The Newtown Pentacle

Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One has seldom even driven through this part of Pittsburgh, possibly twice in my recollection, but a humble narrator had never taken a look at the ‘Uptown’ section while on foot.

Uptown sits on a high bluff overlooking the Monongahela River, on the southern side of Pittsburgh’s so called ‘Golden Triangle.’ Uptown is neighbored by a corporate tower dominated zone called ‘Downtown’ to the west, ‘Oakland’ with its universities and cultural institutions, and an affluent residential neighborhood called Squirrel Hill to the east. To the north is the ‘Hill District.’

There’s a gaggle of ‘Second Empire’ style buildings found in Uptown, with their mansard roofs and terracotta finishes. Many of them are abandoned, or have been burnt out by fires and are being used as squats, or they’re tightly boarded up.

One was walking up Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue on this particular Sunday afternoon.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The abandoned buildings ‘thing’ here is really startling.

When you saw something like this back in Brooklyn or Queens, it was generally because a real estate developer had bought the property, and was intentionally allowing it to rot away and become a nuisance, so as to avoid any sort of interference from historic preservationists or community groups getting in the way of their dreams of avarice plans. A friend of mine back in Greenpoint coined the term ‘Bloomblight’ for the practice of the Real Estate Industrial Complex.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has an abundance of abandoned homes within its borders. I’ve read estimates suggesting there are more than 50,000 buildings of all types within the municipality which have simply been abandoned by their owners. When you start looking at the larger region, the abandonment and concurrent blight conditions are hard to ignore.

‘Blight Clearance’ is a budget item in Pittsburgh’s annual spending, as it is for many municipalities in the region.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I saw signage promising this area was an ‘opportunity zone,’ which means that if you show up with financing and a plan, the City will likely approve it and give you tax breaks and the land will almost be free to do nearly whatever you want to do with it. I asked a local friend who recently retired from the local Real Estate Industrial Complex about Uptown, and he told me that Uptown has been the ‘next big thing’ here for about 40 years.

Compared to surrounding areas, the City of Pittsburgh has relatively high taxes and a political estate which will insist on all sorts of requirements – affordability, access, inclusion – which drive up the cost of building anything. Just across the county line, however, are lower tax suburbs which will bend over backwards to get you to build something there instead of here.

There’s ‘the City of’ and ‘the county of’ and then there’s ‘the metro area.’ Each zone has advantages and disadvantages, from a business or development POV.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Check out that old apartment house!

I see this particular ‘style’ quite a bit here in Pittsburgh’s urban neighborhoods. Lots of windows and terraced spaces. This sort of inventory dates back to before air conditioning, when ventilation in Pittsburgh’s famously humid climate demanded lots and lots of windows. Every other building on that side of the block I was walking down had stout plywood covering the windows.

To be fair, Uptown is a neighbored by a couple of troubled and ‘crimey’ areas to the north, and is set along a steep bluff hemmed in by highways and bridges. A couple of high speed roads and interstates form its southern border and subject the neighborhood (as it were) to 24/7 traffic noise and pollution.

This is another one of the places which the native “Yinzers” have advised me to avoid at night, due to crime and other insalubrious activities.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The next big thing? It’s hard not to imagine some of these empty lots and historic homes housing some of the overflow population from the universities in nearby Oakland. Saying that – If I were in my early thirties and blessed with a large bank account, and looking to build my ‘compound,’ I’d probably be establishing ‘Waxman Manor’ somewhere else. Up in the hills, with a private stream for water.

I’ve long dreamt of building into a hillside, like a Hobbit, and surrounding my domicile with a murder fence and kill zones, which I’d hire a certain group of ‘Boomers’ to design – ones who had served in the Viet Cong.

Nobody but nobody knows how to keep the Americans out of your hair like the Viet Cong do.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The gentrification hammers seemed to be hard at work at a couple of spots here in Uptown. Mostly what I observed on this stretch were rotting old buildings, open brick lots, and a lot of people who definitely seemed to be living on an edge of some kind.

There were sparse examples of junkies and possibly a prostitute or two milling about, but otherwise there was very little in the way of street life. The occupied buildings I observed had the appearance of fortresses, which reminded me of the late 1970’s and 1980’s back in Brooklyn’s Flatbush and Canarsie. Bars on all the first floor windows, driveways adorned with barb wire fencing – that sort of thing.

Back tomorrow.

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