The Newtown Pentacle

Friday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As opined yesterday, your humble narrator was feeling pretty good on this particular outing. The weather was on my side… if anything it was too ‘nice’ out… clear and bright.

I was scuttling along, in a loathsome manner, alongside the colossal masonry retaining walls of the Union Dale Cemetery in Pittsburgh’s California Kirkbride section. All caught up.

The structure and ‘halo’ of the high speed roads leading to and from Downtown Pittsburgh are such that entire neighborhoods have been overlooked or forgotten. This is one of the several ‘north side’ neighborhoods which you drive past, at speed, on your way to somewhere else. Expressways, highways, interstates – all have limited exits and lead to extant locales. Money once spent in the city will instead be spent in a distant suburb. The area surrounding the roads loses value, due to pollution and noise.

As seen across the world, when an urban area touches the start of a high speed road, it tends to wither away over time. This observation will be a lot more apparent by the end of this walk, than it is at the start. NYC examples: Astoria Blvd. between 31 and 48th streets especially, but really the entirety of the Grand Central Parkway. Borden Avenue from the Queens Midtown Tunnel to Maspeth comes to mind, and there’s always the BQE, and Cross Bronx, and the Interboro and… and… and…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

‘That’s one heck of a school building,’ thought your humble narrator.

It turns out that it’s the Pittsburgh Oliver High School campus pictured above, and a quick web search suggests that this building is used as office space for the local school bureaucracy in modernity.

Shrinking population, less students, I guess.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The interim goal for my morning was to check out a nearby set of City Steps. Nothing quite as gargantuan as that last North Side set of stairs which I walked at Rising Main, mind you, but I’m working my way through a sort of list right now. It’s not actually written down, this list of mine, but there’s things I want to see and experience this year.

This was fairly easy walking by Pittsburgh standards. Hills, yes, but not crazy steep ones. No abysses, either.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I find the esthetics of the building stock here quite satisfying.

My path was a bit complicated – walk a block make a right, another and you make a left – that sort of thing. I’ve started a text document which I’m encoding all these directions into, so if anyone reading this is planning a trip to Pittsburgh or if you’re already here – if you want to check any of these places out for yourself, leave a comment below and I’ll send you the directions so you can go check things out.

It’s easy… you put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Promises are offered that I won’t regularly be running shots of street signs here, but I’d also like to re-mention yesterday’s statement that I have finally found a practical usage for AI. If you want to know where you were on a walk, as in which neighborhood or whatever, providing the machine with the intersection info on signage solves the problem.

I’ll be talking about using AI to help plan an out of state day trip in a few weeks, and let me tell you – it was both disastrous and time wasting.

It’s like asking a blind man to describe what a parrot looks like, when an AI is considering answers to ‘meatspace’ questions. The technology is great at parsing numerical and spreadsheet information… but the real world is… not… it’s generally not as it’s described on paper.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Going to break off this week before getting to the first destination on this scutttle, which will continue next week when you get to see the Sunday Street Steps in Pittsburgh’s California Kirkbride.

Back next week with more – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.

“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle

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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.