The Newtown Pentacle

Friday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The industrial building pictured above, as seen from the streets of Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville section, is the home of Carnegie Robotics. The end of the world is probably being invented in there right now.

There’s an air of dread floating about in my mind when I see industries working in this direction. Developing technology in this direction will lead us out of the current ‘Robocop 3’ reality show we’re all living in, go right through Terminator, and end up being the back story for Dune.

Butlerian Jihad, anyone?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s a big ‘H’ on the wall of the Carnegie Robotics property. It signifies the former owner of the site, the Heppenstall Company. Luckily for me, Pittsburgh City Paper’s Chris Potter did a piece on the Heppenstall outfit back in 2006, so I didn’t have to hit the books and do my own detective work.

One kept on walking. Forward, ever forward.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

My obeyance to the conceit of following the ‘way’ or alley streets continued, and in this case, I ended up walking along the ballast rock path alongside a set of Allegheny Valley Railroad tracks. I would have been thrilled, were the white whale to have appeared, to capture a photo of one of their train sets.

It’s getting stupid at this point. I’ve learned to predict the movements of two of the four railroads that commonly operate here, and am beginning to figure out those of a third. The fourth – AVRR – is like a phantom.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s the 40th street bridge pictured above, a colossal vehicle span connecting the north shore nearby Rialto Street and Route 28 to Lawrenceville.

I had to walk through a company’s parking lot directly after this.

One of the cool things about Pittsburgh is how few shits anyone gives about that sort of thing. Unless you’re messing around and trying to break into the cars in the lot or something, it’s completely uncommented upon and ‘ok.’ What a difference compared to all the yentas who would bug me back in NYC with the ‘what are you taking pictures of’ and ‘who are you with’ comments before telling me that taking photos was a crime and they were going to call the cops on me. I’d laugh when a car of Cops, particularly on the Queens side of the Creek, would pull up and say ‘Hi, Mitch.’

I once had a mob of old Greek ladies chase me down the block, over by St. Irene’s in Astoria, and they were yelling ‘it’s Al Quaeda’ at the top of their lungs after seeing my camera. Yikes!

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Just as a point of fact, there are no actual laws in the United States forbidding photography – with just a few exceptions – mainly focused within the confines of Military Bases and around Judicial Courts. The ‘rule’ is that if you are in a public space – street, sidewalk, park – whatever – you have no ‘expectation of privacy.’ This is the very ‘right’ that the cops exploit that allows them to put security, red light, or bike lane cameras up wherever they want to. Good for the goose, all that.

I didn’t see any AVRR activity, but I did see a bunch of their rolling stock being stored on this siding.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Looking back where I’d been, and this ended up being my favorite shot of the day for some reason. Everything went right with the exposure and I barely had to ‘touch’ it when doing the developing phase in Adobe Camera Raw. Process wise; the shots comes off the camera, are converted to a format native to Adobe’s software family, they get a basic set of settings governing this, that, and the other thing, are cropped, edited a final time, and then published. I go out of my way not to alter photos in any way other than basic adjusts to contrast and that sort of thing. When I employ a ‘trick,’ like exposure or focus stacking, I usually describe what I did under the photo here. I aspire to journalistic ideals.

Everything you see here is part of the tyranny of the real.

Back next week with more.

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