Archive for the ‘Pennsylvania’ Category
Grand Viewing
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A snapshot of a certain side of ‘Life in Pittsburgh,’ that’s how I’d categorize this post.
Our Lady and myself go out to dinner seldomly here, as we generally cook ‘three meals a day’ at home. We have a big suburban kitchen now, and it’s fairly easy to build up an involved meal – roasted meats, vegetables, etc. I like to really ‘put on a show’ when cooking dinner, and if I do it right we’ve got days of leftovers perfect for lunch.
Saying that, gotta get out every now and then, so we tried out a saloon with a pretty great food program just across the street from one of the inclines up on Mount Washington. If you find yourself at Steeltown Saloon, I can recommend the jerk chicken tacos.
After we finished up, a walk was on order, along Grandview Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was popping. This was the first truly warm night, after the brutally cold winter season, which Pittsburgh had just experienced. To wit: I was wearing the summer version of my ‘Mitch Suit,’ with shorts and a Guayaberra style short sleeve shirt. Our Lady was encased in a shimmer of golden mist, with luminous flowers floating around her which were not at all affected by gravity. She was like a character from a Studio Ghibli cartoon. Two tiny songbirds were carrying her purse and singing.
We had decided to walk for a bit, and then we’d call for a ride home.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one looks up the Ohio River, towards the section of Pittsburgh called ‘The North Side,’ which I’ve been coincidentally spending a bit of time in recent weeks.
As mentioned in prior posts, I’m currently way ahead of schedule here, and thereby a bit of a time warp is still occurring. These photos were gathered on the 4th of April, the words are being typed out on the 21st of the same month, and if I’ve gotten the scheduling correct you’re seeing this on the 22nd of May. Whew. Confusing.
How’d your month go? I’m curious as to all the mad things which have likely happened, but as you’re reading this I can imagine that I’ve already ‘effed around and found out’ several times, so I know too. Time warps…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s been a minute since I did any low light photos, although I wasn’t ‘shooting’ so much as ‘snapshotting.’
Don’t ask me to define the difference, but there is one.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was pretty crowded. Lots of college age kids were out, wearing tight clothes and showing off for each other. The car enthusiasts were starting to gather and rev their engines.
Our Lady activated one of her apps and summoned a ride.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While we waited, I couldn’t help but point the camera in the direction of the PNC Park baseball stadium where the Pittsburgh Pirates live. A game was starting up and you could hear the cheering, miles away.
Back next week with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Chartiers Creek, Bridgeville
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Chartiers Creek, in Pennsylvania’s Bridgeville.
First – allow me to say that I’m new to this urban waterway’s story, so if I get something wrong as far as your lived experience, please leave a correction and ‘get me smart about it’ in the comments section.
Second- This waterway has historically received an absolute ocean of mine runoff over the last century, emanating from several historical coal mining sites extant along its course. I’m told that it was quite common to see these waters running a bright orange, not too long ago.
It seems that iron, and pyrites, are commonly found in the layer cakes of Appalachian soil – alongside coal, shale, dolomite, sandstone, and limestone.
When a coal mining shaft exposes formerly sealed away minerals to the atmosphere, oxidation occurs, causing ‘rusty’ water to collect below. Natural processes, like springs, carry the runoff water up to the surface.
The flowing waters of mine runoff display an acidic PH level, due to all of those dissolved metals, and is fairly toxic to fish and other littoral forms of life.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The design and operation of a mine involves two critical factors – ventilation, and the management of ground water. When the mine closes, nobody is pumping out the water anymore so a vast reservoir of the liquid forms within these manmade voids. Water always wins, so it gets out of the mine and up to the surface.
The State’s environmental people have apparently been working with both the Feds and Bridgeville, for several years, on a huge remediation process here. Spending the public’s tax money on cleaning up a corporate caused, and quite historic, problem. Sounds familiar, no?
Down below, the largest mining outfit here in Bridgeville was the ‘Pittsburgh Coal Company’s Bridgeville mine’, which was in operation for around 35 years and carved some ten million tons of bituminous coal up and out of the depths. That was just one of the mines here, the largest one albeit, but there were a LOT of smaller claims being worked hereabouts.
