Fourteen Months later…
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator stumbled out of HQ in Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont at about five in the morning, fired up the Mobile Oppression Platform, and then drove through the entire state of Pennsylvania into New Jersey, and then across the George Washington and Triborough Bridges into NYC. I timed it right, and was traveling at 50 mph on the Harlem River Drive by mid afternoon.
All told, the drive is about 400 miles – and with bathroom and lunch breaks, costs about 7 hours of my life and a full tank of gasoline to execute. One wasn’t planning on returning to the corruption of the nest until the end of this year, but exigency is what it is.
Pictured above is the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site, along the fabulous Newtown Creek. In my absence, decking and seating has been installed.
I had some family business to attend to, back in the old neighborhood, if you’re wondering.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was staying at a friend’s place in Middle Village, but he wasn’t going to get home from work until well after 5 p.m., so I had a bit of time to kill.
The Maspeth Avenue Plank Road site has been discussed endlessly here at Newtown Pentacle.
When I first started offering walking tours of Newtown Creek’s uplands, this often flooded spot was hidden by invasive weeds and thorny brush. A buddy of mine, who works nearby, had a stack of wooden palettes he couldn’t get rid of, so we loaded them into the bed of his pickup and set them into the soil here to create a pathway. Literally recreating a plank road at Plank Road.
My pals at Newtown Creek Alliance have been working here since, executing no small amount of time and treasure to ensure that an intentional point of public access to Newtown Creek exists in Queens. In the intervening years, the place has become quite well used by workers and Maspeth residents for a variety of purposes. If you build it, they will come.
As you’d imagine, returning here was a bit of a ‘head trip’ for me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
“Why bother, it’s a dump,” “they should just fill it in and pave it over”… I’ve heard it all from the people of Maspeth. The only way I ever found to motivate that part of the Newtown Creek world was to intone that Superfund money was going to go to the Hipsters in Brooklyn and Ridgewood (whom they generally hate), and Queens would get left out of the equation unless they got involved with the process. That side of the community, however, never really bothered to get involved with things here so my colleagues and I ‘took the bull by the horns’ for them instead.
Contemplative after my long drive, I took just a few photos. There’s very little on Newtown Creek which I haven’t exhaustively photographed – and especially so the Plank Road – which I’ve shot at every interval of the day, including the dead of night. This is where I photographed the implosion of the old Kosciuszcko Bridge from, as an example, and I’ve brought hundreds of curious lookie loos here on tours over the years.
It was weird, being here again. It almost felt like I was visiting my own grave. I always referred to this area as ‘the happy place,’ but instead I was filled with a deep melancholy, and possessed by reminisces of times past and absent friends.
Back tomorrow.
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Bigly industry
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured in today’s post is the U.S. Steel’s Clairton Works, a gigantic industrial plant whose design and mission involves the transformation of coal into coke. The coke they process here fires the furnaces at other USS plants, notably the Edgar Thompson Steel Mill a few miles west of here.
Fleets of tugboats and railroads carry raw coal here (which does have the appearance of having been pre-processed, particle size wise, I’d offfer), where it’s them cooked in anoxic ovens which produces the coke. Or at least, that’s how I understand how their process works, as I’m still largely ignorant on the subject.
You can read about Coke, and its relatively short industrial history, at this Wikipedia page.
The Clairton Works is the largest manufacturer of Coke in the United States. The history of the plant and the town it is located in are wound up in each other, and this Wikipedia page offers a cogent history which I’d just be referring to over and over so – click here for the overview/scoop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One had parked the Mobile Oppression Platform on the other side of the river, at a lot offered by the Montour Trail outfit, and then walked across the Clairton-Glassport Bridge to the north bank of the Monongahela River for these points of view. I had to shoot through tightly spaced fencing for some of the shots, which is a pain in the butt.
On this shoreline, several large properties were in the business of storing and sorting coal that had been brought using maritime barges. Stout pierage and docks were observed on both sides of the river, which also had impressive concrete bulkheads installed along their water facing edges. I’m sure that I was popping up on security cameras within the plant, and that were I to have crossed some imaginary property line I’d get to meet the local gendarmes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The owners of the plant, U.S. Steel, offer this overview document on their website – which describes the purpose, challenges, and environmental control systems of their operation – you can check that out here.
The economic engine of this part of the country used to revolve around this industry, and in many ways it was the industrial heart of the United States during most of the 20th century. Steel from Pittsburgh allowed Manhattan’s skyline to rise, Detroit to build automobiles, and the Navy was able to replace the Pacific fleet lost at Pearl Harbor due to the efforts of the workers at these plants.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is – of course – quite new to all of this steel stuff. The scale of things are positively cyclopean, dwarfing anything you’d encounter back in NYC or Northwestern New Jersey. The confluence of massive amounts of rail and maritime activity, everything about Clairton is amazingly large and it’s difficult to conceive of the scale of an operation this big even when you’re staring right at it.
