Archive for March 2023
McArdle Roadway Viaduct
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While I was cracking out the shots of St. John’s featured in yesterday’s post, it was noticed that I was particularly close to sort of a little bridge which I’d driven over countless times. Every single one of those times, I’ve made a mental note to look it up, and to figure out a way to access its pedestrian and bike partition. I’ve also made a mental note to look up who this P.J. McArdle guy was, and it turns out he was actor Zachary Quinto’s Great Grandfather, so there’s a Spock/Star Trek angle. Win.
Turns out the bridge is called the McArdle Roadway Viaduct, and it’s part of the P.J. McArdle Roadway – which ramps traffic up off of the flat lands south side of Pittsburgh and towards the Liberty Tunnel which is punched through the base of Mount Washington.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When you’ve got a de facto cliff adjoining the confluence of three rivers sitting in the center of your City, engineering challenges abound. There’s the automobile and other vehicle lanes, and there’s also a series of heavy freight rail tracks, all terraced and woven in on the side of the cliff. This shot is from about a 1/4 mile or so west of the bridge structure, as a note.
Historicbridges.org has a nice page about the McArdle viaduct, accessible at this url.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get to the top of the viaduct and walk down the frankly terrifying sidewalk which leads to the walkway on the bridge. Problem is that the top of the walkway is where the entrance to the Liberty Tunnel is, and that area ain’t exactly what I’d refer to as “pedestrian friendly.” There’s some pretty choice and “less common” views of the city center available from there, so…
Back next week with Choo-Choo’s.
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St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As I’ve been roaming about here in Pittsburgh, a certain church building has been continually catching my eye. On South 7th street at East Carson Street in what I presume to be the South Side Flats neighborhood is where you’ll find it. St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church’s Parish was organized in 1891, the church building itself was erected in 1895, and then enlarged in 1917. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Ukrainian Catholicism is a complicated story, so I’m just going to refer you to the Wikipedia page about it. There’s Kings and Warlords, Mongols and Russians, Schisms and Synods. All are involved in a multiple millennia long storyline that goes all the back to the beginnings of the Christian era in Europe. Suffice to say that this organization is what the Vatican regards as a “Particular Church” which is part of its organizational hegemony and its adherents are considered as full fledged Catholics despite the Church not using the Latin Rite. The Ukrainian Catholics organization also includes a Major Archbishop who is part of the pecking order back in Rome.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Those two paragraphs up there are not everything I’ve been able to find out about this branch of the Catholic family, but truth be told I don’t want to deep dive into that sort of thing and it’ll probably piss off some of you if I do. On a side note, A few weeks ago, I showed you a photo of and mentioned a Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section. Saying all that, it’s a pretty interesting thing to read up on, the history of Europe’s churches. If you use the term “Europe” in a larger sense than its geographic boundary, you’ll find other people’s interpretations of the material amongst the neighbors. Notably – the Copts of the Levant and North Africa are pretty interesting.
What drew me here was curiosity, which was piqued while I was moving around other sections of Pittsburgh and my eye kept on drifting toward this church. Beautiful building.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Ukrainians use the so called “Greek” or “Patriarchal Cross,” and this spectacular Mosaic was arranged over the lintel and under the cruciform of the main entryway. Unfortunately, I didn’t go inside, but as I always say – I’m like a Vampire, I need to be invited into a building in order to do my work. Hopefully, I’ll manage to get to know somebody from St. John’s in the future. It’s got to be amazing in there.
I really dig religious art of this kind. I’d love to know all of the references that the various parts of it point to. Flag, blue shirt, water, palm tree – every thing there has to have some meaning.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A sportsball field of some kind, quite modern in design with bleachers and everything, adjoins the Church. I speculated for a moment about whether or not there might have been a parochial school in its footprint once which was connected to the church, but I haven’t been able to find anything to back up my theory. All up and down the Monongahela River, which is a few blocks away, there were Steel Mills and Rail Yards. A lot is missing from the scene witnessed here in 1917 when the expanded version of the building opened.
As mentioned, this place has been catching my eye for a while.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Here’s a long shot of the place, nestled into the foothills of Mount Washington. The South Side Flats neighborhood that St. John’s is at the western end of has a really interesting catalogue of private homes and commercial buildings which could be described as “old timey.” There’s a thriving night life industry in this area with lots of bars and clubs which, as I’ve read, draws in the college kids.