Remember, here in Bridgeville, you could observe coal seams at ground level in Colonial and early Republic times, on surface outcrops of rock. Lots of smaller deposits were literally just worked into at ground level, with miners digging straight horizontally into the hill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that the coal seam, just like all the other rock in the Appalachian Mountains, is folded up in jagged depositional layers, a condition which is due to the range’s long tectonic history. These mountains and hills are older than the dinosaurs, and were once attached to what’s now Scotland.
PA’s Department of Environmental Protection has a cool scholarly explanation of the coal seam’s geology available.
As this land shifted about, over hundreds of millions of years, some sections of the coal got folded up in different ways, and at odd angles, in the layer cake – a ‘syncline,’ for instance, or an ‘anticline.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I did mention that I’ve been reading up on all this stuff, didn’t I?
A lot of what I’ve been witnessing here in Pittsburgh over the last few years offers a similar storyline. An industry appears with lots of plucky small players, then a ‘king’ emerges who dominates them and monopolizes the sector. That Dominar then abandons the industry after extracting as much money as possible and unloading it on someone else, then the ‘Captain of Industry’ would move their family and household to Fifth Avenue in NYC – leaving behind environmental, economic, and societal devastation here in Pittsburgh while they slept on a bed stuffed with dollars in Manhattan.
‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’ indeed.
I’ve described my viewpoint of Pittsburgh’s History, out loud, as ‘they practiced the darkest form of Capitalism out here.’
A hundred years later and the people who profited from the mines are long gone, whereas the modern day taxpayer has to foot the bill for cleaning up the mess that they left behind. Captains of Industry Robber Barons indeed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Chartiers Creek, pictured in today’s post, has been receiving an awful lot of investment and attention from that modern day municipal kitty in recent years, thereby.
Just south of Bridegville, in the town of South Fayette – there’s the Gladden AMD Treatment Plant, which treats mine water with hydrogen peroxide and removes nearly 1,000 pounds of iron from the flow daily. A passive treatment system, dubbed the Wingfield Pines Conservation Area, uses settling ponds and an aeration fountain to filter some 43 tons of iron from the water annually. There’s all sorts of of smaller projects going on to ensure shoreline stability and enhance the ‘littoral’ zone.
This – of course – is how I spend my free time on a Saturday morning while my wife is taking a class, in a nearby shop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m still learning about all of this coal ‘stuff.’
It’s led to interesting conversation with a friend who’s a tunnel engineer about how ‘they’ navigated cardinal directions and stayed ‘plum’ while digging underground, prior to modern times and ‘back in the day.’ It seems that piano wire was critical to their efforts, as once it’s under tension it doesn’t sag, and spirit levels could be hung along its length to guarantee you were ‘plum.’
I’ve also learned that the ‘canary in a coal mine’ thing wasn’t due to ‘mephitic gases’ emerging from the deep, as the exposed coal seams robbed the atmosphere of oxygen chemically, via oxidation. The canary’s respiratory system includes a heartbeat that’s much faster than ours, making it a lot more sensitive to a lower oxygen environment. If the caged bird fell off its post, you had precisely eight minutes to get out, and find some fresh air.
Wonder if that’s the origin of the phrase ‘eight minutes to midnight?’
Back tomorrow with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Bopping in Bridgeville
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Belief exists – within one such as myself – that passing mention of a municipality in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh neighboring the section which Newtown Pentacle HQ is found within – a place and a state of mind called ‘Bridgeville,’ sometime in the past.
At any rate, welcome to Bridgeville, for today’s post.
Here’s a link to Bridgeville’s Wikipedia entry, and one to their official governmental site. There’s a historical society there too, and I’m on my second watch of this great presentation to that historical society, by a fellow named Warren Merritt. Good stuff, that.
Modern day Bridgeville is largely residential, but there’s a significant amount of commercial/strip mall style development there. Texas Roadhouse, a Home Depot, the drivers license center for the State’s PENNDOT agency, basically all the sorts of ‘mall’ style retail businesses you’d expect in a suburb can be found along its ‘Washington Pike.’
That’s what’s here in Bridgeville these days, but there’s a significant historical incarnation of this area, one which made Bridgeville quite a different place in the past.
Coal, the past here was all about coal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle had signed up for a class which was held here in Bridgeville, allowing me a couple of free hours to explore some of the town’s less well traveled sections on a recent weekend morning. I had the car with me, and a long list of saved locations embedded in a Google Map.
