Archive for May 5th, 2025
Slopes to flats
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described last week, your humble narrator was engaged in walking a downward sloping section of the milieu here in Pittsburgh, in pursuance of exercising several otherwise hard to hit muscle groups in my atrophied legs.
Said atrophy had been caused by the ‘recovery from the broken ankle situation,’ which I do realize that it seems I never stop mentioning.
Sorry about constantly bringing it up, but it’s been a pretty impactful experience for me and it’s become one of the ‘book end’ events with which I’ll be using to differentiate the various sections of my timeline. Book ends are what I call life changing events – graduate school, first job, marriage, death of your parents, etc. The ankle and it’s aftermath also has become a delimiter to my movements, and thereby omnipresent.
I soon found myself limping down South 18th street, a pathway which I’ve shown y’all before. This scuttle began in the South Side Slopes area, and it was all downhill on the walk until I reached the South Side Flats section which occupies the flood plain of the Monongahela River.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When you get to the Flats area, the first thing you notice is the strict homogeneity of much of the housing stock. I always refer to this kind of row houses as ‘Philadelphia Style,’ with narrow sidewalk pavement and little to no space between buildings. Directly across the street from these houses is a busy railroad trestle which carries Norfolk Southern traffic, and it provides a neat division between ‘slopes’ and ‘flats’ here on the south shore of the Monongahela.
Yeah, I did hang around the tracks for a while, but at the time of day I was passing through – nada – as far as trains. As is usually the case, as soon as you get far enough away from the tracks to make it impossible to photograph the scene, you hear a train coming through. Sigh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I showed y’all a view from the opposite side of this newly cleared parcel of land a few weeks ago, a point of view some three city blocks away. This time around though, the camera was already wearing a lens that could fit through a chain link fence, I’d offer.
Back tomorrow with more.
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