The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Continuing the series of posts from my visit to the Rivers of Steel ‘Photo Safari’ at the Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale section.

Actually, I don’t know if Swissvale is it’s own thing – town, village, borough – or what. This ‘commonwealth’ business out here is fairly inscrutable, as offered here in the Keystone State of Pennsylvania. You’ve got towns, cities, boroughs… HQ, for instance, is in the Borough of Dormont, but if you were to send me a letter you’d address it as ‘Pittsburgh.’ Additionally, my place is found in Dormont, but the guy across the street from me lives in Pittsburgh (City of…). It’s weird, man.

It gets even more complicated when it comes to Cops and Fire coverage in Pittsburgh. There’s Sheriffs, and Constables, and ‘regular’ Police. The local departments seem to be trained for the day to day stuff, whereas if there’s a homicide or something really complicated they’ll first call out the ‘DT’s’ from Pittsburgh PD, and then above the PPD Detectives there’s the Pennsylvania State Troopers who handle all sorts of high level stuff but who also do the regular cop duties when needed. I haven’t seen any of these Troopers yet (you wouldn’t miss them as they wear Smokey the Bear hats with the chin strap) and supposedly there’s a whole other Federal level of law enforcement here as well, including FBI and the rest of the alphabet agencies.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

In the two posts prior to this one, it was mentioned that that I had somewhat free reign to wander about large sections of the Carrie Furnace site, with my camera mounted up on a tripod. I moved in an anticlockwise or widdershins direction. This had a lot to do with the position of the sun, and was a little bit influenced by an intellectual game I play with myself.

It was a fairly warm day, and that rarest of things in Pittsburgh – a clear sky – allowed the radiation of the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself to cascade to the ground unimpeded. Sol Invictus, amirite?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The remains of a rail connection and a crane are found on the Carrie site. Location wise, on the other side of that graffiti’d wall is a sloping and quite wooded bank of the Monongahela River. The graffiti is intentional, and several panels of the wall were displaying rendered mural paintings in addition to the more traditional tags and letterform stuff. They do workshops for this art form here, and in addition there are classes which teach aluminum, and iron, sculptural casting technique.

After this post publishes, I’m certain that several people will be compelled to leave a comment describing the function and history of the rail line and the privately owned (‘private’ as in owned and operated by U.S. Steel) freight rail service that used to feed raw materials into the plant. Have at it, railfans!

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One of the old locomotive units is actually on display.

A humble narrator continued to circle the remains of Carrie Furnace, clicking the camera’s shutter as I went. I wasn’t trying to do anything too fancy, just working the scene. Whenever you ‘come in cold’ to a place like this, you need to ‘look up, down, all around’ since there was zero prep other than the basics. You also can’t let yourself bog down and spend all your time focused on one thing, or another, because you don’t know what’s just around the corner. I know a lot of photographers who would just stroll in, take a single shot and say ‘one and done.’ That ain’t the Mitch way.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I figure that if you’ve got three hours, which I had, that’s 180 minutes you don’t want to waste. Plenty of time afterwards to chat with the other participants. I wish that I wasn’t there between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but there you go. Just about the worst part of day for light. Good news? It wasn’t raining. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind the rain if we were there at dusk, or dawn.

The even better news? I have Tix for another Photo Safari at Carrie Furnace in late July which starts at 6:30 p.m. and goes till 9:30 p.m. Now that I know what to expect, I’ve already started planning for that one. As long time readers will tell you, I like low light.

Bwah hah ha.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Tomorrow’s post will finish describing the circuit around Carrie Furnace. This was absolutely one of the most exciting things I’ve gotten to experience here in Pittsburgh, and that’s saying something.

Back tomorrow.

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