Intermodal Scuttle
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Topsburgh to Bottomsburgh part seven:
This section of road, here in McKees Rocks Bottoms (which I’m referring to as ‘Bottomsburgh’), goes by the super romantic nomen of ‘Intermodal Way.’ Sexy, no? This photo was captured right about here, if you wanted to poke about in the neighborhood via Google Maps.
One of the things which photographers do that drives me absolutely batshit revolves around closely guarding ‘their spots.’ There’s a lot of that sort of gatekeeping, and it’s annoying, so I just give out GPS coordinates to the world and hope that somebody goes there to get better shots than me sometime in the future. You’re welcome.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All along the tracks, devastation. Collapsing warehouses, busted windows, all kinds of trouble. I’m kind of ‘interested’ in this area, so will definitely be paying a bit of attention to whatever is on the other side of those structures sometime soon.
Saying that, I ain’t an ‘urbex’ kind of guy. I always remind people that ‘I’m like a Vampire and need to be invited in to do my work.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m sure that there’s ‘great’ shots inside of there, but it’s also dangerous, and one seems to have become accidental prone in his old age – apparently.
It had only been a few hours since I had slipped on a patch of ice and then slammed down onto the pavement, but now in addition to my neck and shoulders feeling stiff, I was feeling a bit weird in the teeth (my jaw snapped shut during the fall, causing my teeth to ‘clack.’ I haven’t mentioned this previously, but my dentition is an ongoing and lifetime medical drama, and has been ever since I was a kid. Didn’t win the genetic lottery there, either, I guess.).
Grandma Sarah also told me that ‘you were put on this earth to suffer.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking up the hill towards where the people live, up in the slopes.
That newish industrial building in the fore was a bit of a mystery to me, but a quick Google search suggests that it’s home to an outfit called ‘American Steel Span’ which offers steel outbuilding kits.
Quonset my hut, then, and there you go.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s an example of the world’s smartest thing – cut the rail spur off and then create a truck based shipping yard, right alongside the rail yard instead. Might as well cut the piers away at the river and drop them into the water… oh… they did that one too. Sheiste.
This post is the penultimate of this series, I’d mention.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
More abandonment, but this one seemed to have work crews getting up to something inside, so hopefully some productive usage of this land might occur in the future.
Back tomorrow, to say ‘Hey Now!’
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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.
The Newtown Pentacle 
Grandma Sarah was not an Objectivist?:
“Pain, suffering, failure do not have metaphysical significance—they do not reveal the nature of reality. Ayn Rand’s heroes, accordingly, refuse to take pain seriously, i.e., metaphysically. You remember when Dagny asks Ragnar in the valley how his wife can live through the months he is away at sea, and he answers (I quote just part of this passage):
‘We do not think that tragedy is our natural state. We do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it, and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering, that we consider unnatural. It is not success but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.’
This is why Ayn Rand’s heroes respond to disaster, when it does strike, with a single instantaneous response: action—what can they do? If there’s any chance at all, they refuse to accept defeat. They do what they can to counter the danger, because they are on the premise that success, not failure, is the to-be-expected.” – Leonard Peikoff, the Philosophy of Objectism lecture series, Lecture 8
georgetheatheist . . . john galt
May 12, 2026 at 2:42 pm