St. Joseph’s RC church, Oil City
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When people get rich, suddenly, they generally want to say ‘thank god.’ When people stay rich for a generation or two, they start building churches. In the case of Oil City, there’s a real cracker of a Catholic Church enjoyed by the local parish, dubbed the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church.
Since I was in town, a visit to this particular ‘sacred space’ was on my to-do list. My companion for the day and I strode up to the place, and found the front doors locked, but the side entrance was open and we stepped inside for a somewhat breath taking visit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
St. Joseph was built on a hill found on the north side of Oil City, in a fairly well kept residential neighborhood. I’m told that no matter where you are in Oil City, the spires are visible and provide a landmark which the locals use to navigate the streets with. There were earlier versions of the church on this site, with decidedly lesser structures. The current building was opened in 1894, with the congregation officially having been established in the Oil City/Titusville area all the way back in 1862.
A detailed historical account of St. Joseph Parish is available for inspection at this site. It’s somewhat difficult to read, due to some curious choices regarding typography, but it’s a sound narrative and very well researched.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We entered the building, and found the cavernous chapel completely empty of congregants. One affixed a wide angle lens, the one I was blathering on about last week, to the camera and got busy. I’m told that the church has been quite recently renovated and refinished, in 2020, by a Wisconsin based outfit that specializes in this sort of thing.
I’m told that the architectural style of the building is ‘gothic and late gothic revival,’ but I’m not at all schooled in such matters and cannot speak intelligently about the subject.
Check out this page from archipedia for the details on its style.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This church is ultimately overseen by the Bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania – the ‘Most Rev. Lawrence T. Persico.’ The Bishop, in 2020, combined the nearby St. Stephen Parish with St. Joseph Parish at the request of the local pastor, one Rev. John Miller. It’s all St. Joseph Parish now.
This sort of combination and restructuring is a region wide phenomena which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is undertaking, due to the decline in local populations here in the so called ‘rust belt,’ and it’s a process I mentioned in a post about St. Bernard’s RC church back in the South Hills of Pittsburgh (which has a different Bishop, and Diocese).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What I can say, categorically, is that the interior space in St. Joseph is striking and glorious. Great lighting design, gorgeous stained glass, and kept neat as a pin. As long time readers will tell you, a humble narrator has had a long fascination with photographing ‘sacred spaces,’ and in particular ones belonging to the Roman Catholics.
I seldom use a tripod in these sorts of places, as it seems disrespectful. This time, however, my companion and I were the only ones in the chapel, so I did. My little ‘platypod’ mounting plate was deployed and the camera affixed to it. It allowed me to use flat surfaces in the church itself for the camera to rest upon.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We still had that long drive ahead of us, described a couple of days back in this travelogue, some two and change hours back to Pittsburgh with a quick stop mid journey to drop my traveling companion off.
One thereby bid adieu to Oil City, having also decided to return in the spring for another go at satisfying my shot list and getting the rest of the points of interest I had encoded into a Google Map, which we didn’t get to. The oldest continually producing oil well in the United States is nearby, for instance… and I’m interested in riding on the Oil City & Titusville Railroad as well.
Back next week with something different, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
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The octopus’ garden
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few days ago, you got to see the Drake Well – the very first commercial oil well in the United States. Regaled, you were, with tales of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush of the late 19th century, and a corporate leviathan named John D. Rockefeller, who formed a monopoly over the new industry which was called the Standard Oil Trust.
An attempt at summarizing Standard’s business practices was made in that post – describing their ‘combinations’ scheme of horizontal integration, which gave Rockefeller and Standard an iron grip on the prospecting, drilling, pumping, transport, pricing, refinement, marketing, and delivery of petroleum to oil’s ‘end’ customers. Over 90% of the global market was under their control, and a near total monopoly over the domestic North American Market was achieved.
Pictured above is the National Transit Building in Oil City, Pennsylvania. This was a regional HQ for Standard Oil during PA.’s Oil Rush. The ‘head office’ was in NYC, specifically the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway, in lower Manhattan.
An excellent history of Oil City’s National Transit Building, and the titan of industry which inhabited it, can be accessed here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Directly across the street, where an oil exchange building that was built by the local entrepreneurs once stood, is the Oil City National Bank Building. Like the National Transit Building across the street, the bank building is part of Oil City’s historic district. My understanding of the history here is that once Standard Oil established itself across the street, the first thing to go was the Oil Exchange, and that the bank itself was a part of Standard’s ‘combinations of horizontal integration.’
Once the local Oil Exchange was closed down, if you had petroleum you wanted to ship to markets on the Eastern Seaboard – you’d have to cross the street and talk to one of the Standard men who represented another near total monopoly – the Pennsylvania Railroad. Need barrels? Pipes? Labor? Talk to someone in the National Transit Building.