There were about a dozen large material handlers, like the one pictured above, at work when I arrived but it must have been time for a shift change as their operators were all piling into pickup trucks and leaving their rigs behind while I was up there on that bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the view of the Clairton-Glassport Bridge which I walked over, looking back towards the south side of the river, and a residential section of the city of Clairton. The span is about a half mile long, and lined with an unfortunately small chain link fence. As I mentioned yesterday that it is virtually impossible to get a clean shot through this type of fencing.
I imagine that’s by design. I’ve had experience with this type of fence back in NYC at Sunnyside Yards, and it’s a real pickle to get a shot through. The larger chain link fencing, with a more conventional two inch diamond is a pain in the neck too, but the smaller one is nightmarish for photographers. There were a few surveyor holes cut into it here and there, but they didn’t offer salubrious view points.
I used my phone, whose lens is tiny enough to somewhat ignore the fencing, to record a couple of short videos from up on the bridge – check them out here and here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As a newcomer to Pittsburgh, I still haven’t discovered the points of view which the natives enjoy. I’m constantly looking at other people’s photos and videos, and trying to scry where they were shot from. The site linked to above is Fort Frick Photography, and I’m a fan.
Again, back in NYC at my beloved Newtown Creek, long experience created an absolute glossary of these POV spots. Climb this, walk there, stand on that – that sort of thing.
I’m still finding those things here, and my occasional encounters with other photo people have included conversation about visual access to the various points of interest around Pittsburgh. I didnt grow up here, so it’s all new to me, and I’m unsure of ‘the rules,’ or where it’s ‘kosher’ to shoot from. You have to worry about teenagers, cops, malign creatures of the street – all that. I’m never so vulnerable as when I’m on foot and using the tripod. Static target.
Back next week with something else, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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Coke, coal, & Clairton
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A rare sunny/warm January day found a humble narrator behind the steering wheel of his Mobile Oppression Platform, heading eastwards along the Monongahela River. My destination was the community of Clairton, where U.S. Steel maintains and operates the Clairton Works. The manufacturing mission here involves the refinement of Coke from Coal, for usage at other company facilities dedicated to the production of steel. This process, coincidentally, produces a tremendous amount of ‘coal gas’ along with several other undesirable compounds.
If Pittsburgh happens to smell like rotten eggs on any given day, odds are that the wind is blowing past the Clairton plant with its voluminous exhaust of sulfur compound waste products.
There’s a great site called ‘Plume Pittsburgh’ which offers a live ‘weather’ report on the local triad of point sources (of which Clairton is the primary offender), and it basically lets you know which way the wind is blowing here, or at the two other U.S. Steel facilities in the ‘Mon Valley.’ PlumePGH can be accessed here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I haven’t spent much time around these parts, yet. Partially, it’s the fact that other places closer to home have drawn my interest. Another factor is that the town itself seems pretty stressed – with shuttered store fronts, abandoned homes, and other ‘rust belt’ indicators which indicate an insalubrious state of affairs, and suggests that the local gentry wouldn’t necessarily be welcoming to a curious stranger wandering around with a camera. Got to acknowledge ‘vibe.’
The locals seem to park on sidewalks and in private lots, which indicates to me that the streets are fairly ‘verboten’ for strangers parking on them. This is a place which you have to get to by automotive means, although I’m told there used to be street car service from Pittsburgh proper ‘back in the day.’
Luckily, there’s a branch of the Montour Trail which overlaps with the still unexplored ‘Steel Valley trail,’ and the Montour outfit offers a free parking lot for its visitors. After securing the MOP into said lot, a humble narrator set out on foot. I was seemingly the singular pedestrian in this section of the town. Definitely was the only one wearing a filthy black raincoat and carrying a camera.
There’s near constant rail traffic here, and there’s a lot of maritime activity on the nearby river, as well. CSX runs a frequent freight service whose coal carrying cars bear the logo of ‘Coke Express.’ Pictured above is a Norfolk Southern Train which is also no stranger to these parts, and observed but not photographed was U.S. Steel’s ‘House Brand’ Union Railroad.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s about a 3 or 4 block walk from the trail’s parking lot to a fairly large vehicular 1987 vintage bridge spanning the Monongahela River, one whose anterior side provides for a point of view of the Clairton Plant, and the thing offers a pedestrian/bike lane. Thereby, away I scuttled,
Unfortunate circumstance on the bridge itself involves the State authorities’ usage of the sort of chain link fencing pictured above. Little 1 inch diamond shape holes… this is always a difficult circumstance for the wandering photographer to shoot through, and similar fencing used to annoy me back at Sunnyside Yards in Queens. There’s rail tracks all over the place, but the main tracks are found just below the bridge. This sort of fencing is commonly encountered at locations overlooking rail lines, so it’s likely some sort of Homeland Security regulation.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you what I saw on the other side, and make an attempt at a semi informed description of the milieu.
