The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I spend a lot of my ‘walking around time’ hereabouts at the risible edges of Pittsburgh, so for this day’s scuttle I decided to start things off at more or less the dead bang center of the ‘Golden Triangle’ section, which hosts ‘Downtown.’ Said area is the financial and political center of the city, county, and region.

Big buildings, looks like a city, but actually a very large town, Pittsburgh is.

I found myself standing in front of the ‘St. Benedict the Moor’ Roman Catholic Church, at an ‘angle’ between ‘Downtown,’ and the ‘Hill District’ which is found on – literally – Centre Avenue.

Should I ever manage to actually start my ‘sacred spaces’ photo project, which I’ve been threatening to do for years now, St. Benedict is one of several local churches that I’d love to be able to set the tripod and camera up within.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Purposely, other than the starting point, I didn’t craft any sort of real plan for this scuttle other than to witness things on foot which I’d only seen while hurtling past in an automobile. Opining regarding this subject is an old trope for me, but you really cannot ‘see’ anything when moving at vehicle or bicycle speeds. While walking, all the ‘nitty gritty’ stuff becomes apparent, allowing one to ‘see.’ Wandering, it’s important.

This area is a politically sensitive one, with a history of awful racial stuff mixed in. Once upon a time, this section of Pittsburgh was the local equivalent of (historical) East Harlem back in NYC – a civilizational center point for the region’s working and middle class black community, replete with lots of home grown cultural institutions. August Wilson, Teenie Harris, and a lot of other cool artists, and writers, and musicians, emerged out of the Hill District’s ‘milieu’ – ‘back in the day.’

In 1961, Pittsburgh decided it would rather have a hockey stadium than a functioning black community here. The City ‘urban renewed’ the neighborhood away, built the ‘Civic Arena,’ and then a few decades later they tore that first stadium down, building another just a few blocks away for the Pittsburgh Penguins. That also demolished a bunch of people’s homes to make way for the ‘greater good.’

The footprint of the long gone civic arena is enshrined, by a multi acre plateau of commercial parking lots that serve the newer stadium.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

To the west, the office buildings of ‘DownTown’ Pittsburgh, as seen from one of those parking lots where people used to live and love.

A bit of new construction has recently concluded, which saw an office building for the ‘FNB’ outfit rise from one of these lots. The project had been underway for a while when I arrived in Pittsburgh nearly four years ago, and it’s just in the last year or so that it’s become an occupied and busy building.

Urbanism and modern development projects generally aim to have a positive effect on not just the building lot itself, but the hope is often to promulgate an economic and social halo around large projects. You’re planting a tree, why not do a garden too – and since you’re planting a garden – what about a park instead? Bus shelter?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Thing is, they really don’t grasp this concept in Pittsburgh.

Paying a hot dog guy to set up his cart at the end of this walkway for a year just might induce might pedestrians and office workers to go take a walk, and the presence of pedestrians just might spur other vendors into some sort of entrepreneurial action. A shop, or even a bench with a bit of shade… ‘something’ to ‘draw’ people this way or that…

It was just unrelenting sunlight, and the tyranny of the real, as I walked towards the de facto sidewalk of an urban highway.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’ve described Pittsburgh’s office buildings as ‘inhuman in scale’ in the past. That’s a high handed statement, even for me… but…

This style of architecture isn’t consequential of humanity, instead we’re just meant to adapt into, and thereby become consequential, because of ‘it.’ Post WW2 American architecture is ‘effed up.

Buildings in Pittsburgh don’t seem to be required to have ‘set backs,’ so they soar up in straight lines and create ‘perma shadows’ on the streets around them. The office buildings’ ground floors are either occupied by empty lobbies with security desks, or high end ‘white tablecloth’ restaurants with menus designed for a businessman’s three martini lunch rather than ‘grabbing a quick bite.’ Either way, this scheme doesn’t lure ‘life’ towards itself.

You can walk no more than a few blocks in a row in this area until you find yourself having to risk your life by running across a highway onramp at a stop sign or traffic light. Pedestrian concerns were, at best, an afterthought to the generation who governed over this buildout.

Again – they had a Rachel Carson in Pittsburgh, not a Jane Jacobs.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s the new FNB (First National Bank) tower mentioned above.

Shiny.

Glad I brought the polarizer filter with me on this walk.

Back tomorrow with more.

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