The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Your humble narrator broke off of the Great Allegheny Passage trail during a walk from Homestead to the South Side Flats, briefly, to find somebody willing to sell me a Gatorade nearby the South Side Works development, here in Pittsburgh.

Another ‘used to be a steel mill’ and ‘redeveloped as a mixed use retail/residential zone’ sort of place, this South Side Works area is. CSX’s tracks flow through an underground tunnel here, which you can definitely tell when one is passing beneath the pavement.

Having soon attained a beverage, one set out of the last leg of this scuttle. My Dracula adaptation had run its course, in my headphones, and I opted to pocket the audio device for the remainder of the day.

Situational awareness. This is the start of an area which I colloquially refer to as ‘Junkie Town.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This warm and somewhat humid day was a perfect one for slurping a pint or two of beer, thought I, and then soon reacquired the GAP trail. Passing under the Birmingham Bridge, pictured above and then to the South Side Flats neighborhood towards the Sly Fox Brewery, which is often mentioned here. Sly Fox also happens to sit along a choke point in CSX’s Pittsburgh – or Keystone – Subdivision, with frequent rail traffic.

There were lots of people clustering around the water, and interacting with a loathsome specie of feathered reptile which kids call ‘Canada Goose.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’d guess that the photos embedded in these posts from this scuttle represent about five to six miles of distance by this point, but I wasn’t keeping count on this particular day. Now that I don’t have to report progress to a Doctor anymore, it’s a lot less important for me to know it was four miles, or six miles, or whatever.

I’m probably going to buy a bike sometime in the next year, just to increase my range, but I’ll offer my usual complaint about bikes which is the same one that I do about cars – you’re traveling too fast to actually see where you are and you miss the interesting stuff. Things just shoot by you too quickly.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Pictured above is what most of the trail looked like on this stretch, a long and unremarkable vegetation tunnel. At least it was shady.

As I understand it, caring for these trails is a largely volunteer effort, although governmentally sourced from ‘Uncle Sugar’ or the Commonwealth are used for equipment and consumables, like the salt used for de-icing the path during winter months. The volunteers also have to regularly deal with landslide materials which migrate down from the prominences.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Finally, I managed to scuttle out from the boring section of the walk to a more interesting section of the City, nearby the South Tenth Street Bridge and the Color Park. As mentioned above, I was already thinking about what I would order when arriving at the Sly Fox Brewery.

I also figured I’d be shooting a bunch of trains while there, so…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Color Park is where you’re supposed to do graffiti or street art in Pittsburgh, and people take advantage of that in the same way that they used to at LIC’s 5ptz, or still do at Astoria’s Welling Court back in Queens.

Back tomorrow with the Choo-Choo’s.

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