Perry Hilltop and the Swindell Bridge
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This missive is the start of another multi-day series of posts.
Welcome to Perry Hilltop, a plateau neighborhood found in the larger Perry South section on the North Side of Pittsburgh.
This walk, and the series of posts which fell out of it, began right about here. Efforts have been underway to explore Pittsburgh’s ‘North Side,’ which is the former ‘Allegheny City,’ a separate municipality that Pittsburgh annexed at the start of the 20th century.
These photos were gathered on the 9th of April.
As is my habit with such matters, I’ve been following ‘street corridors’ which overlay the past. Modern roads are chosen, obviously, whose path more or less mirrors the historic ones which were cut through the woods and cliff faces.
In the case of this walk, it’s Perrysville Avenue and the Federal Street Extension areas (which you’ll be see in over several incoming posts) which were originally set up as a plank road, between the Allegheny/Ohio River shoreline and less settled areas found up in the hills, with the path ultimately leading to some colonial era Military Fort up north.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The start of this series of postings, however, starts with a tiny bridge which leads to a larger one.
I’m told it’s called the ‘Maple Avenue Bridge,’ a 1929 ‘riveted cantilever truss,’ and I didn’t need to look anything up to tell you that it’s in a deleterious state of repair. There’s even an electrical supply cable sagging down over the thing, hovering right about shoulder height, as measured from when I scuttling along on the roadway’s sidewalk below.
This trip started with one of my one way cab rides from Dormont, which dropped me off right across the street from Maple Avenue Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First thing that happened after getting out of the car, some kid walked up to me and asked me if I had any ‘smoke.’
I said ‘nope,’ don’t have anything on me to smoke, and asked him if he was hoping for a cigarette or something. He clarified ‘smoke’ as ‘weed’ and then made clear that he was seeking to sell me some. This misunderstanding and interaction amused both myself and that local entrepreneur. The kid wandered off, whereas I got busy with the camera.
Capitalism, huh?
The 1930 vintage E.H. Swindell (aka East Street) Bridge awaited.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Swindell Bridge is pretty huge, a little over a thousand feet long and five hundred and forty five feet high. It connects two hilltops, spanning the ‘East Street Valley,’ which the I-579 and I-279 high speed roads run through down below.
The Swindell Bridge is – observably – in a horrible state of repair, and a $27 million rehabilitation project is meant to kick in either at the end of this year (2026), or early 2027, which will seek to address its many issues.
As linked to above, they’re going to try and spruce up the Maple Street Bridge as well, and there’s an areal ‘safe streets’ project which is theoretically going to be implemented concurrently with these other projects.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one looks down from the Swindell Bridge, at the interstate corridor below. As always, I need to state that I love the parabolas, curves, and massing shapes which are created by highway engineers.
Additionally, I hate the historic storyline that resulted in these visually interesting shapes being created. That tale included the demolition of more than 800 homes, and alienating the thousands of families who used to live down there, in the East Street Valley. Bah!
This view look north, although it kind of bends a little bit to the east too.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking south/west from the Swindell Bridge, Downtown Pittsburgh just kind of appears, peeking out from behind a hill. It should be mentioned that for the last nearly four years, I’ve been saying that ‘I’ve got to walk over that bridge sometime,’ while referring to the Swindell Bridge, while driving on the ‘Parkway North.’
That’s what the Yinzers call this road.
Check! Another one off my list.
Back tomorrow with more.
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All sideyed, at Conway
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described yesterday, during a lament about a Shell Plant found further north/west along the Ohio River, I had some rather mundane stuff to take care of ‘up here’ – about 25 miles north of Pittsburgh ‘proper.’
I had planned a couple of hours of ‘me time’ into the obligation, and spent about an hour of it lurking on a street called ‘Fourth Avenue’ in Freedom, PA., while staring at the Norfolk Southern Conway Yard.
Positively, there are better angles to see this gargantua of a rail yard from, but killing time is killing time, even if it only offers ‘profile’ shots.
from Wikipedia:
- Freedom is a borough in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, United States, along the Ohio River. The population was 1,496 at the 2020 census.[3] It is 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Pittsburgh and is part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Originally founded as a steamboat-building town, it later became known for producing oil and caskets in the 20th century.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One was sitting in the car, fairly obviously, and for some reason I love this shot from within the Mobile Oppression Platform’s cabin, accidentally captured while pulling my camera out of its bag.
