The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s the Hot Metal Bridge pictured above, and the pathway I was walking here in Pittsburgh was described in this post from February of last year. The burning thermonuclear eye of God itself had slid away from the vault of the sky, and since there really isn’t an extended period of ‘dusk’ in these parts – it gets dark fast. Snap your fingers and ‘boom’ it’s suddenly night time.

I’ve been hankering to do some ‘night work’ again, at any rate, which is something that’s not been on my menu for a while.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I didn’t have any of the equipment normally used for such pursuits along with me on this walk (tripod etc.), rather I was packing a kit of prime lenses so the captures had to be handheld.

No problem there. The prime lenses I had with me are all ‘bright’ with the capability of large apertures. The ‘darkest’ lens I had with me was f2.8 wide open, and the rest ranged from f2 to f1.8 with a couple of them also offering image stabilizer technology. My camera has a built in sensor stabilizer, so coupled with a stabilized lens, that gives me around 6-8 stops worth of wiggle room.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

After having walked the Three Rivers Heritage trail from downtown Pittsburgh, alongside the north shore of the Monongahela River, my crossing back to the south side of the waterway was accomplished via the Hot Metal Bridge – a former rail bridge which once connected two sides of a steel mill and has been converted over to automobile/bike/pedestrian usage in modernity.

It got darker with every step I took, which sounds like a metaphor for my entire life, but there we are.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

On the right side of the shot above is a high technology focused office park where several corporate entities are based. Carnegie Mellon has a building in there too. All sorts of robotics research, work on self driving cars, and other fairly terrifying advancements are being created and tested therein. The land used to be the property of that former steel mill which the Hot Metal Bridge was a part of.

To my eyes, Pittsburgh has done a lot better with its ‘post industrial landscape’ than NYC has. If this was Brooklyn, those buildings with their hundreds of high paying technology jobs would be empty condo buildings full of ‘pied a terre’ apartments that rich suburbanites use as crash pads when they’re in the City, and rent out as AirBNB’s when they’re not.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s the Birmingham Bridge at center of the shot above, a span which I recently walked over and offered a post about a few weeks ago, with Downtown Pittsburgh rising up behind it.

Luckily, I’d be taking a ride share home this particular evening, as I was heading towards a pub with a pretty excellent bar menu for a dinner date with Our Lady of the Pentacle. This was pretty exciting stuff for us, as we’ve become ‘dirty rotten stay at homes’ since moving out here.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The lifestyle we’re experiencing here in Pittsburgh is domestically focused, and it’s rare that we even get takeout or go to a restaurant for a meal, or go to a bar when we want to have a drink. Generally, it’s meals at home and stocking up at a supermarket about once a week. The isolation is splendid, but every now and then – usually about once every week, or week and a half, we force ourselves out for some diversion.

This is, of course, a real departure from life in NYC with its tiny kitchens that lack automatic dishwashers or food preparation space, and a multitude of take out options.

Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.

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