The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Gargantuan, the Rising Main City Steps on Pittsburgh’s North Side, in today’s post.

These are the fourth longest ‘City Steps’ in the city, and they are in a deleterious state of repair. The ground which their foundations rest within is subsiding, sliding, and pulling the staircase to and fro. I tried to illustrate this a few times by looking back up at where I started, so you can see the almost serpentine footprint of the things.

As longtime readers will tell you, I’ve endlessly talked about this weird mental condition regarding stairs that has taken root in my mind, ever since shattering my ankle on a set of steps at home. I freeze up, grasp for dear life at the bannister, and mistrust both my sense of walking balance and the purely mechanical propensity of walking down stairs.

It’s a kind of PTSD, and I’ve been self medicating for the last year with exposure therapy, forcing myself to seek out and expose the senses to this stimuli. It’s working, in terms of ‘normalizing,’ but still quite present.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

My phobic intuitions were tantalized, thereby, by this.

At one point, the bannisters on Rising Main are literally fallen away. Some civic minded person seems to have attempted an impromptu repair, using a garden hose.

I really do wish that this was AI.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There you go. Securely attached.

The Rising Main steps connect the Fineview community at their apex to what used to be a thriving neighborhood at the bottom.

More on that is inbound.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Rising Main path is parallel to what looks like an entirely condemned and abandoned roadway called Toboggan Street, which also has its own set of stairs which seem to be in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Several fairly picturesque abandoned houses were seen along the way.

As mentioned above, it’s going to be a while before – or if – I come back here. These steps were causing me no end of anxiety.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

What a shame.

Now, as mentioned yesterday, my puzzlement over this situation led to me ringing up my pal Tim Fabian, who casually threw out the phrase ‘East Street Valley’ during our conversation about my visit to the area.

I then looked that term up, and as it turns out, it refers to a generational road building project that saw an extension of I-79 (locally – I-579) rammed through this neighborhood. This ‘zone,’ as it turns out, used to be a densely populated section of the City of Pittsburgh.

The highway project played out between 1966 and 1989. Here’s that story. A bit of depth to the East Street Valley project will be offered in a subsequent post this week.

As a point of trivia, when discussing the ‘Interstate System,’ an odd numbered road is north/south whereas an even one is east/west. There’s an exception or two to this rule, in various spots around the country, but otherwise…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Y’know, sights like this abandoned building are just candy for wandering photographers. You could draw us in, trapping shutterbugs like moths attracted to a flame. Get enough of us, you’ve got a baseball team.

Saying all that, the devastation and abandonment witnessed in this section of Pittsburgh is – at it turned out – a feature, not a bug.

Back tomorrow.

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