The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Firstly, the official speed limit on Route 28 is 45mph. Given a nearly total abandonment of the enforcement of traffic laws regarding vehicle speed on the part of the Pittsburgh Police Department, the actual speed limit here is delimited by how fast you feel comfortable driving. It’s common for a pickup to hurtle past you at 80mph on this stretch. That’s fast enough for the slipstream of a passing F-250 to jostle your car, and enough to pop the baseball cap off a humble narrator’s cabeza.

The St. Nicholas Trail is an artifact of a road widening project which is said to have wrapped up around 2011. Route 28 offers some spectacular views of the city from a less common POV, so I decided to roll the dice and see where this trail went to. I tightened the band on my ball cap.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This was actually quite a horrible experience. It reminded me of the foot path to St. Michael’s Cemetery in Astoria, which runs along the Grand Central Parkway. Cars whipping by on your left, a wooded highway side on the right. Lots of car exhaust, noise, and heavy trucking shooting past at high speeds. Horrible, really.

I was so happy.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Looking back at the oncoming horde of engines, metal, and glass. I’m not kidding about this road being a difficult drive. Pittsburgh drivers love to tailgate, and compound accidents are pretty common here. A four car compound crash incident happened just a few days after shooting these photos.

As a former New Yorker – yes, we are aggressive drivers too. Saying that, we New Yorkers all learned how to drive in a constrained space with hard speed limits in a dense urban core, limits which are enforced by a de facto paramilitary army of 38,000 highly motivated cops that are expected to hand out a certain quota of traffic tickets every day.

There’s less than 900 Pittsburgh PD officers on staff currently, and no Chief.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Norfolk Southern has a set of tracks which parallel Route 28, and they had a series of train cars sitting alongside the road which made for a nice framing device – compositionally speaking. The rail cars had black stone within them, a mineral which was probably coal.

Luckily, the St. Nicholas trail is fairly short, and it leaves the immediate vicinity of Route 28 after a short interval of what seemed like a mile and change. This ‘totally stupid fun’ scuttle was just what I needed, but I can’t recommend the path for its insalubriousness, due to the arms length nearness of hurtling highway traffic.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The trail’s path begins to veer away from Route 28 at one point, and you get to leave the highway noise, exhaust fumes, and constant wake driven blasts of air pressure you experience.

As described, St. Nicholas Church was an RC outpost here that was colloquially referred to as the ‘Croatian Cathedral,’ and that was the ethnic population here which called the surrounding neighborhood ’Mala Jaska.’

I lived in a Croatian section back in Astoria, and learned that it’s just best to go along with whatever they want to call something, bro.

My upstairs neighbors in Astoria for a bunch of years were a Croatian family. Mom and Dad, and an adult son. Dad’s name was Dario, the son Mario. My landlord used to employ them to do repairs on our building.

Our Lady and myself would just refer to them as the ‘Arios.’ Mario used to insert ‘Bro’ into every statement he uttered, but to fair he was a Union laborer and that’s the culture he lived in. He would call his Mom ‘Bro.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Thankfully, the totally stupid fun section of my day was coming to an end. I still had miles and miles in front of me. It was beautiful day in Pittsburgh, with temperatures in the high 60’s and a steady breeze.

Back tomorrow.

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