The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Continuing with an exploratory scuttle along McNeilly Road in the Pittsburgh area, during which I was avoiding any contact whatsoever with the NFL Draft event happening elsewhere in Pittsburgh.

The Newtown Pentacle time warp is still in effect, btw, as I’ve somehow managed to get way ahead of schedule. These photos are from the 22nd of April, the words you’re reading were written in mid May, and you should be receiving this in late June, if I’ve got my scheduling correct.

A relatively short course of just about two to three miles, found between Route 88/Library Road and Route 19 Truck West Liberty Avenue (with a one block insertion from a street called ‘Pioneer Avenue’), McNeilly is another one of the locales where people dug holes into the earth and then spent 12 hours a day down in the dark with torches on their hats, in the company of company owned donkeys which never saw the light of day.

At the lower right hand corner of the shot above, where all those tires are stacked up behind a fence, there’s a forgotten coal mine portal which was discovered during a 2008 renovation project at the T station.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

On the north(ish) side of the street, a series of steep hills lead up to a fairly modern real estate development of suburban style homes on a plateau. I noticed that non-stepped dirt path from ‘below to up’ there. Must be a real joy to walk during the winter, or when it’s raining.

Most of the commercial buildings found on the southerly side of the street are empty, with realtor signs displayed prominently.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I got into another argument with Google’s AI recently.

Gemini insists that this ‘clearly a tributary of Saw Mill Run’ stream is in fact part of the main body of the waterway, which in reality runs along Library Road, and then a section of a road called ‘Saw Mill Run Boulevard.’ Historically speaking, Pennsylvania has been occupied by European Busybodies for centuries, and it is culturally impossible that these tributaries haven’t been assigned individual names by either the Europeans, or the Natives before them. That’s information which likely hasn’t been digitized yet, meaning that to an AI’s POV the name doesn’t exist, and thereby it makes presumptions and pronouncements to try and please a user, even if it’s a bad or incorrect answer. Human children are told to ‘not just make something up if you don’t know an answer.’

No bueno.

I got started on this whole coal quest due to my curiosities about a stream across the street from HQ in Dormont, which seems to not have a name. Despite it being on maps, and being part of larger storm water drainage strategy here in Dormont and the surrounding communities, no name. It appears on maps as ‘a “UNT” or unnamed tributary of Saw Mill Run.’ I’ve been around a LOT of governmental conversations about water, and believe me when I tell you that the stream has a name or at least a number. Aquifers have names, even though they’re found deep in the ground, as an example.

The coal guys litigated mineral rights for every square inch of surface land around here, and then down a thousand feet. It’s IMPOSSIBLE that this water is ‘unnamed.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A lot of the older residential buildings along McNeilly appear to be ‘Miner’s homes,’ a style of dwelling which I mentioned a few posts ago, when discussing Bethel Park. This is a pretty standard model of house, hereabouts, although in modernity additions and renovations have altered the homogeneity once on display. The presence of this model of house, in numbers, indicates that mining used to take place nearby during an era when people walked to work.

McNeilly Road begins angling upwards midway, forming into a fairly gentle but long upslope grade away from ‘down here.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

McNeilly Road continues past a couple of secondary schools, one religious and one public, and is lined with residences for the last mile of its regency.

Now… the plan for the rest of my day was to meet up with Our Lady of the Pentacle, and some friends, at a local brewery to have a drink and listen to a local band play some tunes.

One decided that it might be interesting to see what Google’s Gemini might offer to me as the shortest walking route between ‘here’ and ‘there.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As the title offers, it was like asking a blind man to describe what a parrot looks like, as this was the route it suggested using.

GPS directions in Pittsburgh always require some interpretation because of the terrain, as that factor doesn’t seem to be something that AI’s ‘see.’ The path pictured above does, indeed, go directly to my destination in the shortest sense of ‘how the crow flies,’ but the orthographic overview of the street map doesn’t calculate the hills and valleys – at all.

The real world, and Pittsburgh in particular, is three dimensional.

Y’know how I always offer that I’m safeguarding myself against getting ‘cul-de-sac’d’ while walking about in Pittsburgh by figuring out a route before I take a walk? This is what I mean, and avoid.

I walked a couple of extra blocks, made a left, and followed a ridge line to get to where I was going rather than enduring those ups and downs. Bah!

Back tomorrow with something different.

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