Hopefully, I’ll find a way to get me and the camera invited inside the building sometime, would love to get some photos of the interior.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I covered a decent patch of ground on this particular day. One drove up and down the streets hereabouts, which were luckily pretty traffic free, scouting out interesting things to return to on foot in the future.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Dormont noticings
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Mobile Oppression Platform, as I’ve named the Toyota, was purchased and registered in New York State before we left. One last payout in tax to Albany, for me. State law here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania demands that resident vehicles be registered under their bureaucracies, and transferring the legal status of the vehicle – even between neighboring states – has proven to be surprisingly complicated due to having to handle the bureaucratic demands of two States and a large automobile manufacturer’s financing department. The long procedure was finally completed, and as the car is now wearing a Pennsylvania license plate, one had to bring the thing to a dealership for an inspection to scry its emissions and mechanical soundness. It’s a brand new car, so it obviously passed, but I still had to kill an hour or two. Luckily, just such a dealership is proverbially “around the corner.”
I did what I do when I’ve got time to kill, and walked around the periphery of the town I’m living in, called Dormont. There’s no such thing as a typical house here, according to my admittedly limited observations, but those homes pictured above are pretty typical and are likely in the 190-300k range. Unfortunately, they’re located along an arterial roadway and up the block from one of the worst McDonalds I’ve ever set foot in. I do like a McCoffee though, which is surprisingly decent as far as hot bean juice goes. Saying that – how do you screw up McDonalds? I used to work at a Burger King in high school, and I can tell you that it’s assembly line back in the kitchen. The only time you really have to pay attention is when your building the actual sandwich, everything else is timed and fairly automated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I drive past these buildings just about every day on the tertiary arterial road which connects the two secondary arterial roads that define the larger neighborhood. The blonde brick one has the word “Hafer” in block type across its lintel, and an intriguing design element which I think I’ve seen before. I’ve found an old ad from 1971, hawking Carrier Air Conditioners, that lists “Hafer’s” in Dormont at this address as a store where you can buy one of their units. I’ve also found an announcement from 1919 that a C.A. Hafer had been awarded a valuable plumbing contract on a then new housing development. Hafer seems to be a fairly common name in Pennsylvania, incidentally, so there’s a lot of false positives. Curious.
At least I now have a leading question to ask when I pay a visit to the Dormont Historical Society. I recognize this sort of design as a mercantile building, and that three circled icon… it’s a tip of my tongue thing, one which I know I’ve seen before. Masons, Shriners, Odd Fellows? Something.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a chain of casual dining restaurants, of the sort which were called “diners” once, in the Pittsburgh area called “Eat’N Park.” It’s one of those not terribly healthy for you kind of menus – pancakes with bacon and eggs, or burgers and fries, or corn dogs, milkshakes and pies – but sometimes that’s what you want on a weekend morning. This outfit is pretty consistent from location to location with their branding, service, and food quality even though they’re found all over the geography in these parts. I’m told it’s a family owned company that’s getting ready for a growth spurt of new locations, and they’re observationally pretty popular.
Luckily for me, these dudes were fixing an illuminated Eat’N Park sign here in Dormont, just as I got stuck at a red light.
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.
Oliver Miller Homestead
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I swear that I had no idea about this, when I parked the car. An errand had found me in the neighborhood of South Park, in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, nearby the neighborhood of Bethel Park. The spot I had chosen to park nearby is a water and fountain feature called “The Cascades,” which as it turns out hasn’t opened for the warm seasons yet. After meeting a family of Deer, I took a short walk and found myself at the Oliver Miller Homestead public museum, where American Citizens first took up arms against George Washington and the newly created United States in 1794.