You could bet going in that you weren’t going to be paying the same price for services or materials as Standard Oil was. It was also likely that one of the Standard Oil men would make an offer to buy you out, and expand their empire by making you a vassal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
National Transit Building was completed in 1890, and after the 1911 Sherman Anti Trust judgement against the Standard Oil Trust broke the octopus up, the building and its offices were bought by the three locally headquartered companies of Pennzoil, Quaker State, and Wolf’s Head. The building passed into private hands in 1957, and then in 1993 it was donated to a non profit corporation which subsequently failed to make a go of it. It was empty and abandoned for a spell.
Ralph Nader bought the building in 1995, invested $100,000 in renovating it, renamed it as the Civic Renewal Center and then gifted it back to Oil City. Today, it’s home to artist studios and private offices.
Check out the current management’s website here.
Back tomorrow with more, from Oil City.
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The grass is green & the girls are pretty…
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, this is the same view which I was denied, here in Pennsylvania’s Oil City, due to heavy bank of fog at dawn when I first arrived – as detailed in this post. The POV above is from a small park area, called Murray’s Overlook, which I’d ‘guesstimate’ as being about 800 feet over the municipality, and the branch of the Allegheny River which snakes through it.
Oil City is a spot I’ve been wanting to check out since moving to Western PA. from NYC. As the name of the place might suggest – it’s one of several ‘oil boom towns’ which sprang up during the Pennsylvania Oil Rush during the late 19th century. This used to be the HQ location for Pennzoil, Quaker State, and Wolf’s Head Oil.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oil City achieved its greatest population size in 1930, when it was home to about 20,000 people and had a very busy industrial maritime shoreline that handled the subterrene lakes of oil being extracted from the nearby fields. Industry and large businesses have relocated since, and thereby the population in Oil City has steadily declined over the last century from peak levels. There’s about 9,000 people living here in modernity.
The boom years left behind a stock of beautiful old buildings in the downtown historical area, a particular specimen of which will be focused in on – as a matter of fact – a bit later this week. There’s rail tracks still present in Oil City, but there’s no station anymore and the trains passing through the place are carrying freight.
Well, I guess you can ride a train for part of the year at least, the Oil City & Titusville heritage line, which was mentioned yesterday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The town promotes its historic legacy, in an attempt to draw in tourists, and there’s wooded trails and historic districts and all kinds of stuff to explore here. We parked the Mobile Oppression Platform (MOP) in the lot of one these trails, which follows the shoreline of the Allegheny River (pictured above), and sallied forth on foot.
There’s a bunch of cool bridges here too. I have no idea which one I was standing under… umm, ok… it’s the 1990 vintage Veteran’s Memorial Bridge, which replaced an earlier 1910 version.
Apparently, an apocalypse played out hereabouts in 1892, one which wiped out the entire town – the disastrous flood and fire of June 4th and 5th. Click through for this one, I’d advise – burst dam causes a flood, naphtha and oil released into water, a yellowish fog rises, a fire starts, a boom, suddenly everything’s burning including people and animals… Here’s a second link, one with actual photos of the devastation. Here’s a third, from the Federal Agency NOAA. It’s some story, this.
The conflagration’s official tally included killing about 132 people, destroying roughly a million and a half bucks worth of private property, and largely wiping out Oil City’s waterfront. Titusville was hit by this flooding as well, and all of the bridges across Oil Creek leading into Oil City were lost.
That’s 1892 money, btw, in modernity those one and a half million dollars of loss would translate to a modern day sum of $36,627,500.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It had become quite a beautiful day by the time we returned to Oil City, my companion and I thought, after executing our quickly decided upon change of plan in the morning.
I was catching a ‘vibe,’ however, that we didn’t want to hang around here terribly long, lest the attentions of some base element catch upon us. A definite vibe of being watched from afar…
Regarding this hippy dippy ‘vibe’ thing of mine, nothing in particular set the radar off. I was just suddenly ‘aware’ of my surroundings, and something was off.
To be fair: We had zero in the way of negative interaction with others, my companion and I, but my ‘spidey sense’ was tingling. The few residents of Oil City whom we interacted with couldn’t have been nicer, in actuality. Maybe I was just tired, and fatigue was fueling my paranoia.
I think it’s smart to be a little paranoid, but I am from NYC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At any rate, I was beginning to feel some actual physical exhaustion, after waking up so much earlier than I usually do. There were still a couple of things I wanted pics of before heading back to Pittsburgh, however. Regardless, I had about a two and change hour drive from Oil City ahead of me to get back home.
I also knew that the southeasterly drive would place the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself directly in the center of the MOP’s windshield. That’s going to suck, I thought, and Y’know what? I was right, it did – in fact – suck.
The fact that I was going to have to contend with school bus influenced stop and go traffic was also present in the brain. Additionally, just as I would be entering Pittsburgh, the evening rush hour would be getting underway.
This day trip, thereby, was nearly over.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These six images were all ‘tripod shots,’ and the last of that sort of shooting I’d be doing this day.
From this point out, I had rigged the camera for ‘photowalk’ duty, and after stowing the tripod and other gear into my knapsack, we headed over to the historic district, where a specific structure that I wanted to get a few shots of would be found.
