Archive for the ‘railroad’ Category
ancient walls
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Described in yesterday’s post, the Herr’s Island Railroad Bridge section of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail in Western Pennsylvania’s City of Pittsburgh is pictured above. It spans the north side of, and the “back channel” of, the Allegheny River.
It’s where a humble narrator decided that it was time to deploy the tripod and attach the ND filter to the lens. It had to be about 11 in the morning by now, and warnings about a weather situation blowing in from the west indicated that the 4:30-6:00 p.m. part of the day was not going to be conducive to photography due to a string of thunderstorms heading east. Best to get busy, despite it not being the best time of day – light wise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Maritime industrial action on the Allegheny? Heck, yeah there is. Spotted this adorable little push boat towing an equipment barge towards the junction of the 3 rivers.
One did find a chance to interact with a sailor or two during my stay, and they were positively fixated on the fact that Pittsburgh is reachable by water from everyplace on Earth via its three rivers and their eventual connections to either the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the back channel of the Allegheny which the Herr’s Island Bridge spans. In the distance are a couple more of the 446 bridges in this city. If you’re the sort of nerd that I am, and you’re reading this right now so… yeah, you are… Pittsburgh is an open air museum of Civil Engineering. I chalk this up to JP Morgan’s American Bridge Company being based here historically, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Coraopolis.
There was so much private capital flying around the Steel City prior to WW2, it staggers the mind. American Bridge Company was a minor subsidiary of the larger Morgan project “US Steel,” which consolidated 28 steel manufacturers – including Andrew Carnegie’s “Carnegie Steel,” Elbery Gary’s “Federal Steel” and Judge Moore’s “National Steel” into the largest and wealthiest corporation of its time.
For those of you youngins – Steve Jobs and Apple. Google and Facebook. Monopolies immune to the Sherman Anti Trust Act by design.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Officially, that’s the “Thirty-First Street Bridge, Number Six Allegheny River” pictured above. Colloquially, it’s the 31st street bridge. Politically, it’s the “William Raymond Prom Memorial Bridge,” named for a local son who died while serving his country in Viet Nam. It’s a monster arch bridge spanning the Allegheny River, and I had decided that it would be my turn around point long before this shot was clicked off the list.
It’s a pretty high bridge, altitude wise. 72.6 feet from MLW (mean low water) where it meets the piers, and 180 feet up at the arch, 31st street Bridge is 2,681 feet long from on ramp to off ramp. Also, like each and every bridge I encountered here in Pittsburgh, 31st street bridge had pedestrian and bike accommodations. A walkable city where sidewalks don’t suddenly turn into highway off ramps. Imagine that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Really, I could spend a month in Pittsburgh and not run out of bridges to shoot photos of. Wow.
Also, notice that there aren’t high chain link fences with barbed wire on top? That the sidewalks have grooves in them to aid walkers and bicyclists in icy weather? The near total lack of street litter, graffiti, garbage floating in the water, and all the other reminders that we receive daily in NYC telling us that our tax money is being spent badly and on the wrong things? Just saying.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 31st street bridge connects the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Troy Hill on the north side of the Allegheny with the Strip district on the Iron Triangle river delta. I walked through the strip district, but that’s something we’ll be taking a look at later on in this series of posts from my just under 72 waking hours here in Pittsburgh. I’ve got so much to show you all in the next couple of weeks.
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Back tomorrow with more.
