The Newtown Pentacle

Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Thump, thump, thump… my walking gait has improved significantly since the orthopedic incident, and one can scuttle normally again. Managed to not drag the affected limb about in recent efforts, and on this walk in particular (the longest one I’ve pulled off since the event) the ankle was playing ball and not troubling me overly.

Saying all that, I had to go into ‘junkie avoidance’ mode while scuttling this section of downtown Pittsburgh, as some ‘creature of the streets’ had noticed the camera and was conspicuously following me.

Crooks in Pittsburgh are blatant, and obvious.

It ain’t like Brooklyn, where you’re walking along peaceful and calm and then ‘blammo,’ and you wake up buck naked in a hospital with a cracked skull and there’s a cop there asking what your name is. Brooklyn street crooks would have already set up new credit card accounts using your stolen ID, even before the FDNY collected you off the sidewalk.

The crooks out here are mainly looking for something – anything – of value they can exchange for drug money.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’ve chatted with some of the street people here, whom I’d describe as being like ‘sick dogs.’ Suffering, hungry, cold, bereft of affection – they’re surface sympathetic characters all – but will randomly bite you if you let your guard down. Substance abuse is a toxic combination of two of the seven deadlies, specifically gluttony and sloth. It’s often hard to feel compassion towards a drunk, but there we are.

I went into my evasion mode. Walking a bit faster, erratic heel spins to signal that I knew he was following me. A couple of hard stares in his direction. Sick dogs back off, they don’t want prey that might fight back as it’s not worth the calories. The fellow broke off his pursuits, and disappeared into the grid.

Probably went looking for an old lady to push over, instead of this old man.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A peculiar street treatment involves a former department store location downtown, where the sidewalk proceeds through a tunnel. There’s a street here as well, and the entrance to the former department store’s parking lots. The street is an ‘alley,’ and it’s called Cherry Way.

The department store above me was the founding location of the Kaufmann’s empire. As an interesting aside, the scion of the Kaufmann family in the 1920’s – Edgar G. Kaufmann – commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design his offices, and also commissioned the architect to design a ‘country home’ for him.

That home would end up being Falling Water.

Who knew?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One continued along his lonely path. The next passage I was worrying about getting to was a bridge over the Monongahela River, which would carry me into some overly familiar areas on the southern bank.

This began the last third of my outing, and since I was interested in getting a few shots in of some trains…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Smithfield Street Bridge was crossed, and the overly bright sunlight situation began to abate as the orb began transiting behind Mount Washington, or more accurately Mount Washington got rotated into opposition to the thing.

Really have to avoid ‘solar maximum,’ timing wise, in the future.

My destination was the usual one, nearby that brewery along the train tracks which I often shoot from. Wasn’t going to be a ‘have a beer day,’ unfortunately, as I had things to do later in the evening and their progress wouldn’t have been helped by such inebriants.

As an aside, I write all of these posts on my iPad. Thereby, IOS spellcheck asserts itself often, and sometimes I’ll have to rewrite an entire sentence after I type the period due to rippling sentence wide changes it automatically makes. I’m often frustrated and sometimes amused by these changes, although it’s become a real chore to find all of them before hitting ‘schedule post.’

IOS spellcheck’s contribution of the day involves that word at the end of that last paragraph – ‘inebriants’ – which it turned into ‘I diss ants.’

Gotta love that. Just gotta.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

On the other side of the river, a polychrome assortment of Porta-Johns were spotted. I like to think that these are all Tardis’s and that a Time Lord Convention was under way in Pittsburgh.

Back tomorrow with some ‘Hey Now’ and a Choo-choo.

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