The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Historic research – which I’m definitely not doing – revealed something to me recently about the ‘zone’ that I’m dwelling within.

That zone is specifically called ‘Dormont,’ which is a small community, surrounded by much larger municipalities, in a larger region called ‘The South Hills.’ The ‘zone’ sits right at the edge of Pittsburgh’s official municipal border, and in the case of HQ, that border is literally across the street from me with differently colored street signs facing each other on the parallel corners.

OK – the ‘big neighbors’ next to Dormont are Beechview (which is part of Pittsburgh), Brookline (part of Pittsburgh), Mount Lebanon (its own thing), and Bethel Park (its own thing). Regionally, these communities are part of a larger area referred to as ‘The South Hills,’ which is geographically expansive.

Think the border of Queens and Nassau County, for the New Yorkers.

The shot above is from one of the crossroads, found along West Liberty Avenue (Route 19 Truck). The POV has me standing at the edge of Brookline, looking towards Beechview where the McDonalds is, with Dormont towards the left.

So – why was I standing here? What’s the deal? Did I go get a Big Mac?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Coal. It’s coal that brought me here. Coal is something I’m just starting to learn about, and it’s fascinating.

Check out this great page at Brooklineconnection.com, discussing the Oak Mine, which undermines this entire area. The location shown in the third shot on the linked page is where I was peregrinating about for the shots in today’s post. Other nearby mines were operating all the way up until the 1980’s, apparently, but this one is meant to have shut down in the early 20th.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One drove over to Brookline, parked the car, and then set out on foot to see if there was any observable remnant of the mine.

An enormous masonry structure, which appears to be a retaining wall, was jammed into the hillside. Closer inspection of the structure revealed that it was not a retaining wall, and that the large masonry blocks were stuck at least two deep into the hillside.

It seems that Brookline in particular was a central node for harvesting coal meant to serve the residential market, with estimates stating that 90-95% of the area is undermined.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As an aside, Brookline has a Flatbush Avenue within it, and a Queensboro Avenue, and there’s an Fordham Avenue there too. There’s only one true place on this planet, and the Brookline people kind of acknowledge that – despite replacing ‘lyn’ with ‘line.’ Ever read Roger Zelazny’s ‘The Chronicles of Amber’? It feels like that sometimes, to this Brooklyn Boy.

That building pictured above is a little chicken wing fry shack, but notice that its foundations don’t seem to match up with the brick building. Could this be where the first electronic vehicle scale, at the mine, in Pittsburgh was installed?

Ok… that’s obscure tech stuff… You’d drive your horse drawn wagon onto the scale, and the combination would be weighed. Then they’d fill your wagon with coal and weigh you again. The differential is what you owed the mine. Similar systems persist today, in the waste handling industry and for businesses that move rocks and soil around in trucks.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This shot is from directly across the street, within the parking lot of that McDonalds from the first shot.

This coal revelation has explained so many things about Pittsburgh to me. Why do these vehicular streets – built out in the 1940’s or later – follow serpentine routes? High speed routes built for cars don’t do that.

Answer: there used to freight rail alongside of, and predating, these roads, and the roads followed the tracks.

Everything is starting to make sense now.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

All this coal business does raise a few new questions for me, which is cool, and it also revives an older one.

The oldest question, actually, and the only one that really matters…

Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?

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