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gnarled orchards
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The first thing I wanted to do in Pittsburgh was eat Breakfast, but I didn’t have a plan for that. My plan for the day involved the Allegheny River side of the Iron (or Golden) Triangle. “Iron Triangle” is the colloquial name I’ve inherited for the delta shaped landform shaped by the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers but I’ve seen and heard Pittsburgh people say “Golden Triangle.” Pittsburgh has just over 302,000 residents within the actual city limits, but the Pittsburgh metropolitan area (Pittsburgh is the seat of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County) on the other hand boasts some 2.37 million citizens. The lay of the land here is fascinating, with the river delta providing a low point in relation to several very, very steep valleys and prominences. Individual neighborhoods in Pittsburgh can often be separated from each other by deep ravines and wooded valleys, even though they’re the equivalent of what New Yorkers would call “a couple blocks away”
That’s the Roberto Clemente Bridge above, which I crossed over to the northern shore of the Allegheny via. The bridge leads to the PNC Stadium, where the Pirates play baseball. All along the bridge, you’ll observe padlocks inscribed with names. Some of these are memorial in nature, whereas others indicate loving bonds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of my targets for the Pittsburgh trip was exploring the Three Rivers Heritage trails adjoining the post industrial waterfront. When you’re talking Pittsburgh, United States Steel and the American Bridge Company need to be mentioned. My first thought after hearing “Pittsburgh” is “Andrew Carnegie” but in the case of those two companies it was NYC’s own JP Morgan who created them. Frick and the other robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century were at least partially based here, and their industrial setups persisted well into the 1950’s, even though they were diminished and impoverished due to the meddling of the Rockefeller and Morgan people back in NYC. By 1962, when Pittsburgher Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published, it had become obvious that some other use for the abandoned industrial waterfront had to be imagined. Pittsburgh was abandoned by its largest employers, the air and water were highly polluted, and a plan was hatched to change things. It took a while, but today Pittsburgh is consistently ranked as one of the best cities to live in not just the United States but the entire world.
What we did in NYC, with faced the same situation, was simply this – nothing. We allowed our abandoned industrial waterfront to blight into areas for junkies and scalliwags to inhabit, and then we declared these areas off limits and designated them “brownfield opportunity areas” to ease the transfer of the property from well greased public to greasy private hands, while dealing out a bunch of tax breaks to smooth out the creation of luxury condominiums for the wealthy to inhabit. Like the Romans, we created a holocaust and declared peace here in NYC, and “forgot” to clean up the environmental stuff until the rich people were living on top of it. Pittsburgh followed a different path, although they have condos too, but they’re not the dystopian glass boxes that serve as dormitories for corporate staffers and european tourists which loom over Long Island City and North Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and hand jobs here in Pittsburgh. They have plenty of problems, with decaying building stock left over from their glory days as the “Steel City,” when the population was nearly double what it is now. Entire industrial sectors which once employed thousands are simply vanished, leaving pensionless workers behind. There’s environmental gunk in the ground and water, huge industrial campuses that need to be dismantled and environmentally remediated – all that. This section of the country isn’t called the “Rust Belt” for shits and giggles.
It was right across the street from this old church that I found a fantastic off the maps diner, seemingly frequented by the locals, which served me a fantastic breakfast. I don’t normally eat a heavy breakfast, but given what my plans for the day were – I figured that I’d earn the eggs, bacon, orange juice, and blueberry pancakes by the next time I’d be taking a break. After getting fed, and having drank a yard arm of coffee, the camera was fully deployed and a humble narrator got busy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Heinz factory complex was on my shot list for the day, and just happened to be a couple of blocks from that humble diner. The weather and atmospherics in Pittsburgh are exceptionally changeable. Literally every hour of the day while I was in town, the sky was dramatically different than it been an hour before or would be an hour after. As is my habit, I had watched the weather report on TV local news for a forecast, and warnings about a powerful system of thunderstorms heading for the City abounded, so an interval spanning the 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. time period seemed like an excellent time to be back in the AirBNB and sheltered. Good, a deadline.
It was a warm day, and Pittsburgh is characteristically humid to start with given its riverine valleys topography. Luckily, I had carried warm weather clothing with me as well as cold weather garments. I would end up needing both on this visit, and was particularly glad that I had an umbrella tied onto my camera bag as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This Heinz factory was converted over to residential uses a few years ago, offering rental apartments and lofts. Considered to be sky high prices in the Pittsburgh rental market when it opened in 2005, the original price at opening for a 1 bedroom was $825 a month, and a 3 bedroom with a fireplace, terrace, and river views would have run you $2,725 a month. That’s turned into $1,655-$2,280 for a one bedroom in 2021, and a two bedroom will run you anywhere between $1,769 and $3,308 today. Their website doesn’t list any available 3 bedrooms. My understanding of the Pittsburgh Real Estate situation is that it’s actually a lot smarter to own than rent in this area, and that the “market” mainly involves free standing or semi attached homes rather than apartments or condos. A McMansion in a desirable suburb might cost you between $500,000 and $750,000, but the average price of a home is just under $200,000. What that means is that there aren’t that many rental units available.
