The Newtown Pentacle

Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Continuing with a walk over the gargantuan McKees Rocks Bridge, in today’s post. As mentioned previously, everytime I’ve driven over this bridge during the last three years, it’s has been paramount in my mind that ‘I’ve got to take a walk over that thing sometime.’ The views from up here are spectacular.

In many ways, this set of views from up here are from ‘the Pittsburgh I’ve been looking for.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Ohio River waterfront is largely industrial. There’s rail tracks set in and amongst all of the structures, and some of the buildings were of a type whose purpose I couldn’t necessarily identify. Fascinating. This one is from high over the McKees Rocks shoreline side. Looks like it might be a chemical storage facility, down there, maybe.

At first I thought concrete, but there aren’t giant piles of sand and gravel anywhere in sight. The cylindrical tanks are fairly clean in appearance as well. Concrete is messy. I’ll find out eventually, as I’m definitely going to be coming back up here again.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This one looks back at the ‘Bottoms’ neighborhood of McKees Rocks. See what I mean about ‘the murder capital of Pennsylvania’? Place is neat as a pin. That isn’t what a dangerous neighborhood looks like. Economic distress I’ll buy, but dangerous? All of my ‘tells’ are absent – late model vehicles in various states of repair sitting in front yards, alongside clutter and uncollected garbage, groups of feral teenagers, abandoned homes, all of that sort of stuff.

It’s a grid based street pattern here, which is sort of rare for Pittsburgh, and most of what I was observing from above were either multiple family residential buildings, of at most three to four stories, which were surrounded by a predominance of single family homes.

Hardly anyone was out and about, but it was late on a Sunday morning when I was there.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A bit of advice I can offer at this stage of the game, gleaned by my small experience, is to not lean on bridge fences in the State of Pennsylvania if you don’t have to.

This fencing was solid, mind you, but my advice remains the same. It’s about a 100 foot drop from this spot, on the pedestrian walkway. My understanding of why PA. seldom omits a walking option for its bridges boils down to the presence of significant populations of religious atavists – Mennonites, Amish, etc. – who pay their taxes but don’t drive cars. Fair is fair.

The weather was dynamic, with a lot of movement in the skies. Bolts of sunlight would suddenly peek through, disappearing when another round of moisture shot through. From up on the bridge, you could see various distant sections of Pittsburgh getting rained on.

I remained dry, since I had carried an umbrella with me, and the perverse humor that the universe enjoys at my expense played out as I didn’t have to use the thing once. If I didn’t have an umbrella, it would have been ‘pissing down.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’ve walked the waterfront trail surrounding that disused penitentiary before. Check out this May of 2025 post for that, or this one from 2024. My understanding of things is that this POV is set to change fairly soon with a big mixed use real estate development that’s meant to start up nearby the confluence point of the three rivers. That’s supposed to bring a giant Ferris Wheel to the party, and demolish the former prison.

This is the moment when I realized what was directly in front of me. Nepenthe.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A sewer plant… it’s a sewer plant. I’ve missed having a sewer plant to point the lens at. Love me a sewer plant, I do.

You can take the boy away from Newtown Creek, but you can’t actually change the fella or what he loves. Sewers!

Back tomorrow.

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