The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Happy Monday, lords and ladies. As mentioned in prior posts, your humble narrator is chronologically unmoored from the day you’re reading this.

In terms of ‘lead time’ this post is – for once – way ahead of the publishing schedule, and my ‘tyranny of the now.’ In short, I’m writing this post on the morning of September 2nd, whereas you’re receiving it at the end of the same month, right about when everyone starts pushing that freaking pumpkin spice… bah!

At the end of August, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself were entertaining out of town guests. It was decided that one of the things we’d do with them, as they’d never been to Pittsburgh, would be to ride on ‘the tourist bus’ which operates of the South Side Works area. The vehicle itself is a double decker ‘London style’ bus.

Pictured above is the Birmingham Bridge over the Monongahela River.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The ‘point of view’ location offered by the bus is pretty cool, as you’re sitting fairly high up over the street. So much so that the guide, on the microphone, was constantly adjuring and warning the crowd about ‘low ceiling’ overpasses and other obstacles we were passing under or through along the route. I got smacked by tree branches a couple of times.

It was a warm day in Pittsburgh, with atmospheric temperatures in the high 80’s. It was not terribly humid, and a mild breeze was blowing.

Pictured above is the Smithfield Street Bridge.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A section of the tour was omitted, with the acquiescence of both ourselves and the bus’s other guests, due to a traffic condition in the Oakland section where CMU and Pitt’s campuses splay. It seems that we were riding the tourist bus on both university’s ‘move in weekend’ for the fall semester, and that the narrow streets of this very urban section of Pittsburgh were choked with moving trucks and personal vehicles being unloaded.

Pictured above is an approach to the West End Bridge, and visible in the shot are that set of stairs which cause me so much worry everytime I try to march my PTSD laden ass down them.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The tourist bus operates as a ‘hop on/hop off’ service, although we weren’t taking advantage of that on this particular trip. The Ohio River was crossed via the West End Bridge, and soon we were on Pittsburgh’s north side, heading southwards towards Downtown.

I’m officially fascinated by the architectural design of these highway ramps, which snake past and through the parking complexes for the stadiums, connecting the I-79 north/south road with the Fort Duquesne Bridge spanning the Allegheny River and leading to points south – including the Fort Pitt Bridge and Tunnel. Parabolas are boss.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Crossing the Allegheny on the Andy Warhol Bridge, and the Roberto Clemente bridge – another member of the ‘Three Sisters’ Bridges – was in frame. This sort of shooting is what I call ‘spray and pray,’ as in you overshoot – a lot – knowing that a a high failure rate is inherent.

I had the camera aperture set to f11, the ISO setting was high enough to merit calling these shots ‘low light,’ and the shutter speed was measurable in thousandths of a second to cancel out motion blur.

Pictured is the Allegheny River, with the aforementioned Roberto Clemente or Sixth Street Bridge in the foreground.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

After gaining purchase on the so called ‘Golden Triangle’ of Downtown, the bus continued on towards the business focused district of the city of Pittsburgh. That large black building is the 1970 vintage U.S. Steel tower, and it’s the tallest building in Pittsburgh at some 64 stories.

They pronounce the word ‘downtown’ as ‘Dahntahn’ hereabouts.

Back tomorrow with more.

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Buy a book!

“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.