More on that tomorrow.
Also, about the title of this post – everytime I say ‘Oil City,’ the Guns and Roses song ‘Paradise City’ pops up in my noggin for some reason. What can I say, other than that I’m all ‘effed up.
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Titusville, Pa.
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above is the home of a journalist named Ida Tarbell. Tarbell is remembered for writing biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon, amongst others. She is especially honored for her nineteen ‘muckraker’ style articles on the Standard Oil Company, which were originally serialized in McClure’s Magazine.
Her work on those articles resulted in the ultimate breakup of Standard Oil and the creation of Federal level regulatory agencies. The reports were combined into a book – The History of the Standard Oil Company. The text is available as a free audiobook, in two parts, and found at LibriVox.
It’s quite a book, I would add.
One first became aware of Ida Tarbell when researching the Tidewater Building back in NYC, found alongside the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge in the Blissville section of Queens, on Newtown Creek.
Her home in Titusville PA., pictured above, is thereby recognized as a ‘historic place,’ and there’s a bit of signage out side signifying the author’s work and the house she dwelt in. Lovely structure, if you ask me. I got the distinct impression that it’s still in use as a home, rather than housing a historic society or something.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The next stop was to check out a Motel whose conceit revolves around the fact that all of the rentable domiciles are former railroad Caboose Cars. This is part of the Oil City & Titusville historic railroad outfit’s operation.
The rail outfit runs what you might call a ‘Heritage line,’ not unlike the one in Western Maryland Scenic RR, down in Maryland’s City of Cumberland, that I showed y’all a few weeks ago. The OC&T peeps seem to operate along similar lines – historic rolling stock and short run tourist trips.
They also have a bunch of interesting rail cars on their site.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This RR outfit sprung into existence after the Oil Rush started up just after the Civil War, and operated well into the 20th century. That’s a 1947 locomotive pictured above, one which you can find out all the nitty gritty about at the OC&T site.
I plan on returning, in the Springtime, when they are running the trains again for tourist duty. There’s an open air car which seems quite promising for itinerant photographers.
This is a fairly long drive for me, from Pittsburgh, roughly 2 and change hours from HQ.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On display, the OC&T RR had several interesting offerings to check out, but this snow plow train car immediately caught my eye. What an interesting series of parabolic curves, huh?
It was time to get moving, though. As you’ll recall, this day trip began with a visit to what turned out to be a fog choked view of Pennsylvania’s Oil City. My companion and I decided to reverse my original schedule and try Titusville instead, with a return to Oil City (about 20 miles to the south) planned for the afternoon.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was about 11:30 a.m. by this point, and as described in prior posts – I had left HQ at about 4:30 a.m. so I was running on fumes at this point. We decided it was a good idea to grab a meal, and also use the opportunity to oblige other biological functions. The local McDonald’s, thereby, was visited and patronized.
The fast food outpost is located along the shoreline of Oil Creek, mentioned yesterday, but grabbing a few shots of this unusually stolid bridge was also on the menu. It’s the 1939 vintage South Franklin Street Bridge, if you’re curious, which carries local Route 8. It’s historic!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This shot was gathered from onboard the South Franklin Street span, depicting Oil Creek lazily flowing through Titusville. After quaffing cheeseburgers, fries, and drinking a coke, we climbed back into the Mobile Oppression Platform and motored in a southernly direction along Route 8, and back to Oil City.
More on all that tomorrow.
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Oil Creek
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Oil Creek pictured in today’s post, as seen from the property where the Drake Well site is found just south of Titusville, PA. The waterway itself is 46.7 miles long, and is a tributary of the Allegheny River. This was my first time visiting it.
Apocryphal stories which I’ve read over the years suggest it got its name from slicks of raw petroleum, which would seep out of the ground, floating along on its surface. Further legends suggest that the local Native American folk used the tar like natural petroleum found along Oil Creek for a variety of purposes, such as medicinal poultices and waterproofing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’d ask you to scroll back and check out the mega post offered on Friday, which discussed the Drake Well site, and the Pennsylvania Oil Rush of the late 19th century. It was an exhausting one to write and research, and its length strays into territory which the kids would call ‘TLDR’ or ‘too long didn’t read.’
Today, it’s just pictures of the waterway itself for you, Lords and Ladies. My companion and I on this particular day trip had other spots to hit, places to visit, and things to wave the camera about at. Saying that, I couldn’t resist breaking out the tripod and getting busy for a few minutes. Tomorrow we get back to the travelogue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It should be mentioned how much I’m enjoying the novelty of seeing these things for the first time, especially locales such as this which I’d only read about back in NYC, while researching the early oil industry along Newtown Creek.
These days, it’s actually kind of pretty along Oil Creek, but contemporary descriptions of this area from the late 19th century described a despoiled and destroyed landscape filled with oil derricks and puddles of raw petroleum. Mordor, basically.
Back tomorrow with more, at 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 