The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One last mansion, from Pittsburgh’s ‘Millionaire’s Row’ on Fifth Avenue in Shadyside. This one is called called the Hillman house.

The next section of this particular scuttle would see me moving through a very, very different section of Pittsburgh, called Oakland.

A quite urban section of the City, it’s replete with ritual centers for the various religious denominations, universities, and you’ll observe vast campuses of hospitals and college buildings.

Traffic is always heavy here and it’s the only place in Pittsburgh, other than nearby a stadium on a game day, that I’ll regularly observe thousands of pedestrians milling about.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Eventually, I’m going to properly explore Oakland – on foot – in a block by block fashion, but on this particular outing my goal was to get through it as quickly as possible. Your humble narrator had an evening assignation with Our Lady of the Pentacle, during which we were going to meet up for a dinner ‘out’ at a restaurant, and I was anxious about getting myself over to that comparatively far flung area where we’d be meeting up.

When you’re on foot, most places are far flung.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Fifth Avenue corridor in Oakland is a congested mess. Street construction is never ending, and they’re building a couple of new hospitals, and there’s ten million college kids milling around, and grinding red light related traffic is omnipresent. I don’t fear driving through here, because I’m a former New Yorker, and this still ain’t what I’d call ‘traffic.’

If you’re not being forced into pushing your car’s transmission lever into the ‘park’ modality while sitting still in a trench on the BQE, or find yourself admiring Maspeth from up on the LIE, it ain’t traffic.

The Yinzers, on the other hand, would seemingly rather have bamboo shoots inserted under their fingernails rather than sit in this sort of slow down. Road rage is always on display here in Pittsburgh. That makes this sort of traffic dangerous to move around on foot.

As a note: the middle pedal in front of the driver’s seat activates the brake. Cars don’t just move forward – they can slow down, and stop too. Also, you can turn the steering wheel fully during a turn, it’s not just small adjustments and then driving up and over on the sidewalk’s curb.

These are people who have lived and learned to drive without the gentle guidance of the NYPD showing them the way, to be fair.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Polio was cured somewhere along this stretch. Jonas Salk, vaccines, scientific miracle – all that. Remember this as being part of ‘reality,’ as it’s also called ‘history.’

One managed to negotiate his way through the crowds of students, and started thinking about the next leg of this scuttle. I had already decided to attenuate certain plans…

It should be mentioned that this walk occurred on the one year anniversary of the broken ankle incident. My original plan had involved some ‘showing off,’ thusly, but I thought better of it.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I was planning on spitting in the eye of my stair based PTSD by walking down the most insane set of City Steps which I’ve encountered so far in Pittsburgh – the ones leading down from ‘The Bluff’ nearby Duquesne University. In a rare moment of comportment, one reconsidered that plan and decided that it would be ‘daring the universe’ to do so.

One will be scuttling those steps again, just… not yet.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Plan B involved crossing the Monongahela River via the Birmingham Bridge, just under a mile away, and downhill at that. More on that one tomorrow.

Remember: if it looks bad, don’t look, and always save the last bullet for yourself.

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