Inclined towards
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As previously described, one was executing one of my ‘long walks,’ which play out over several miles, one recent afternoon. Along the path I scuttled upon, you find yourself passing under the cantilevered trackway of one of the funicular inclines, specifically the Duquesne Incline (which I refer to as the ‘yellow one’). I got lucky, as the coincidental timing of when I was passing by included a close up of one the cars of the incline passing by virtually at arm’s length.
The T streetcars, the buses, and these inclines, are operated by the Pennsylvania’s Port Authority here in Pittsburgh. I still haven’t taken a bus, although I’m anxious to observe the various busways which snake through the city.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s one of those T streetcars from above, exiting the Panhandle Bridge and heading away from the city’s center, to the Station Square stop on the south side of the Monongahela River. The properties surrounding the bridge in the photo above used to be rail yards, operated by the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie RR – back in the day. There’s supposedly a whole lot of real estate development going on in this area, as part of the post steel industry revitalization effort.
The sky was beginning to look ominous, but as is my habit – I had checked the weather report and was carrying an umbrella with me.
The zoom lenses had been left at HQ, and I was carrying my kit of ‘bright’ prime lenses only. One on the camera, three in the bag – 16mm, 35mm, 50mm, and an 85mm.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Midway along the roadway I was scuttling down is found the 1924 vintage Liberty Tunnel, a high volume roadway dug through Mount Washington. Just over a mile in length, this tunnel is motor vehicle only, and it provides quick automotive access to the South Hills region of Pittsburgh from the ‘downtown’ center. HQ is at the bottom of one of those southern hills, and I drive through this tunnel frequently.
By the way, New Yorkers – this was shot at rush hour on weekday… they call this heavy traffic here. Wow.
It was starting to rain, but I was nowhere close to done with my day’s activities. My umbrella was deployed, and fixed into position between my camera bag’s strap and the left shoulder joint. This allows hands free usage of the thing, more or less.
Back tomorrow.
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Low to high
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, one was executing a constitutional walk around Pittsburgh recently, stretching my legs and maintaining a steady level of activity which kept my heart beating in an elevated but therapeutic manner. After riding the streetcar ‘T’ line to the center of Pittsburgh, and then crossing a bridge over the mouth of the Ohio at the joining of the city’s three rivers, one proceeded along the south shore of the Monongahela River.
Luckily, a Norfolk Southern train was rolling past on an elevated set of tracks found along a secondary arterial roadway called Saw Mill Run Blvd. This Saw Mill Run section is a fairly scary pathway, pedestrian wise, but I was heading for one of the inclines so…
Having paid my fare on the T, I got a free transfer to the incline/funiculars. That’s how I got from low to high (1,000 feet up) without having to climb a mountain.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After being deposited atop Mount Washington, which the funicular is set into, my path led me to the P.J. McArdle Roadway which carries vehicular traffic from down on the waterfront flats all the way up to the ridge line of the landform. The views are fairly spectacular up here, and I quite enjoy them. There’s also a shared pedestrian and bike path which leads back down to the flatlands below.
One has been using an app on the phone to measure things of late, and apparently I walk at 2.6 mph. The phone also advises on the length of my stride (26.4 inches), approximates the number of steps taken in any given outing, and describes asymmetries in how I’m moving my feet about. No big revelation is encountered there, especially after the various issues and injuries experienced in my left foot in recent years,
I’m about 3% off in terms of that limb’s efficiency according to the phone. It seems that about a third of the time I’m out scuttling, I have both feet contacting the ground at the same time, which must mean that the phone wants me to hop like a bunny or something.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fencing along this pathway is terrifyingly fragile, riddled with rust and the weathered corruption of old age. In several places it’s non existent and you’re looking at 1,000 foot drop along what has to be a 60 or 70 degree angle through woods. Brr.
This particular stretch of the cantilevered roadway sports concrete separation between the ped/bike lane and vehicular traffic but this is only for certain sections. There’s a long stretch of this P.J. McArdle roadway where all there is between you and the traffic that’s zipping past you at 40-50mph is just a regular three inch curb. Brrr.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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A gray day
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was exercise day again, so the now familiar ritual of walking to and riding the T streetcar, from HQ to the metropolitan center of Pittsburgh, was enacted. I’ve been using my headphones again on these walks, after a quite long interval of not doing so, and one was listening to an audiobook.
This time around one was listening to a ‘various hands’ reading of the text of Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’ with different narrators reading the various chapters, a file I had long ago downloaded from the LibriVox outfit. It’s a series of awful readings actually, of a book written by an awful man and the audiobook uses a not so great translation as its source. The audiobook has a series of what sounds like 19 year old American college students do the readings. Seriously, if you want to produce something like this, find somebody who sounds like Werner Herzog or Brother Theodore to do the narration. It’s Nietzsche, after all.
Thus spake Waxathustra, while watching as a village fool, walking on a tightrope of aspirant desire, took that first step in order to delight the sheep below.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I switched over to a different audiobook, and proceeded to scuttle towards Pittsburgh’s West End Bridge, spanning the Ohio River. The T had dropped me on the North Shore of the Allegheny River, nearby the sports ball stadium utilized by the Pittsburgh Steelers to thrill the community, and at the streetcar service’s terminal stop not too far from the aforementioned West End Bridge.
The new audiobook I had keyed in was Nellie Bly’s ‘Ten Days in a Mad-House.’ The text triggered a vast set of reminiscences for me, about Roosevelt Island and the Queensboro Bridge. This narration was read by a woman who sounded quite young, and quite apropo for the voice of Nellie, who was the inspiration for Lois Lane.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After crossing the Ohio River, one encountered the outfall canal of its tributary ‘Chartiers Creek,’ a waterway which was mentioned in a post about a recent visit to the community of Carnegie for a short walk, not so long ago. This day’s endeavor, however, was one of my ‘long walks’ and there were a few things which I planned on getting a look at along the way, which included the outfall pictured above.
Ten Days in a Mad-House, if you’re not familiar, revolves around a 19th century Reporter Nellie Bly getting herself committed to New York’s Welfare Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) asylum, as part of an undercover assignment for the New York World newspaper. If you want to check out the free audiobook – here you go.
Later in her career, Bly would ‘go around the world in 72 days,’ write a novel, and then married a 73 year old millionaire when she was 31. After her husband’s death in 1904, Bly became an industrialist running his steel can and container manufacturing business. Nellie Bly was a pen name, she was actually named Elizabeth Cochran.
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.
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.
“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 