What the Ravens may see
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Riding on a tourist double decker bus was actually kind of fun. One has been appreciating the esthetics of Pittsburgh while driving about, but for obvious reasons – largely not recording them. The bus allowed me to roll about freely, and enjoy the visual advantages of being about 15-20 feet above the street. I was shooting fast, as the bus was moving with traffic at anywhere between 25 and 45mph. It’s nice when someone else is driving, and I get to just ‘do my thing.’
We were heading from the Strip District towards Downtown Pittsburgh. Downtown has a decent collection of tower office and commercial buildings, which are of several different vintages. Older buildings in Pittsburgh have lots and lots of windows, having been built prior to the introduction of air conditioning in a famously humid climate. Post AC buildings in Pittsburgh are sealed up in glassine envelopes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For this part of the ride, I decided that I wanted to abstract things a bit and started looking up a whole lot. The streets in the downtown area are fairly well populated, and we passed a couple of small concerts in public parks as well as mobs of people heading north who were all dressed the same. I suspect that this ritual garb clad crowd were heading to some local sports ball stadium, for one of the weekly tourneys offered by the athleticists.
Me? I was dressed in the normal manner, and also wearing my $12 Costco fishing hat to shield away the radiates of the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself from the noggin. I had a bottle of water with me, but it was a summer’s day and a humble narrator was baking in the heat.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Philip Johnson’s PPG center, HQ of Pittsburgh Plate Glass – pictured above – the mirror box one with the castellated looking peaks on it. There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about this section of Pittsburgh in the interval since I’ve relocated here, an area referred to as the Business District by some, the Cultural District by others. The local powers that be are concerned about the effect that a fairly noisome homeless shelter has had on their bottom lines, and thereby have been pushing the government types to excise the haggard population that’s served by the shelter, which they perceive as having impacted their businesses. Fascinating, the way that the bosses think.
These powers that be, of course, are corporate landlords who believe that the reason their office buildings are emptying out is because of the homeless situation, rather than that there are better/cheaper options for your business to locate itself in the surrounding counties, which aren’t in a crowded downtown metro area, or that they’re maybe charging too much per square foot for the space. Also, corporate taxes are quite a bit lower in the surrounding counties than they are in Pittsburgh, but it’s definitely the homeless who are the problem.
Back tomorrow.
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“Athleticists”? If you can’t be an athlete. You can always be an athlete supporter.
georgetheatheist . . . down low
August 30, 2023 at 4:27 pm