I’m going to have to do a bunch of research on Conway Yard, and figure out locations for better points of view. Also, have to make sure that the camera is shut off while within its bag.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One set of switcher locomotives caught my eye, as they shuttled lines of train cars from one track to the next. They had an atypical paint job for Norfolk Southern, which usually means that it’s got some ‘one off’ pollution control or fuel saving gizmo at its heart. Something they’ll roll out for politicians or investors to see at press events.
Notably, Conway Yard was once a prized property of the Pennsylvania Rail Road company.
from Wikipedia:
- Conway Yard (also known as Conway Terminal) is a major rail yard located in the boroughs of Conway, Pennsylvania, and Freedom, Pennsylvania, 22 miles (35 km) northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along the Ohio River. It was the largest freight yard in the world from 1956 until 1980. It is currently owned by Norfolk Southern (NS) and is one of the largest yards in the United States and on the east coast.
- Conway is the only remaining large operation of the four early-20th century PRR yards. NS processes 90,000 to 100,000 cars per month (as of 2003). The site occupies 568 acres, with 181 miles (291 km) of track and a storage capacity of over 11,000 cars and is a hump yard.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I must’ve been hanging around Freedom for about an hour, waiting for something interesting to happen. As I often say, my kind of photography is a whole lot like fishing. You can’t make a fish bite a hook.
So – That’s what Freedom, PA.’s Fourth Avenue looks like, incidentally, directly paralleling the rail yard. These shots were gathered right about here. Nice residential homes, most likely built under the ‘mill town’ model.
All the reading I’ve been doing about coal has kind of bled into me recognizing the sorts of homes which would be offered to miners. I’ve come to be able to recognize these ‘miner houses,’ but there seems to be several prevalent styles of residence which can fit into either description. The ones above are a few notches higher on my ‘size, livability, and quality’ meter than miner houses are.
The latter form are essentially brick boxes with as few a number of windows as the bosses could get away with installing. You’ll see some of those in the near future.
Coal is a fascinating subject, but this post is about Conway, the existence of which is – tangentially speaking – consequential of coal, but there we are. It’s all connected.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A Towboat was navigating down the Ohio River, which was visually interesting, but these shots really disappoint me and I actually considered not running them. It’s that patchwork of horizontal lines. There’s nothing technically wrong with them, it’s just… I dunno.
I’ll definitely be back to this ‘zone’ sometime this summer, but I have a bunch of googling to do first. ‘Rail fanning locations near Conway Yard’ is likely going to be one of my first queries to the Googleplex before I do. I also imagine YouTube is going to come in handy here.
I had to get on with the utter mundanity which had brought me up north, so a last shot or two of those long horizontal lines, with trains in them, were cracked out before firing up the MOP’s engine and hurtling off into space again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Neat, huh? Good thing I had that green swoosh to frame around. Bah!
Mitch’s rules of composition include: ‘triangles!,’ ‘Z’ shapes, and that whereas one thing in a shot is best, three is cool too, but there should no more than five. Odd is better than even. Establishing shot, medium, up, down, all around, close up. Pay no attention to the man behind the camera, folks, he’s busy.
Back tomorrow with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Monaca, PA.
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Occasion found your humble narrator, within the confines of his car, alongside the Ohio River, in a municipality called ‘Monaca.’
Atop an island on the Ohio River is found a plastic factory operated by the Shell Corporation. Officially, it’s a ‘cracker plant,’ meaning that raw hydrocarbons enter the place and then get turned into something else via the art of engineers, and chemists.
This plant is a big deal – both economically and environmentally.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m told that the hydrocarbon feedstock which it manipulates emanates from a nearby horizontal drilling/fracked gas operation. The plastics manufactured here are the sort you’d need if you were planning on making plastic soda bottles.
Basically, that’s a giant garbage machine pictured above, with a century long source of raw material and fuel. Gas comes in one side, and landfill destined ‘forever’ plastic future garbage pours out of the other.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Saying that… jobs, jobs, jobs… blame Joe Biden… blah, blah, blah.
The economic impact of the plant on this locality has been profound, which is something you don’t necessarily need to ‘look up’ to witness.
Fewer abandoned homes locally, businesses on the nearby ‘main drag’ are open and not confined to housing ‘vape shops’ or other low hanging retail fruit. The roads are serviceably paved. There was a Police presence.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
People need plastic bottles, to temporarily possess liquids, don’t they? So what if it’ll take centuries in a landfill for them all to break down into different toxins – if at all. Sigh…
Here’s the official/non environmentalist slanted take/POV on Shell’s garbage factory in Pennsylvania:
Via Google’s AI:
The Shell Polymers Monaca plant is a $14 billion petrochemical complex in Beaver County, PA, completed in late 2022. It transforms ethane from shale gas into polyethylene pellets for plastics, drawing controversy over environmental violations, pollution, and a $1.65 billion state tax break. The plant is exploring a potential sale amid financial and environmental concerns.