Saying all that, I’m not from here and was just visiting for a couple of days. What do I know? I’m just a wandering mendicant, with a camera.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Herr’s Island Railroad Bridge pictured above, which is part of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail. The Western Pennsylvania Rail Road Company built the thing in 1890, which allowed them to cross over rail yards and properties owned by the B&O Rail Road to Herr’s Island – which I understand to have once been where you’d find animal stockyards and cold storage warehouses. The Pennsylvania Rail Road absorbed West Penn in 1903. By 1970, parts of the bridge had already started to be removed, and by post industrial 1990 it was a relic of an earlier era. In 1999, as part of the creation of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and the development of Herr’s Island as a mixed use residential and business district, the Herr’s Island Railroad Bridge was pedestrianized and connected to the north side of the Allegheny River.
More 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.
great elms
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The AirBNB listing described the accommodation as having the “best views” of downtown Pittsburgh. Have to admit, they were pretty awesome. My Amtrak chariot arrived at Pittsburgh’s Union Station right on time at 11:44 p.m. I had ridden on Amtrak’s Capitol line here from Washington D.C., and the train continued on without me to its eventual terminus in Chicago.
I staggered out onto the mean streets of Pittsburgh with my 25-30 pounds of luggage, camera gear, and a whole lot of stress. Luckily, the accommodation I’d be staying at was only a few blocks away from the train station and after a couple of hurdles I was some 23 stories up and chilling out in a pretty nice set of rooms. Before you ask – the AirBNB was roughly one third of the cost of several of the local hotels.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After calling home and letting Our Lady of the Pentacle know I had arrived safely, one began reordering “the carry.” Now that I had a secure home base, about 18 pounds of crap could be stowed there while I did my thing out of doors. I’ve been wanting to take the camera to Pittsburgh – with its 446 bridges and multiple active freight train tracks and it’s funicular railways – for a while. I had a plan, one which would start the next day at around 7 in the morning and play out over the next 72 hours.
For now, though, I set up the tripod (after offloading the Washington photos to the laptop) and got busy. The location of the AirBNB was at the Allegheny River side of the hypotenuse formed by the “Iron Triangle” of Pittsburgh’s three rivers. It was across the street from a local train station, which I did not use at all. Like I said – I had a plan, and it mainly involved walking rather than riding although I did use the occasional LYFT ride share car to get from A to B.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are several corporate “powers that be” housed in this area, including Mellon Bank, UPMC, Huntington, and others. There was also a Federal courthouse a few blocks away. Everywhere I looked, there was something interesting which caught my eye.
Despite the dreamless sleep on the Amtrak ride, I was exhausted. Capturing photos drained away any remaining energy or motivation, and I was passed out cold shortly after shooting them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The arrival in Pittsburgh was rather anticipated, but anticlimactic. Their grandiose Pennsylvania Railroad station has been converted over to a luxury apartment building, and Amtrak’s modern day station is somewhat reminiscent of late in the game Soviet municipal transit architecture – minus the chandeliers.
Nearby the Amtrak station is a Greyhound Bus terminal, as is the Pittsburgh Convention Center.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All of the shots looked peculiar to me when I checked my exposure on the camera screen. What’s with all that yellow/orange light, thought I. Suddenly, it occurred to me that since the NYC DOT has nearly completed its decade long conversion of NYC’S street lighting over to the bluish white LED luminaires, old school sodium based lighting now looks weird to me. Son of a gun, it’s true what they say about a frog in a slowly heating pot of water not realizing that its environment is coming to a deadly boiling point, since it happened gradually.
It’s like how lousy a Mayor De Blasio has been makes Eric Adams look good in comparison. He isn’t though, he’s worse. Mayor Adams is going to turn the heat up and boil you alive. Don’t believe me? Go price out a home in Downtown Brooklyn, he’s been Borough President there for the last 8 years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you can see from the clock pictured above, it was now 1:20 in the morning when I made the conscious decision to go to sleep. All told, I had been on the move for nearly 23 hours. Thing is, I was just getting started, and adventure in the Rust Belt awaited.
