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!
“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.
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.
Bopping in Bridgeville
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Belief exists – within one such as myself – that passing mention of a municipality in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh neighboring the section which Newtown Pentacle HQ is found within – a place and a state of mind called ‘Bridgeville,’ sometime in the past.
At any rate, welcome to Bridgeville, for today’s post.
Here’s a link to Bridgeville’s Wikipedia entry, and one to their official governmental site. There’s a historical society there too, and I’m on my second watch of this great presentation to that historical society, by a fellow named Warren Merritt. Good stuff, that.
Modern day Bridgeville is largely residential, but there’s a significant amount of commercial/strip mall style development there. Texas Roadhouse, a Home Depot, the drivers license center for the State’s PENNDOT agency, basically all the sorts of ‘mall’ style retail businesses you’d expect in a suburb can be found along its ‘Washington Pike.’
That’s what’s here in Bridgeville these days, but there’s a significant historical incarnation of this area, one which made Bridgeville quite a different place in the past.
Coal, the past here was all about coal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle had signed up for a class which was held here in Bridgeville, allowing me a couple of free hours to explore some of the town’s less well traveled sections on a recent weekend morning. I had the car with me, and a long list of saved locations embedded in a Google Map.
Most of the traffic and local populace were involving themselves with the long line of shopping malls defining the modern streetscape mentioned above. I was in an industrial district.
Saying all that, there are many leave behinds from the industrial past to be observed here, with many of these ‘old’ mill buildings – long since modified from their original purpose for the exigencies of modernity – displaying a characteristic masonry design which one has learned to associate with the long shuttered mining operations of the Frick and Mellon Family’s Pittsburgh Coal Company. This corporation became one of the two dominar suppliers for processing coal feedstock into coke, setting prices for both acquisition and end sale. A monopoly, if you would.
That corporation survives into modernity, now calling itself ‘Consol Energy.’ So too do the Mellons and Fricks persist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the end of the 19th, and especially so during the first three decades of the 20th century, Bridgeville was a coal mining superpower. The ‘Pittsburgh Seam’ is quite close to the surface here, and in some parts of Bridgeville, there were even outcroppings of coal which could be directly harvested at surface level. The coal in this area is Bituminous, as opposed to the Anthracite stuff that is more commonly harvested from eastern PA.
The industrial area I was driving and shooting within is right about here in Google Maps, should you want to have a click around and do some remote exploring. There’s a good amount of activity in these old mills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rail tracks hereabouts likely belong to the Wheeling & Lake Erie RR outfit, but I didn’t see any rail action on this particular morning.
There was definitely a waste transfer operation somewhere nearby, as I saw had seen truck drive into a site through a scale, and I could smell trash. Can’t tell you much about what goes on back here.
Yet.
One had a list of locations to take a scouting look at; a couple of cemeteries, a few points of elevation, and old mill or two, an urban waterway, to see if anything interesting might be visible. I was kind of hopeful about one spot being productive, one that was from up on a high ridge. It wasn’t.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A still active metal mill and factory is present, dubbed as being the Universal Stainless and Alloy Products, Inc. Here’s their corporate site, as well, just for the curious, or even for the stainless steel hungry amongst you – lords and ladies.
This coal business continues to blow my mind, as a note.
A significant amount of the land here in Pittsburgh is undermined, with historical mining using ‘pillar and room’ setups, which are only about thirty to sixty feet down below the ground, here in Bridgeville at least. There are also random and forgotten voids, cut into the trackless depths of the ground.
Before the word went out from the steel mills that they’d only buy coal from one of two suppliers in Pittsburgh – both of which happened to be owned by Henry Clay Frick and or the Mellons, who coincidentally owned the steel mills and coke ovens buying the coal – most of the mining was entrepreneurial in aspect. The order for consolidation by the ‘big dogs’ forced a lot of ‘small potato’ miners to sell their claims off to the nascent monopoly and then go to work for it.
In modern times, the corporate types refer to this sort of monopolistic practice as ‘vertical integration.’ Think about Apple computer, there.
Records were left behind by Pittsburgh Coal Company, about where and how deep they had dug, but the smaller operations which predated the consolidation – not so much. Periodically, surprise appearances of undocumented mine ‘portals’ appear during construction projects, here in the Pittsburgh region.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It appears that the early miners ‘followed the seam,’ in from the hillsides.
As the coal embedded in the Appalachian layer cake here was being dug out, mines also began commercially extracting shale and limestone as well, which are commercial byproducts of digging into that layer cake.
Mole hills. It’s like mole hills down there.
Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
Back tomorrow with more.
“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.
West Virginia’s Weirton
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scouting, scouting, scouting.
This shot was actually from the Steubenville, Ohio side of the Ohio River, with West Virginia’s Weirton shoreline visible behind that Towboat.
While shooting these on the Ohio side, a car pulled up and two Juggalo’s got out with a bevy of fishing equipment. They were fully committed to the ICP, as they had facial tattoos of clown makeup and told me they were planning to ‘catch catfish for suppah’ from the Ohio River.
Of course I had to chat with the Juggalo’s. Who am I?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over in Weirton, on the West Virginia side, the ‘big show’ is the massive Weirton Steel Corporation mill – owned by the Cleveland Cliffs outfit – and it was fully shuttered back in 2024 after years and years of industrial activity. This mill used to be the single largest employer in the entire state of West Virginia. I’ve seen numbers stretching as high as 7,500 – as far as numbers of lost steel worker jobs.
Seriously, this is one of the largest industrial operations I’ve ever seen. Bigger than a battleship, and in fact – if you wanted to build a battleship you’d pretty much have to start doing it right here.
Most definitely going to be coming back this way in the future.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A rail spur travels through the central footprint of this mill, and my advance scouting via the Google Maps service suggested that a small rail bridge was nearby. I parked the car in a municipal lot associated with the local government and walked over to that bridge.
I felt it coming before I heard it coming, and I heard it coming before I saw it coming… Hey Now!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The air gets compressed when a train is nearing, and the thrumming of its diesel engine is palpable. As is my habit, I got my exposure triangle in order for this shot.
Come on already… sheesh… I’m so impatient.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Norfolk Southern #5342 appeared, towing a short line of mostly tank cars.
Again, a member of the railroader crew was observed riding on the nose of the engine and looking intently down at the trackage as they went. I’ve been seeing a LOT of this sort of activity lately, specifically by Norfolk Southern employees.
Any ideas, railfans? What do you think they’re doing?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The train continued on, heading away on that spur which leads through the closed Weirton mill. I stopped off at a couple of other spots on my way back to the highway to Pittsburgh, but didn’t ‘get’ anything worth sharing.
About 15 minutes later, I was heading for the road back to Pittsburgh, and saw this train again, in the distance.
I’ll definitely be coming back here for a second taste sometime.
Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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 