The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Long story short, I somehow found myself standing on the shoreline of Lake Erie, in the recent past. Never laid eyes on this Great Lake before, so yay.

Turns out that Lake Erie is about a two hour drive north of HQ, basically in Pittsburgh. Didn’t have time to linger, so this was a ‘run and gun’ and all shots are from a singular perspective. Plan on me coming back this way again in the not too distant future, but with a whole lot of preparation – a shot list, Google maps of possible ‘POV’s’ – all that.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That thingie seems to be an observation tower of some kind.

Big tourist zone, this section of Pennsylvania’s Erie shoreline is. It seems that ‘waterfront vacation’ in this section of the country (Northwestern New York, Western PA., eastern Ohio) takes the form of either visiting one of the Great Lakes, or driving all the way to the coast at Ocean City in Maryland.

Funny thing is, having grown up on Brooklyn’s southern shore, which faces out to Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic, when my parents wanted to do a ‘vacation getaway,’ they always talked about heading to the Catskills or some other mountainous area of the sort where the very people who like to come to Erie or Ocean City for vacation live.

Dichotomy, huh?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Have to imagine that I landed in exactly the wrong spot for my particular interests, given that this was a quite modern real estate developmental area which was entirely tourism focused. Big hotels, docks, convention center type buildings. Lots and lots of what looked like time share apartments looking out on the lake too.

Research, have to do some of that before returning.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Your humble narrator generally doesn’t like photo destinations which he can’t just walk up to. It annoys me to have to drive places, in the Mobile Oppression Platform – a Toyota, but.. as the saying goes – the mountain ain’t coming to Mohammed.

Recent endeavors have seen me driving eastwards for rail action; in Cassandra and Cresson. South towards Maryland’s Cumberland, west towards West Virginia’s Weirton and Ohio’s Steubenville.

The photos in today’s post are from the northern edge of what could be described as the ‘Pittsburgh Metro Area,’ a roughly 100 mile circle (or rounded rhombus) with Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle and Acrisure Stadium at the economic and cultural center.

I’ve mentioned the ideation that Pittsburgh is at the center of an Appalachian Megalopolis, locally overshadowed by the Chicagoan, and especially the East Coast seaboard’s setup with NYC, and Washington DC, as the pole stars of a continuous urbanized area that runs from Boston all the way to the south.

North American megalopolis zones (or at least the ones centered in the USA) include the southern one around Houston, the entire west coast from Tijuana to Vancouver, the Atlantic coast from Boston to Atlanta with the NYC to DC zone forming its dense core, there’s also ‘Chicagoland,’ and there’s a few smaller entities like the Appalachian one, or the Mormon one out west. Up north, there’s Toronto, and then… you get the concept.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That is one heck of an enigmatic church which caught my eye. It appears to be ‘Orthodox,’ although I couldn’t guess what version of orthodoxy they employ within. Next time, I’ll be prepared…

My time in Erie was short, as I still had to drive roughly two hours to get back home. This one wasn’t a photo trip, I had something else to do up here that was utterly banal, and really not worth discussing.

Erie is roughly 120 miles north of Pittsburgh, and the drive back is all on one road and its various extensions – I-79.

Most of that drive hurtles through quite rural areas, with limited stops on the highway. Speed limits are high, up in the 65-70 mph zone depending on where you are in the drive.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The next morning, well, there I was… standing alongside a set of railroad tracks in Pittsburgh’s Bridegville, waiting to photograph a Wheeling & Lake Erie RR train which never arrived. C’est la vie.

Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.

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