The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Checks me out yo, I’m’s like a reg’lar Ponce De Leon wit dis… Bruh!

So, I received the good news that the Fountain of Youth is actually found right here in Pittsburgh, rather than in Florida where the legends embraced by the Imperial Spaniards indicated it as being. Seriously, how could I not wake up at 5:30 in the morning and drive there, after having just heard about it’s existence?

After piloting the Mobile Oppression platform onto the appropriate land mass just north of Pittsburgh proper, and parking the car in an informally designated area along the side of a road, I walked down a muddy slope and then across a smelly stream, and then up a muddier slope. There were many, many angry bugs forming buzzing clouds.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The past is always predicate, so… Pittsburgh has nine municipal parks which together occupy a land mass of some 12,000 acres. North Park accounts for some 3,075 acres of that total, and it’s the largest of the nine. North Park dates back to 1927 when the County Commissioners of Allegheny County, in an effort led by a fellow named E.V. Babcock, voted to create a North and a South Park. They hired an landscape architect named Paul B. Riis to design North Park. The place opened to the public in 1931. ‘New Deal’ Works Projects Administration workers completed several additions to the place throughout the 1930’s, including the ‘Fountain of Youth’ spring house pictured in today’s post.

Click the following link for a cogent governmental description of the park’s history, here for a people’s history of North Park at the fantastic uncoveringpa.com, and for a fantastic historical write up by a high school student(!) check out “The Uproar.”

It wasn’t quite daytime yet when I arrived, and the scene was shadowed by the tree canopy anyway. One deployed the tripod and got busy… ruins to shoot, ruins.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I added the usage of my little but super bright Nitecore flashlight into the recipe for these shots for some fill light, but what you’re looking at above is a mere portal. Within the pictured facade is an interior room, once whose wall sports a metal framed aperture built into it. Beyond this rectangular framing is the famous, and often mentioned, fountain of youth itself.

Gingerly, one approached the edifice, in the awestruck manner of Moses moving toward the bush that burnt. Here I am, said I.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Within… well, first I should mention that when I stepped inside the chamber and turned on the flashlight, the walls were positively crawling with enormous insects. I’m talking “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” sized creepy crawly bugs. Big black eyes, and large enough that you could hear their feet scratching along the wet rock while they retreated to their hidey holes… and finally… one gazed with palpitant enthusiasm at the aperture leading to the fountain itself.

Apparently, Allegheny County advises against sampling the waters of the Fountain of Youth as they are somewhat contaminated with sewage, and chemical fertilizers which leach into the ground water from a nearby golf course.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s it, right there, the fountain/spring. Kind of underwhelming, I must say, but as mentioned above – it’s a ruin. Regardless, I can tell you that my gray hair had suddenly returned to the luscious dark brown coloration of my youth, and that my tonsils seemed to have autonomously regrown themselves. That process reversed itself on the drive home, and I’ve since returned to looking like a shocking caricature of that younger fellow. It must have been the fountain’s vapors which triggered the temporary condition, no doubt due to the miasmic fumes one would expect in such a place. Feeling satisfied with what I had gathered, I headed back to the car.

Luckily, a humble narrator had done no small amount of planning before leaving HQ, and another interesting site in North Park awaited.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

In accordance with the title and first line of this post, I will resume the attempt to phonetically translate my native Brooklyn Brogue into written English for the sum up to my tale:

Sose, I’s drove overs ta ‘effin Nord Pahk in Piddsboig causin I hoid that dey gots one a dem Fowntan a Ute’s type tings ovah dere. I seens a buncha bugs and shit, and somebody coulda – y’know – easily fell on his ass and cracked his melon opens cause dere’s no sets a stairs or sidewahk or nuttin, and youse gots to walk in the effin doit and a crosses a friggin streams which gets your kicks all effin wets.

Back’s tommorahs wit more of this kinda bull – at guess what – your effin Newtown Pentacle, like an icehole.

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