Most of the traffic and local populace were involving themselves with the long line of shopping malls defining the modern streetscape mentioned above. I was in an industrial district.
Saying all that, there are many leave behinds from the industrial past to be observed here, with many of these ‘old’ mill buildings – long since modified from their original purpose for the exigencies of modernity – displaying a characteristic masonry design which one has learned to associate with the long shuttered mining operations of the Frick and Mellon Family’s Pittsburgh Coal Company. This corporation became one of the two dominar suppliers for processing coal feedstock into coke, setting prices for both acquisition and end sale. A monopoly, if you would.
That corporation survives into modernity, now calling itself ‘Consol Energy.’ So too do the Mellons and Fricks persist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the end of the 19th, and especially so during the first three decades of the 20th century, Bridgeville was a coal mining superpower. The ‘Pittsburgh Seam’ is quite close to the surface here, and in some parts of Bridgeville, there were even outcroppings of coal which could be directly harvested at surface level. The coal in this area is Bituminous, as opposed to the Anthracite stuff that is more commonly harvested from eastern PA.
The industrial area I was driving and shooting within is right about here in Google Maps, should you want to have a click around and do some remote exploring. There’s a good amount of activity in these old mills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rail tracks hereabouts likely belong to the Wheeling & Lake Erie RR outfit, but I didn’t see any rail action on this particular morning.
There was definitely a waste transfer operation somewhere nearby, as I saw had seen truck drive into a site through a scale, and I could smell trash. Can’t tell you much about what goes on back here.
Yet.
One had a list of locations to take a scouting look at; a couple of cemeteries, a few points of elevation, and old mill or two, an urban waterway, to see if anything interesting might be visible. I was kind of hopeful about one spot being productive, one that was from up on a high ridge. It wasn’t.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A still active metal mill and factory is present, dubbed as being the Universal Stainless and Alloy Products, Inc. Here’s their corporate site, as well, just for the curious, or even for the stainless steel hungry amongst you – lords and ladies.
This coal business continues to blow my mind, as a note.
A significant amount of the land here in Pittsburgh is undermined, with historical mining using ‘pillar and room’ setups, which are only about thirty to sixty feet down below the ground, here in Bridgeville at least. There are also random and forgotten voids, cut into the trackless depths of the ground.
Before the word went out from the steel mills that they’d only buy coal from one of two suppliers in Pittsburgh – both of which happened to be owned by Henry Clay Frick and or the Mellons, who coincidentally owned the steel mills and coke ovens buying the coal – most of the mining was entrepreneurial in aspect. The order for consolidation by the ‘big dogs’ forced a lot of ‘small potato’ miners to sell their claims off to the nascent monopoly and then go to work for it.
In modern times, the corporate types refer to this sort of monopolistic practice as ‘vertical integration.’ Think about Apple computer, there.
Records were left behind by Pittsburgh Coal Company, about where and how deep they had dug, but the smaller operations which predated the consolidation – not so much. Periodically, surprise appearances of undocumented mine ‘portals’ appear during construction projects, here in the Pittsburgh region.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It appears that the early miners ‘followed the seam,’ in from the hillsides.
As the coal embedded in the Appalachian layer cake here was being dug out, mines also began commercially extracting shale and limestone as well, which are commercial byproducts of digging into that layer cake.
Mole hills. It’s like mole hills down there.
Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
Back tomorrow with more.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Hey Now, yet again
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was Palm Sunday, and… well, what do y’all think us Jews do when you Goyem are in your churches, communing with your god?
This ‘hebe’ was out taking pictures of trains.
After having captured shots of another Norfolk Southern freight unit hurtling past from a point of elevation over the tracks (yesterday’s post), one scuttled about a city block east at the edge of the South Side Flats zone, and then found a pile of big rocks to sit on while waiting for #872 up there to arrive.
Sated, I moved on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I didn’t have any sort of plan for this part of the walk, just following my nose and kicking my feet around. Eventually, I’d need to get back to the T Light Rail’s Station Square stop, which is about a mile or so from the spot pictured above. Movement, that’s what I was after.
Hey, I don’t think I’ve walked that way yet, wonder what’s there?