This is, I’m told, where the first shots fired of the Whiskey Rebellion were let loose. For those of you who didn’t pay attention in high school history class, or fell asleep during the endlessly boring lessons about the Articles of Confederation in 10th Grade, allow me to summarize our country’s very first tax revolt in a somewhat modern vernacular.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in the day, the fledgling United States was drowning in debts which the Rebellion had incurred in pursuit of chasing the British Crown away. President Washington signed into law a tax on distillates like Rum and Whiskey. Agriculture enthusiasts had long been in the habit of distilling excess or surplus grains like rye, barley, wheat, and even corn into liquors. This is an old European trick, preserving summertime calories in a manner which could also coax the party spirit out of people. Also, in the days prior to the Germ Theory of Disease, your best bet to sterilize the water you were about to drink was to add a bit of the good stuff to it. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing, of course, but it was. Clean drinking water is one of the technologies seldom pointed to as creating the modern era, but there you are. This practice of adding a shot’s worth of an alcohol drink into your water is why rum or whiskey were a part of soldier’s rations right up to the 20th century.
To pay down the National Debt of $54 million, (current worth of that number would be $1,476,850,909.09 today) Washington and the list of famous names he worked with in Congress enacted the Whiskey Tax. To say that this went down like a lead balloon with the Frontier types (Lewis and Clark left for their journey to the west from Pittsburgh, literally the last outpost of European Civilization in those days, until you got to the Spanish holdings) in Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley is a bit of an understatement. Many of these “Frontiersmen” had actually served under Washington during the rebellion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a great account of the conflict which led to the Whiskey Rebellion becoming a shooting war in this post at Mt. Lebanon Magazine. Suffice to say that a tax collector came here to the Miller Homestead on July 15 in 1794. That drew a crowd, which soon became an incensed mob, and the Tax collector and Sheriff had to run for their lives. By the time that the Tax collector – one John Neville – was able to summon army troops to help him enforce the law, that angry mob had transformed into a Rebel Militia. Things went pretty much as you’d expect at that point, with trained soldiers on each side shooting at each other and farm buildings burning down.
Things soon progressed to the point that George Washington, President of the United States, assembled an army of 12,000 soldiers and was personally leading them – as a General – towards Pennsylvania. You can read all about it here, but you should have paid more attention to it back in 10th grade.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Thomas Jefferson repealed the Whiskey tax in 1802 when he became President, and he blamed all the bloodshed and trouble in the region on his rival Alexander Hamilton, who had pushed Washington and Congress into accepting fiscal reality regarding the debts.
The Miller property was colonized in 1772, and the original deal here was a log cabin on a farm with several “out” buildings – a barn for the animals, a house for the slaves, etc. The log cabin was replaced in 1830, and the modern homestead building is called a “Stone Manse.” This is a protected historic place, and when the surrounding South Park was opened in 1931, the Miller Homestead was turned into a public museum.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I observed several other small structures, including the cabin above and a “spring house” which hosted a large basin and fresh water bubbling up into it from below. The site was closed when I visited, but a humble narrator crossed the boundary while trying to save a butterfly from a predatory bird. That’s my story, sticking with it.
This was all just lucky serendipity for me, incidentally. As mentioned, I had no idea this was here, and somehow I made a beeline for it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
South Park is pretty amazing, actually. There’s an animal preserve section nearby this spot which has Bisons living on it. Pictured above is a barn, which struck my fancy enough to take a picture.
Back 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.
Nothing but blue skies
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Homestead Grays Bridge pictured above, spanning the Monongahela River. I don’t have much to say about it other it was lit up all pretty like on a recent Sunday afternoon when I was passing through. The last week has been pretty much overcast or super rainy here in Pittsburgh. Annoyingly so.
At any rate, one managed to get out and about a few times last week when it wasn’t raining or dire.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An errand of a somewhat pedantic nature, actually a series of such errands, found me nearby something I’ve been wanting to take a gander at – Pittsburgh’s South Park. It’s another one of the mega massive public amenities hereabouts. I was in the neighborhood and had an hour or so to spare before needing to head back to HQ, so I picked out a random destination within the 2,000 square acre urban park to aim myself at.
When I pulled the Mobile Oppression Platform into a parking lot, a big pile of deer were roaming about. They stuck around for a few minutes and posed for pictures before scampering off into a wooded section.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s an actual traffic roundabout in the park, something very common in Europe but not so much in the USA. As it turns out, the random spot I chose to pull the car over has an enormous “historicity” to it, but I’ve always been lucky when it comes to stumbling across places with an interesting past.
More on all that tomorrow, at 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 