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Gray days
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a spell of what felt like two weeks of rain and snow showers, a brief January interval occurred here in Pittsburgh during which precipitation wasn’t falling from the sky, and a humble narrator headed over to the West End Overlook park to try and capture a few shots. What I was hoping for was an image or two of some shoreline flooding which all that sky water had wrought along the river banks – during which the level of the three rivers had risen about 24-36 inches over their mean average, but by the time I got there – the waters had receded.
That’s me, a day late and a dollar short.
Most of the locally sourced photographers in Pittsburgh seem to make it a point of operating during early mornings and sunset, and I’m beginning to understand why. The early afternoon light was absolutely ‘meh.’
That’s Downtown Pittsburgh and the confluence of the Three Rivers pictured – Allegheny and Monongahela’s meeting point, where their admixture becomes the Ohio.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Regardless, I was there anyway and decided to crack out a few shots. This location is about a 20 minute drive from HQ, and it’s a public park, so there’s no worries about trespassing on someone’s property. I’ve captured some genuinely lovely shots there in the past, and as long time readers of this – your Newtown Pentacle – will tell you, when I find a nice spot or ‘point of view’ I’ll revisit it during different seasons, times, and climatological conditions.
Also as mentioned, I’ve been in a bit of a ‘mood’ for the last few weeks, which is something easily forecast when the season is mid winter. If you click through to any of the January and February archives listed on the right hand side of the page, you’ll find lots and lots of me bitching about the cold and dark months. It’s not ‘seasonal disaffective disorder’ if you’re wondering, instead I’m just somewhat bored and miss the ‘good light.’
That’s the West End Bridge, and that tug is navigating the headwaters of the Ohio River.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This photo looks up the Monongahela River, which is a corridor that I’ve spent a lot (most) of my photo time exploring in the last year.
It started to rain again just as I was clicking the shutter button for this shot, and one had to break down the tripod and camera quickly and return to the Mobile Oppression Platform for cover. All told, I think I had something like an hour up there in between bands of rain and drove back to HQ in a frustrated mood.
Man, I’ve got to find somewhere where I can go shoot that has a roof.
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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.
Loose Grommets
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Have this old man mentioned, lately, how much I hate the winter months?
When I was a young but already humble narrator, Winter was one of my favorite times of the year, but life in this fairly decrepit and rapidly decaying pentagenarian pre-corpse that I inhabit finds that the season offers little joy. My health problems Bingo card includes arthritis, a condition which reminds me of every major injury that’s ever been inflicted upon the ceramic frame that my corrupted flesh hangs upon, during the wet and cold. Couple that in with the physical and psychic aftermath of a recent trip to NYC, and a back log of fairly unexciting photos which I’ve yet to to develop. Hence – an archives post greets you today. What can I tell you – I’m all ‘effed up.
I’m medium sure that y’all haven’t seen these, but if you have – the brain is still fried from that drive to and from NYC from Pittsburgh, so… sorry. Coming apart at the seams, at the moment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since I fundamentally have little to say about the shots embedded in today’s post, other than that they were gathered on Pittsburgh walks I took in December and early January before the ‘gray’ season set in, I’d offer that I really wasn’t ‘grooving’ on NYC when I was there last week and decided that I’m glad that I finally escaped the place. I say it all the time – I live in Pittsburgh now, but NYC will always be home.
Thing is, it’s very ‘human’ to romanticize the past, but one tends to gloss over or forget all of the existential horror of day to day life. Things are much, much better for us here, living out a less pressurized and quieter existence here in Pittsburgh.
Spending a few days back home really magnified this POV for me. Everything was smaller, and dirtier, and harder.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m told that ‘the old neighborhood’ is experiencing a snow event today, but this particular storm blew around Pittsburgh, and it’s a chilly but otherwise sunny day here. I’ve got a few hundred photos to develop, which you’ll be seeing in forthcoming posts, but I’m also desperate to get out and get some exercise, despite the arthritis and other daggers of age and inflammation I’m feeling right now.
Best thing to do, when such factors affect me, is to get out with the camera and scuttle about. Pop the locks, stretch the tendons and ligaments, use the muscles.
Back tomorrow with something a bit less introspective and complaint focused, 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.
The Newtown Pentacle 