More tomorrow, from the pretty city of Pittsburgh, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“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.
rolling hills
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Union Station in Washington D.C. is where Amtrak is headquartered, and is their second busiest train station with just under 5 million riders passing through it every year. It’s the southern terminus for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, and also handles several commuter rail lines as well as municipal Streetcar and Bus operations for the City of Washington D.C. (local, as opposed to the Federal side of things).
In the late 19th century, Washington was a real mess. Separate rail yards, including ones on the site of what’s now the National Mall, were operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In 1901, Penn RR and B&O RR announced that they had arrived at an agreement to partner up and build what would become Union Station. As part of their agreement, they would abandon and remove the tracks and depots which they had piecemeal installed over the last 50-70 years in Washington. The abandoned land became the National Mall which was partially described in last week’s postings here at Newtown Pentacle.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Union Station was built under the supervision of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. Congress got involved, and “S. 4825 (58th-1st session) entitled “An Act to provide a union railroad station in the District of Columbia” which was signed into law by 26th President Theodore Roosevelt on February 28, 1903. The Act created a Washington Terminal Company (jointly owned by the B&O and the PRR-controlled Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington Railroad) to construct a railroad station “monumental in character.” The budget was $4 million (roughly $98.3 million in modern valuation) but Washington is no different now than it was then, so in the end it cost $5.9 million to build the thing. Grade crossings in the City were also eliminated, which cost the taxpayers about $3 million additional smackeroos.
A bit of trivia encountered while reading up for this post is that the neighborhood that Union Station was built in used to be called Swampoodle, and it was a “lawless shanty town populated by Irish, Italians, and Negroes” where public drunkenness and other licentious behavior was common. There were livestock pens, and a collection of shops that housed tin smiths. By October 27, 1907, Swampoodle was gone, as that’s when Union Station opened for business and the B&O’s Pittsburgh Express first arrived, to much fanfare.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m told that there are 32 station tracks at Union Station. 20 of them enter from the Northeast, with the remaining 12 entering the facility via a tunnel under Capitol Hill. I’m sure there’s a lot of nuanced commentary that could offered by a rail historian or dedicated rail fan, but one prefers not to dwell too deeply on such matters unless he’s forced into it. Unlike Sunnyside Yards, I do not want to be in a position to tell you who the field engineer for the Pennsylvania Rail Road was.
It’s during the time period that this station was built that the America we know in modernity was being created. Petroleum was replacing coal, cities were enacting sanitary and health codes, foreign military adventures had become normal, and the idea that a non European country might be able to single-handily dominate and control an entire hemisphere of the planet had emerged. It was during the interval of Union Station’s construction – in 1903, specifically – that the Wright Brothers began flying. The Civil War was a bad memory that fathers and grandfathers told their children about.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In 1971, the private capital version of rail road companies in the United States collapsed into bankruptcy, and President Richard Nixon nationalized the assets. Conrail was created to handle freight, Amtrak to handle inter city passenger travel, and the inner city and commuter rail businesses were allotted to a number of regional authorities – MTA, SEPTA, and so on. In the case of Union Station, the Federal Department of the Interior was put in charge of the place. Badly maintained, by 1983, it became apparent that a change was required if Union Station was to be saved. The Reagan administration transferred joint ownership of Union Station to Amtrak and the Federal Department of Transportation.
Far more renovations and rethinkings of the space occurred for me to pass on, but suffice to say that a significant and very expensive amount of work occurred here, resulting in gorgeous public areas like the grand hall – pictured above – being returned to their (somewhat) original glory. Union Station as you see it above reopened in 1988. There’s still work to be done, in both operational capability and the historic preservation spheres, and Amtrak keeps on talking about a fairly expensive vision for the future.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Great Hall/entrance is meant to be a waiting room, and when it’s time to start moving towards your train, you enter the concourse. That’s where the Amtrak counters are, as well as a series of shops and restaurants.
