Archive for February 1st, 2024
Ten mile scuttle, part five
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A lifetime habit of mine was to use a combination viewing of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings to orient myself whenever I was climbing out of a Subway in Manhattan, to help me navigate and let me know where I was and what direction I needed to go. Here in Pittsburgh, a similar thing is accomplished using the U.S. Steel Tower.
Don’t let the non profit health outfit’s ‘UPMC’ logo fool you, that’s the U.S. Steel Tower pictured above. UPMC is United Pittsburgh Medical Center, a non profit dealie that seems to own a lot of land in Pittsburgh and its extended metroplex.
The steel guys are still in the building, as a note.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Feds have a bunch of agencies housed in the corridor pictured above, here in Pittsburgh. The ‘Feebs’ are here, as are Fed level courts and the ‘big post office’ and the passport people, and I’m sure DEA is lurking around somewhere nearby too. A few blocks away is Pittsburgh’s City Hall and a local level court complex. This street is called ‘Liberty Avenue.’ You see a lot of uniforms and badges walking around eating hot dogs in this section.
I was heading roughly southwards at this point, on a long walk.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
UPMC is one of the ‘800 pound gorillas’ in Pittsburgh, a non profit corporation which owns a lot of the region’s hospitals and clinics and nursing homes, and employs a LOT of people. There’s controversy at the moment between the politicians and this non profit, since the behemoth medical entity doesn’t pay any property taxes… and since politicians like to spend tax money on new things they’ve recently dreamed up… the two ‘estates’ are at odds with each other.
Nobody seems overly concerned about spending money on fixing potholes, here in Pittsburgh, I’d mention.
I’ve always wondered why our society doesn’t try to get things right, improving insufficient or badly designed existant systems, before installing new and expensive ones.
Personally, I’ve been working on a recipe for meatloaf that I’m pretty close to perfecting (recipe version 7), but have resisted the urge to start roasting chickens, before I get the meatloaf formula just right. That’s how I roll, call me crazy.
Back tomorrow.
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