The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Continuing today, a medium length scuttle that started in Pittsburgh’s Allentown section, continued down the Knoxville Incline Greenway, and then stepped back out and onto the steeply graded streets of the South Side Slopes neighborhood here in the Paris of Appalachia.

The housing stock in this area used to be considered as ‘worker’s dwellings,’ back when the shorelines of the Monongahela River were lined with steel mills and rail yards. The quote for what Pittsburgh used to be like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries comes from the greatest of all American quotidians: Mark Twain.

Twain’s offering was that ‘it looked like hell with the lid off.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

My path carried me towards a small masonry bridge at South 12th street which overflies a set of rail tracks and acts as one of the connections between the ‘slopes’ and the ‘flats’ zones. I’ve looked around a bit, and it seems that this one actually belongs to Norfolk Southern rather than the municipality- although I’m pretty sure that the latter entity likely controls the surfacing, signage, and maintenance of the actual roadway.

It’s a real pickle driving over this puppy, by the way.

Blind turns, all that. It’s also ‘pre modern’ in its approach to the pedestrian space. Definitely not ‘ADA’ compliant, and it would be a serious challenge to negotiate a mobility device like a wheelchair through here.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It was ‘ankle safe’ though, in its defense.

The subject of people who have mobility issues seldom seems to come up in the civil discourse around streets these days, drowned out as they usually are by the bicycle people and their demands for… whatever the hell it is they’ve decided they want this time. The wheelchair, cane, and walker crowd is always shouted down by these anti-car hooligans, who desire the installation of obstacles into the common roadway and the removal of obstacles from theirs.

Bah!

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s a few cool views on this path, including ground level visual access to the Norfolk Southern tracks. I was specifically not hunting for trains on this walk, instead the goal was purely one of ‘exercise’ with a layer of photographic opportunity on top.

On, and on, did your humble narrator scuttle.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Just look at that. The parking lane on the left side of the shot is part of a street where there’s a legal left onto the bridge – a blind 120 degree turn.

The pedestrian space leads to a step at the end of the ramp, so screw you young parents with a carriage or anyone using a wheeled mobility device.

You go a couple of hundred feet on the bridge roadway and there’s another blind turn, followed by yet another at the top of the thing. All the while, opposing traffic is executing a series of blind turns as well. The roadways design is essentially a capital letter ‘Z.’

Madness.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Back on flat ground, in the South Side Flats area, and onto somewhat familiar ground. The first half of my walk carried me down the side of Mount Washington, and now I was on the flood plain of the Monongahela River.

Back tomorrow.

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