As usual, I was the singular pedestrian.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Street Furniture was encountered, and somebody must seriously regret not dealing with this couch prior to a rainstorm which blew through Pittsburgh the previous night. Sheesh. Hell, back in NYC, this sofa would already be in somebody else’s living room. A lot of people don’t lock their cars up here, or even their houses when they go out. Can you imagine?
My toes were pointed, in the direction I needed to go.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another view of the South Tenth Street Bridge, complimenting yesterday’s more aerial POV from those high flying City Steps up in the South Side Slopes. I’ve noticed a serious drop off in foot traffic in this area in the last few months. Wonder why?
I figured on being RR greedy, and headed down towards the trackage of CSX, but they weren’t busy – at all. Nothing was coming through.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
More street furniture was encountered.
Littering and dumping in Brooklyn and Queens was always done in a somewhat artistic way. You wouldn’t just abandon a couch like this, you’d need to ‘eff it up a bit,’ maybe even set it on fire before abandoning it. Paint some obscene graffiti on it. Maybe include a sort of explosive into the plan… something… give the couch a Viking funeral. It’s been loyal.
That sort of thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I keep on reminding myself that ‘every walk doesn’t have to be an exodus,’ and accordingly kept on heading back towards transit. There’s a T light rail unit crossing the Monongahela River via the Panhandle Bridge, which was the last shot from this one.
Back next week with something – completely – different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Descending to… Hey Now!
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To start this one off: the peculiarities of the Newtown Pentacle time warp are still in effect, as the shots in today’s post were gathered back on the 29th of March. Just in case you’re wondering why you’re seeing bare trees and all that in mid May.
Your humble narrator had resolved, at the end of the hostile frigid season, to really lean into things when it warmed up and another one of my little aphorisms to simplify life is ‘do what you say, say what you do.’
One found himself, thereby, in the South Side Slopes section of Pittsburgh and scuttling down a steeply graded road called Arlington Avenue. The main goal of this walk was to exercise the big muscle found in the center of my chest, so I was scuttling along at a pretty good clip.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Didn’t have much of a plan, and this walk played out through an area that’s become fairly familiar territory for me. I used the ‘Lauer Way’ City Steps to descend down to the ‘flats,’ rather than following the measured parabola of Arlington Avenue.
The PTSD thing about steps is continuing to recede into an emotional ‘Davy Jones locker’ that I maintain – deep within a section of the brain where I store things away I don’t want to think about anymore. That memory is now neatly tucked away, right between my Dad’s Pancreatic Cancer and my Mom’s end stage Dementia. I’ve got a whole folder of events in there for all the times I’ve been punched in the face, or when I said something stupid or hateful too.
All the fun stuff, it’s found in my box of psychic pain.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wasn’t so much scuttling here, it was a lot more like shambling. Occasionally, one would turn stiffly at the waist and then gesture the camera at something, while making a sound like ‘urhhhnnnn.’
That’s the South 10th street bridge, over the Monongahela River, pictured above. The location within these hills that I was walking down from would be analogous to Pittsburgh’s South 12th street, if I was standing on the flood plain below where the South Side Flats neighborhood is found.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was heading for an ‘ole reliable.’
That’s the 12th street pedestrian bridge pictured above, overflying the Norfolk Southern RR trackage which snakes along the side of Mount Washington on the landform’s Monongahela facing side. I’ve come to understand that Norfolk Southern uses the former tracks and right of way of the Pennsylvania Rail Road. I walk by this spot a lot.
I was outfitted with a ‘railfan’ scanner radio for this one, and radio chatter suggested that ‘something’ was coming this way, so I found an opportune spot and then switched lenses over to something that could easily poke through chain link fencing without occlusion.
Specifically, an 85mm f2 prime lens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hey Now!
Norfolk Southern #4600 thundered past, hauling a line of empty mineral cars. An attempt at squirreling out its model typology and build history ended up getting squished by a more historic NS Freight Train that once bore the same number. Again, not a railfan, I just like taking pictures of trains.
Saying that, of course, there I stood with a scanner radio on a Sunday…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The plan was to head a block or two away to the east, after achieving flat ground, and hope for another train sighting, specifically of one coming from the opposite direction. It seems that when a train is observed going one way, it’s likely that another one is coming from the counter direction shortly afterwards. Guess they try and time it out that way to avoid roadway disruptions.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 