Hammer time
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Railroad Street pictured above, with some of the newly constructed housing units and concurrent parking lots which Pittsburgh’s Strip District now houses. Observationally, many of the people who live in these new buildings are students, or young professionals employed in the nearby downtown section. Personally, I’m not at all interested in living here in what look to me like a great deal like barracks, despite their colorful and shiny facades. I said the same thing about LIC, as a note.
I’m also determined never to share walls with anybody else other than Our Lady of the Pentacle and Moe the Dog by choice again. The nearly three years which we’ve been living in a private house is the longest period in my life I’ve gone without seeing a roach or a mouse appear inside my home.
Astoria was freaking infested. I knew a guy there whose back yard became infested with cats. Cats! What do you do, bring in dogs? It’s like that old Porky Pig and Daffy Duck cartoon. The mind boggles.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not for me, as I often say. If I wanted apartment living, I’d have stayed in NYC. My song will probably be different when I’m in my late sixties rather than fifties.
The development projects here have been a great success, apparently, and brought a 24/7 population into an area that used to empty out at night and on weekends. Tax rolls are up, but the lousy architecture contagion is spreading. Hey, people are voting with their feet to live here, who cares what I think. It would have been smart for the city to demand green roofs on all those parking lots though, to offset the storm water situation, but that’s me. Maybe they like building sewers and treatment plants at City Hall, I don’t know.
Things started getting a little boring, as they do in these sorts of areas, so I hung a right and headed towards the Allegheny River waterfront in pursuance of acquiring the trail which follows it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s really the same old story here. ‘Used to be, once, long ago,’ replaced by new and shiny quick construction designed to minimize development and maintenance costs by using common wet walls and utility conduits. Very ‘YIMBY.’ Have they built schools, fire houses, police capability to serve the new populations? Sewerage? Anything? I really don’t know.
At any rate, the ankle was really starting to sing its song at this point in the walk. I had just passed through my former threshold point of five miles in terms of what I could reasonably expect myself to be capable of.
The current ‘uncomfortable’ thing that happens in the ankle and foot is a sensation that I have two shoelaces wrapped tightly against the heel of my foot and then something ‘clicks’ during heel strikes. The Docs tell me these symptoms are tendon related and will ameliorate with time and exercise. Stretch and strengthen, they tell me.
Push on, weakling, push.
Back tomorrow.
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