ‘ways’ are where deliveries happen, garbage is stored for pick up, or the roadway itself is semi private and maintained by neighborhood home owners. In the latter cases and because obviously no home owner is willingly going to be bringing in a paving crew, the pavement on these way streets seems to be a lot like driving down some Iraqi road which the Americans had bombed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This path was fascinating. No sidewalks, but there wasn’t an abundance of vehicle traffic so no biggie. The dumbass bike people got the city to drop in speed humps and paint bike lane iconography on the pavement, but there’s no concrete separation between bike riders and automobiles. What’s missing here are freaking sidewalks, actually, but the bicycle people don’t care about that. They’re involved in ‘the war on cars.’
I wasn’t really sure what neighborhood I was moving through for the next mile or so, but conversation with a friend who’s a local suggests that I was moving alongside the steep section of Polish Hill. I later would find out it was called ‘Skunk Hollow.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Along the way, City Steps were observed. At some unknown point along this path, Gold Way transmogrifies into Melwood Avenue. That’s all I can tell you, as this was an exploratory experience.
To be honest, I was really enjoying the sensation of being ‘backstage.’
Spent my time observing and waving the camera about, but remained cognizant that I was essentially looking into someone’s back yard everytime I was gazing over a fence.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve mentioned the ‘germanity’ which you might notice in the design and decorative motifs of the older housing stock here in Pittsburgh.
Back in Queens, specifically Astoria and LIC, the German immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were largely skilled laborers who specialized in cabinetry, and general carpentry. At first these skilled laborers were drawn in to work for Steinway or Sohmer to work on pianos, but an enormous number of these German wood workers persisted in Western Queens. Cabinetry and furniture manufacturing used to be a ‘thing’ in Astoria and its neighboring communities. Astoria is associated in modernity with Greeks and Slavs, but historically speaking it was catholic Germans who built the place. I used to live across the street from the Chian Federation Building on 44th street, for instance, which was once the LIC Turn Verein.
As is usually the case in the Northeastern United States, when one ethnic group reaches critical mass, its population begins to move away and leave the old neighborhood behind. Just like Astoria and North Brooklyn, when the Germans moved out, the Slavs moved in. In the case of Pittsburgh, the ‘new’ people also seem to have largely been Slovaks, Serbs, and especially Poles.
I absolutely have not been doing any sort of historic research at all. None, not a bit. Gave all that up, me. I’ve cultivated becoming ‘incurious.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve often thought that it must just suck having an abandoned building pop up next to your home. Got to imagine that eating a monthly bill for pest control just becomes a new line item on your monthly nut.
My next door neighbor here in Dormont is an asshole. Wasn’t terribly upset for him when his house burned down and left behind a windowless brick box, me. While the house was being rebuilt, a flock of sparrows decided to nest inside. I liked hearing them sing while I was sitting in that wheelchair last year, mind you, but still… luckily… it was only birds.
Unfortunately, they rebuilt the house and my asshole neighbors returned.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One continued on his lonely path.
Along the way, I was psychically carving myself a new butthole, while thinking about my many regrets and multitudinous mistakes. As is often described, my particular form of crazy involves a lack of acknowledgment for all the things that I’ve done successfully over the years. Instead, my inner dialogue is usually focused on something like failing a math test in the 4th grade.
Back tomorrow with more.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Golden path?
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Continuing with a fairly long walk here in the Paris of Appalachia, called Pittsburgh by most of the nation’s children.
After marching down Baum Blvd., once known as “Auto Row,” from the East Liberty neighborhood, one turned rightward onto a side street called Melwood Avenue. Just before the turn, a viewpoint of the ‘Neville Street Ramp’ which serves one of the busways was recorded, and it sits alongside a set of RR tracks that used to belong to the Pennsylvania Rail Road Company.
Presumptively, these tracks might be the path through town which Amtrak uses, then? Time will tell. I’ll let you know. (Amtrak does use these tracks for its Floridian service, as it turns out, so yes).
Certainly not doing any sort of research, me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As I’ve often mentioned over the last 36 months, I still haven’t taken a ‘regular’ bus here in Pittsburgh. Part of that is that we own a car, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself. Another reason is that I’m a 15 minute walk away from a light rail line. I have been on a Pittsburgh bus for a short interval, but it was a construction shuttle that was running when the T light rail’s tracks were receiving maintenance attention.
The bus system is fairly byzantine here. When Pittsburgh began mothballing its old Trolley system, it seems, the bus lines which replaced the trolley used the old Trolley line route numbering system. The 51 Trolley became the 51 bus, in essence. This was done in order to avoid confusion in the 1960’s, mind you, but since there’s virtually zero connectivity between ‘then’ and ‘now’… it’s a bit of a challenge to understand the system.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s where Google’s AI comes in, which I’m planning a ‘busway day’ with. The plan will be to use an express bus to go to the terminal stops on the three busways and then use local buses which I’ll ‘hop on and off’ of so as to absorb as much of the scenery as I can along these discrete corridors. Should be interesting. To me, at least.
Something to do… breaking up the gray expanses… offering myself up to probable derision and hatred from strangers while out in the world…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Belgian Blocks. I’ll even accept pavers. These are NOT cobblestones.
Sorry, point of pedantry there for me.
The right turn was executed, and Baum Blvd. was left behind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Melwood Avenue, pictured above.
This was a short leg of the walk, only about two to three blocks in length before it dead ended (that’s what the ‘No Outlet’ sign indicates.) This was a mixed zoning area, with high density residential sharing the street with automotive, commercial, and light industrial businesses.
I was actively looking for the left turn I’d need to make to continue with the plan. As mentioned at the start of all this – it was a great day weather wise and I really wanted to push myself and see where the ankle is. Ever since the orthopedic incident literally hobbled me, I’ve been absolutely attacking the ideation of limitations on my movements. Lots and lots of walking during the last year has delivered me back into fettle, and I need to continue improving the situation.
As is often stated: If I stop moving, I’ll stop moving.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the intersection I was looking for. A steep one block ascent to a street called ‘Gold Way.’ As previously stated – if a street in Pittsburgh is called a ‘Way,’ it’s an alley. I normally avoid walking through the ‘Way’ streets since it’s essentially someone’s back yard (New Yorkers, think ‘community drive’) and it’s got to be weird seeing a stranger with a camera walking through.
Back tomorrow with the Golden Path, or just a ‘Gold Way.’
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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The Newtown Pentacle 