The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

In the last post before my holiday break – during which Newtown Pentacle offered single image posts for the week twixt Christmas and the new year (Happy New Year, btw) – one was describing an interesting walk through Pittsburgh’s ‘Uptown’ neighborhood, and I was threatening to bring y’all along on a walk over the Birmingham Bridge spanning the Monongahela River here in Pittsburgh. I don’t make threats, instead they’re promises, so here we are.

To start: Birmingham Bridge is a positive infant compared to other Pittsburgh Bridges, having opened for business in 1977. Its function is to connect Uptown and the nearby Hill District (on the ‘Golden Triangle’ peninsula) with the South Side neighborhood (found on the south shore of the Monongahela River).

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s an enormous concrete outfit found on the peninsular side’s shoreline, which the Birmingham Bridge’s roughly seven stories of altitude offers a nice view of. There’s 64.8 feet of clearance below the span, and the bridge’s length is some 1,662 feet end to end.

It’s a ‘steel bowstring arch bridge,’ and Birmingham replaced an earlier structure which was called the Brady Street Bridge. Birmingham has six vehicular lanes, and there’s the combined pedestrian/bike lane on which a humble narrator claimed temporary residence during this walk.

To my understanding, there were still Steel Mills and Coke Ovens on both sides of the river when this bridge was erected – operated by the Jones & Laughlin company, but both large footprint industrial sites having since been razed and redeveloped since then.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The distance of this ‘long walk’ a humble narrator was slogging through is best described using landmarks. The T streetcar station I began my scuttling at is located beneath the 64 story U.S. Steel building, which is the tall gray structure at the top right of the shot above.

Stout, the building has become a handy navigational icon for me, which is used in the same manner that I used to employ the Empire State Building, back home in NYC.

As a note: this post is being written on Christmas Eve, and for the first time in a year – I’m actually feeling a bit homesick. I just listened to the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” and an actual emotion bubbled up into my sterility of thought and one of the eyes became a bit moist.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Birmingham Bridge connects to the South Side neighborhood, on the Monongahela River’s southern shore, specifically to a ‘main street’ called East Carson Street. The former footprint of the J&L steel mill in this area has been redeveloped into an incongruous mixed use development that’s called the ‘South Side Works.’ This very modern development sits alongside centuried residential buildings, which makes the somewhat ‘shopping mall’ esthetic of the South Side Works somewhat visually shocking and out of place. There are also residences in the South Side Works area that are nestled in amongst the shops, all of which seem spacious and modern, but an urban shopping mall is definitely not where I’d want to dwell.

After all those years in Astoria, what Our Lady of the Pentacle and I desire is suburbs. Trees, deer on my lawn. Quiet at night and dark, and if you hear an emergency vehicle’s siren, that’s a remarkable moment.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Saying all that, a mental picture of ‘what used to be, long ago’ is beginning to form for me here. Weird thing about Pittsburgh as compared to NYC, is that despite having hosted both British and French imperial armies at one time, and having a significant number of ‘young George Washington’ stories associated with it – most of the really interesting things about Pittsburgh start up around the time of the Civil War. NYC, Boston, and… Philadelphia… had already been crowded shitholes for better than 200 years by that point.

I was always more interested in the 1800-1960’s portion of NYC history than the colonial or modern eras, so this probably isn’t terribly surprising.

Speaking of – I gotta figure out where the spot that Lewis and Clark set out from on the Ohio River is. I’d like to see that propitious point of geography, or at least stand upon it. Touchstones, right?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Melancholy for old times, absent friends, and familiar places notwithstanding, this post was meant to simply discuss a walk over Pittsburgh’s Birmingham Bridge. It’s funny, but allowing my thoughts to drift and cast about is one of the things I enjoy so much about these long walks. Pondering while wandering?

Back tomorrow with the end of this particular adventure, which will conclude the tales of adventure and discovery during this first year in Pittsburgh. Happy New Year, lords and ladies.

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