Archive for February 27th, 2025
Corduroy City
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The streets and layout of Pittsburgh reject all notion of a grid, due to the unique nature of the terrain here. Recent endeavor found your humble narrator gassing up the car, while out and about, whereupon the point of view above was noticed. I grabbed the camera and waved it around a bit.
The church in the shot above is the 1905 vintage Immaculate Heart of Mary RC church, and if you want a closer look at the exterior of the thing – check out this January of 2023 post. That’s Downtown Pittsburgh rearing up behind Polish Hill. I believe that I was in the Bloomfield section when capturing these shots, which I’m told used to be the ‘EyeTalian’ section ‘back in the day.’
The valley between is spanned by a local high speed road called ‘Bigelow Boulevard,’ which climbs the hills away from the shallows of downtown.
Down below in the valley there’s a Busway (I think) and a series of rail tracks mainly used by Norfolk Southern and Amtrak. Haven’t explored the zone down there yet, so I can’t speak intelligently about it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Same location, looking in a mostly easterly direction away from downtown. Our Lady of the Pentacle was with me, and we were heading for a destination that was a bit of a drive. Not far in terms of distance, but it would all be local streets we needed to cross so traffic lights and all that would slow our progress. A couple of miles were occluded by the preferences of the bicycle people, with speed humps and the bumped out corners and painted lines that form a slalom course. Not a single bicycle person was observed using this infrastructure, although it was fun watching buses and trucks navigate the obstacle course.
We hopped back into the car after the gas station and headed towards our destination in the neighborhood of Swissvale. Found along the Monongahela River, Swissvale is neighbored by Rankin, Braddock, and is just across the river – Homestead and Duquesne. This is a fairly depressed area, in terms of quality of life and economic opportunity – I’m told – but truth be told it reminds me a lot of late 1970’s and early 1980’s Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swissvale greeted us with easy street parking, and a massive agglutination of potholes marring the road. The pothole/road condition thing is a real hazard here, due to Pittsburgh’s atmospheric conditions and an Appalachian terrain, the underlying soil is almost always moist. Get the air temperatures down and that moisture freezes, causing the street to buckle. When it warms, the asphalt breaks up and a pothole or sinkhole forms.
About six years ago, a sinkhole swallowed a bus downtown.
Back tomorrow with why we came to Swissvale.
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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
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