On a personal note, man oh man was I tired at this stage of the game. It was about three in the afternoon, and I had left HQ in Astoria at 2:30 in the morning for a 3:30 a.m. train to D.C. I had wandered out into the National Mall at just after 7 a.m. and began shooting with the characteristically brutal “hot” of Washington oppressing me. I got pics of several interesting POV’s while engaging in a frustrating Covid era search for something to drink and a place to… ahem… use the toilet. I made it all the way down to the Potomac and then had to meet up with an old friend for lunch. Sleep deprived doesn’t begin to describe my state.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator was thereby pretty loopy by the time this shot was taken. Honestly, I almost forgot to take it. The next leg of my September travels would involve a 7 hour and 40 minute Amtrak ride, and I’d be getting off the train at 11:44 p.m. Before boarding, I had slurped down a huge cup of coffee at Union Station, and my intention was to use the travel time to offload the Washington shots from my camera onto the very heavy laptop I was carrying with me. There’s a whole process to this – focus check, is it worth keeping, horizon straightening, cropping, key wording – before I even start to address what the color and tonality of the final shot will be. About one out of ten shots makes it through this process, and maybe one out of five of those makes it here.
Truth is that I fell asleep about a half hour after boarding the train, and remained passed out for about six hours. Sleeping in public is so outside of my ordinary mindset that I’m still shocked about it.
Human, all too human.
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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.
swelled alarmingly
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Three in the morning is exactly when Penn Station is at its best, I believe. The adjoining streets are populated by background extras from the movie “Taxi Driver,” and the cops randomly close several of the entrances to the train station because “because.” After stomping around with about 25-30 pounds of gear, and a week’s worth of clothing, one finally found an entrance which I could enter through after stepping over a few unconscious lunatics and an inebriate or two. I had a date with Amtrak, one which would culminate at 3:30 a.m.
The phrase “dystopian shithole” kept on going through my mind, as well as an accounting of the roughly thirty eight cents of every dollar I earn, disappearing into the black hole of New York City and State’s municipal coffers. Tax breaks for Billionaire Real Estate developers are clearly the logical thing to spend my tax money on, rather than a functioning transit system or a functioning social welfare network or a functioning Police force or a functioning anything. If you solve the problems, what are you going to run on in the next election cycle? Priorities.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Late night, they don’t use the sparkly new Moynihan Station for Amtrak, instead they use crappy old Penn Station. The first leg of my travels rendered a humble narrator sleep deprived, but the world doesn’t run on my scheduled comforts. The electronic boards didn’t tell me that the train was boarding, in fact, they didn’t tell me much of anything. An Amtrak employee suddenly materialized and began shouting out the number of the train and its destination. Indications were offered as to which staircase to descend, which led to the tracks below.
Shit. It’s all shit. We pay forty cents on the dollar for shit, and are told we should be lucky we got that. I’m so tired of fighting it at this stage of the game. Why, oh why does everything in NYC just suck?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Descent into the stygian depth of Penn Station found me boarding my appointed train. Settling into the seat was easily accomplished and the train was about half full (see, I’m an optimist). Fatigue would be my traveling companion for much of the next four days, but nevertheless I was quite excited to be finally embarking on this long planned trip around the northeastern United States.
At the beginning of the summer of 2021, an Amtrak rail pass had been purchased, which allowed me thirty travel segments. All told, I ended up using 22 of them over the next week (two of the segments were used on the Burlington trip). I was also traveling solo this time around.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The train began rolling, and I cracked out one shot of the part of Penn Station you don’t get to see. I tried a few shots from the moving train on the other side, but it was just too dark to get anything worth talking about. For the first, and not the last time, on this odyssey – I nodded out and fell asleep.
For those of you who know me, the idea that I fell asleep in public is surprising. It’s surprising for me as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The train arrived at its destination at 7 in the morning, where I had planned about a seven hour layover into my schedule. I had lunch plans with an old friend at 12:30, and the interval would be filled with photographic pursuits.
One had roughly planned out an intended path, and given the amount of time allotted to this leg of the journey – needed to work quickly and efficiently to capture some images.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Day one – and Washington D.C., beckoned.
More 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.
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