Key Details About the Plant:
- Location: Potter Township, Beaver County, along the Ohio River near Monaca, PA.
- Operation: Uses an ethane cracker to produce polyethylene pellets (HDPE and LLDPE) for food packaging, industrial products, and consumer goods.
- Construction: Spans 386 acres, with peak construction employing nearly 9,500 workers.
- Environmental Concerns: The plant has experienced multiple air quality violations, high emissions from flaring, and noise/light pollution, leading to concerns from residents and environmental groups.
- Economic Impact: While promising jobs and economic growth, the project is also notable for the massive, 25-year, $1.65 billion state tax credit incentive, which critics have debated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One had navigated himself in this direction (about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh) for a couple of other, and quite mundane, purposes but since I was ‘in the neighborhood’ – why not stop off to get a few shots?
My usual methodology of scanning the path ahead, through the Google Maps street view technology, had been employed. That activity brought me over to a riverfront park, and a few street ends, here in the community of Monaca.
It was lovely, the park, and it provided sweet points of view on an overcast day. One needed to move on, however, so…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since I was in ‘the neighborhood’ anyway, a visit was also paid to the gargantuan Conway Rail Yard operated by the Norfolk Southern Railroading outfit, over in a nearby PA. community called Freedom.
More on all that tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
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Grand Viewing
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A snapshot of a certain side of ‘Life in Pittsburgh,’ that’s how I’d categorize this post.
Our Lady and myself go out to dinner seldomly here, as we generally cook ‘three meals a day’ at home. We have a big suburban kitchen now, and it’s fairly easy to build up an involved meal – roasted meats, vegetables, etc. I like to really ‘put on a show’ when cooking dinner, and if I do it right we’ve got days of leftovers perfect for lunch.
Saying that, gotta get out every now and then, so we tried out a saloon with a pretty great food program just across the street from one of the inclines up on Mount Washington. If you find yourself at Steeltown Saloon, I can recommend the jerk chicken tacos.
After we finished up, a walk was on order, along Grandview Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was popping. This was the first truly warm night, after the brutally cold winter season, which Pittsburgh had just experienced. To wit: I was wearing the summer version of my ‘Mitch Suit,’ with shorts and a Guayaberra style short sleeve shirt. Our Lady was encased in a shimmer of golden mist, with luminous flowers floating around her which were not at all affected by gravity. She was like a character from a Studio Ghibli cartoon. Two tiny songbirds were carrying her purse and singing.
We had decided to walk for a bit, and then we’d call for a ride home.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one looks up the Ohio River, towards the section of Pittsburgh called ‘The North Side,’ which I’ve been coincidentally spending a bit of time in recent weeks.
As mentioned in prior posts, I’m currently way ahead of schedule here, and thereby a bit of a time warp is still occurring. These photos were gathered on the 4th of April, the words are being typed out on the 21st of the same month, and if I’ve gotten the scheduling correct you’re seeing this on the 22nd of May. Whew. Confusing.
How’d your month go? I’m curious as to all the mad things which have likely happened, but as you’re reading this I can imagine that I’ve already ‘effed around and found out’ several times, so I know too. Time warps…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s been a minute since I did any low light photos, although I wasn’t ‘shooting’ so much as ‘snapshotting.’
Don’t ask me to define the difference, but there is one.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was pretty crowded. Lots of college age kids were out, wearing tight clothes and showing off for each other. The car enthusiasts were starting to gather and rev their engines.
Our Lady activated one of her apps and summoned a ride.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While we waited, I couldn’t help but point the camera in the direction of the PNC Park baseball stadium where the Pittsburgh Pirates live. A game was starting up and you could hear the cheering, miles away.
Back next week with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Chartiers Creek, Bridgeville
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Chartiers Creek, in Pennsylvania’s Bridgeville.
First – allow me to say that I’m new to this urban waterway’s story, so if I get something wrong as far as your lived experience, please leave a correction and ‘get me smart about it’ in the comments section.
Second- This waterway has historically received an absolute ocean of mine runoff over the last century, emanating from several historical coal mining sites extant along its course. I’m told that it was quite common to see these waters running a bright orange, not too long ago.
