The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As mentioned yesterday, a humble narrator had affixed a wide angle lens to his camera after riding Pittsburgh’s T light rail service – from HQ to the downtown section. The big building in the shot above is the U.S. Steel tower, the one at the bottom left is the William Penn Hotel. I was walking through the sort of area which one would normally associate with ‘public open space,’ but the area was roped off and adorned with ‘no trespassing’ signage. I had just watched a video the prior night describing this spot when it opened, and was hoping to get a few ‘now and then’ shots, but you can’t have anything nice anymore.

I’m told that the downtown area has been somewhat deserted since COVID and ‘work from home’ became a thing. The bosses and landlords are pooping their pants over their lack of relevance, thereby, so the playbook response has been ‘blame the homeless’ and tighten up access to public spaces where these people might gather, thereby. This reduces the number of ‘regular’ people who might be using the space too, which makes a pesky homeless ‘problem’ seem all that much worse since they’re the only ones that don’t have somewhere else to go.

It’s never ‘I’m charging my tenants too much per square foot’ with the landlords, is it? Pay no attention to that man behind that curtain…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One wandered around in a somewhat aimless fashion, up and down the streets, which are all still pretty new to me. There’s a lot of famous names carved into the walls in this section of the city – Mellon, Carnegie, Frick.

Personally, I had my NYC ‘radar’ activated. The homeless situation isn’t what I’d call dangerous (at least by NYC standards), but you’ve got a not insubstantial population of madmen and addicts wandering around, living in desperate conditions and they have expensive habits to feed. I didn’t experience anything negative other than rather pointed and aggressive panhandling, but I can see how ‘normal’ people would be freaked out and scared by such interaction.

By ‘normal,’ remember all the places I used to spend my time – often in the dead of night – along the waterfronts of NYC, and the various denizens thereof whom I would encounter. I’m not ‘normal’ in that regard, and have a lot of experience with this sort of circumstance. I used to be ‘friends’ with a guy who lived in a shipping container under the Long Island Expressway at Dutch Kills, who thought that the United Nations controlled nanobots that were embedded in his skin and which were designed to torment. His name was Doug.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Also as mentioned, this downtown stroll was a ‘short walk’ for me. My intention was to burn out about four or five miles of shoe leather during the afternoon and then head back to the T for a ride back to HQ, which is about five miles distant, before it got dark. I had timed this scuttle for late afternoon, which a weather report had prognosticated as being atmospherically calm and conducive for such activity.

It didn’t suck.

Back tomorrow.

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