The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Shiny. Your humble narrator found himself wandering about in a quite urban section of Pittsburgh, nearby the brand spanking new 26 story FNB tower. It sits at the foot of the Hill District, and it’s the most easterly of the tall buildings that are considered to be ‘DownTown.’

My interest in the building itself is fairly minor, as it’s just another office building occupied by the financial industry, but the area it squats upon is fascinating to me. There’s an urban highway interchange here called Crosstown Boulevard, which I’ve mentioned in the past.

Interestingly enough, somebody seems to have a plan to deck over the chasm here.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This zone is another one of Pittsburgh’s horror shows, from a pedestrian point of view. It’s designed for cars and trucks, period.

There’s lights and walk/don’t walk signs found around the occasional crosswalk, mind you, but the setup hereabouts is ‘don’t cross the street here, instead you cross way over there, and then there, and then way over there, and then you can work your way back to the opposite corner from where you started.

Amazing.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The centerpiece of downtown, and the tallest building in the city, is the U.S. Steel Tower. USS maintains a small footprint in the building these days, with the structure’s naming rights – and the vast majority of office space within – being currently occupied by employees of health care giant ‘UPMC.’ University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a non-profit, incidentally.

Have to say – the legends about Pittsburgh’s health care system being top notch are true, at least in my experience. They did find a cure for Polio out here in Pittsburgh, a couple of generations ago, after all. The health care situation hereabouts was a huge contributor to picking Pittsburgh as our new home base after leaving NYC.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Alternatively – I’d mention that it’s also a challenging and somewhat confusing drive, navigating around this section of Pittsburgh behind the wheel of a car. The various ramps and interchanges overlay each other, and it’s not always clear which direction you’re meant to travel in. As is the case with a lot of things here in Pittsburgh, ‘you need to know which lane you’re going to need to be in’ before you get there.

The signage pictured above indicates traffic routing towards the Liberty Bridge, and the Fort Pitt Bridge, with both spans leading out of the center of Pittsburgh and towards the South Hills region via Crosstown Boulevard.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s where those ramps lead, Crosstown Boulevard itself.

To the left is the Bluff or ‘Uptown’ neighborhood where Duquesne University is found. The traffic lanes pictured above lead south to either the Liberty Bridge and Tunnel, or towards the ‘Boulevard of the Allies,’ which provides automotive traffic opportunity to head eastwards and towards interchange with an interstate.

Great transportation infrastructure here, as far as getting drivers moving quickly away from a congested downtown. Awful transportation infrastructure, as it provides few or any departures to local streets, which causes these highways to have a blighting effect on the communities they run through. Also, sucks to be a pedestrian anywhere near this complex.

As mentioned above, there’s a proposal to build a deck over this traffic pit, one which would support a linear park.

When he was still Astoria’s NYS Assemblymember, I tried to convince Zohran Mamdani that decking over the Grand Central Parkway trench in Astoria, and creating a linear park on top of it, would be the best thing that happened to that side of the neighborhood in generations. Most sure fire thing you can do to send real estate valuation into the stratosphere is build a park nearby existing buildings. Documented, that.

I tried selling the idea to Gianaris too, but they both came back with ‘great idea, but do you know how much that would cost?’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

My plan for the day was fluid. Intentionally, I had left HQ with a fairly vague notion of the where’s and how’s. Wanted to follow my nose for this scuttle, and see where it led me. Come with?

Back tomorrow.

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