Archive for March 25th, 2025
Heading south, on West Liberty
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described yesterday, one was engaged in a constitutional walk with a route that was planned out as being rather close to home. On this scuttle, I was walking down a secondary arterial street called ‘West Liberty Avenue,’ which transmogrifies into being called ‘Washington Road’ as it travels southeastwards. West Liberty Avenue intersects with a few other high volume roads, nearby the Liberty Tunnels leading out of Pittsburgh, as it heads out into the South Hills section. It’s set up like a local road, with lights and crosswalks, but the West Liberty/Washington Road corridor is a four lane high volume 24/7 traffic engine. In transit geek language, it would be called a ‘Stroad.’
I’m intrigued by that church pictured above, and plan on seeing what it’s like within the place sometime soon. They built churches like battleships out here, back in the day. There are, in fact, four churches along this route which I’m very interested in photographing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
More of Pittsburgh’s peculiar (to me) alleys were encountered along my way. As is always the case when I’m on this sort of scuttle, one was trying to notice ‘all the little things.’ By this section of the walk my ankle was starting to get angry at me, but in accordance with a now long standing habit I just leaned into it. Won’t get better on its own, and I’ve had enough rest to last me a lifetime.
It’s actually an odd thing to be ‘consciously’ walking. As in focusing in on each step while avoiding the trap of ‘protecting’ my ankle. The protection thing inevitably ends up with me limping, dragging my foot, or walking like the Batman villain Penguin. All of those things are counterproductive to the recovery effort, so I need to maintain a certain awareness of my walking postures whilst scuttling about. My surgeon endorses this view of mine.
I’ve literally had to relearn bipedalism in the last six months. This was something I thought that I had accomplished more than fifty years ago, so it’s frustrating to have to do it all over again. Bah.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
About five years ago, I missed out on a serious payday from the stock photo company Getty when they were looking for shots of urban gas stations, specifically BP ones. I decided at that point to make such institutions part of my shot list. I also discovered how difficult it is to get shots of gas stations at night when they’re all lit up, and that’s something whoch draws me to a subject like nothing else.
Back tomorrow.
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