It seems that iron, and pyrites, are commonly found in the layer cakes of Appalachian soil – alongside coal, shale, dolomite, sandstone, and limestone.
When a coal mining shaft exposes formerly sealed away minerals to the atmosphere, oxidation occurs, causing ‘rusty’ water to collect below. Natural processes, like springs, carry the runoff water up to the surface.
The flowing waters of mine runoff display an acidic PH level, due to all of those dissolved metals, and is fairly toxic to fish and other littoral forms of life.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The design and operation of a mine involves two critical factors – ventilation, and the management of ground water. When the mine closes, nobody is pumping out the water anymore so a vast reservoir of the liquid forms within these manmade voids. Water always wins, so it gets out of the mine and up to the surface.
The State’s environmental people have apparently been working with both the Feds and Bridgeville, for several years, on a huge remediation process here. Spending the public’s tax money on cleaning up a corporate caused, and quite historic, problem. Sounds familiar, no?
Down below, the largest mining outfit here in Bridgeville was the ‘Pittsburgh Coal Company’s Bridgeville mine’, which was in operation for around 35 years and carved some ten million tons of bituminous coal up and out of the depths. That was just one of the mines here, the largest one albeit, but there were a LOT of smaller claims being worked hereabouts.
Remember, here in Bridgeville, you could observe coal seams at ground level in Colonial and early Republic times, on surface outcrops of rock. Lots of smaller deposits were literally just worked into at ground level, with miners digging straight horizontally into the hill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that the coal seam, just like all the other rock in the Appalachian Mountains, is folded up in jagged depositional layers, a condition which is due to the range’s long tectonic history. These mountains and hills are older than the dinosaurs, and were once attached to what’s now Scotland.
PA’s Department of Environmental Protection has a cool scholarly explanation of the coal seam’s geology available.
As this land shifted about, over hundreds of millions of years, some sections of the coal got folded up in different ways, and at odd angles, in the layer cake – a ‘syncline,’ for instance, or an ‘anticline.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I did mention that I’ve been reading up on all this stuff, didn’t I?
A lot of what I’ve been witnessing here in Pittsburgh over the last few years offers a similar storyline. An industry appears with lots of plucky small players, then a ‘king’ emerges who dominates them and monopolizes the sector. That Dominar then abandons the industry after extracting as much money as possible and unloading it on someone else, then the ‘Captain of Industry’ would move their family and household to Fifth Avenue in NYC – leaving behind environmental, economic, and societal devastation here in Pittsburgh while they slept on a bed stuffed with dollars in Manhattan.
‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’ indeed.
I’ve described my viewpoint of Pittsburgh’s History, out loud, as ‘they practiced the darkest form of Capitalism out here.’
A hundred years later and the people who profited from the mines are long gone, whereas the modern day taxpayer has to foot the bill for cleaning up the mess that they left behind. Captains of Industry Robber Barons indeed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Chartiers Creek, pictured in today’s post, has been receiving an awful lot of investment and attention from that modern day municipal kitty in recent years, thereby.
Just south of Bridegville, in the town of South Fayette – there’s the Gladden AMD Treatment Plant, which treats mine water with hydrogen peroxide and removes nearly 1,000 pounds of iron from the flow daily. A passive treatment system, dubbed the Wingfield Pines Conservation Area, uses settling ponds and an aeration fountain to filter some 43 tons of iron from the water annually. There’s all sorts of of smaller projects going on to ensure shoreline stability and enhance the ‘littoral’ zone.
This – of course – is how I spend my free time on a Saturday morning while my wife is taking a class, in a nearby shop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m still learning about all of this coal ‘stuff.’
It’s led to interesting conversation with a friend who’s a tunnel engineer about how ‘they’ navigated cardinal directions and stayed ‘plum’ while digging underground, prior to modern times and ‘back in the day.’ It seems that piano wire was critical to their efforts, as once it’s under tension it doesn’t sag, and spirit levels could be hung along its length to guarantee you were ‘plum.’
I’ve also learned that the ‘canary in a coal mine’ thing wasn’t due to ‘mephitic gases’ emerging from the deep, as the exposed coal seams robbed the atmosphere of oxygen chemically, via oxidation. The canary’s respiratory system includes a heartbeat that’s much faster than ours, making it a lot more sensitive to a lower oxygen environment. If the caged bird fell off its post, you had precisely eight minutes to get out, and find some fresh air.
Wonder if that’s the origin of the phrase ‘eight minutes to midnight?’
Back tomorrow with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 