Seldom Seen Greenway, addendum
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Yesterday, I described the ‘Seldom Seen Greenway’ trail in Pittsburgh’s Beechview section, and mentioned that there was a second level to the place found above the brick lined trestle pictured above. This second level, as I discovered, hosts active rail tracks. I found that out while doing a bit of research on the place after getting back to HQ from the location.
That’s why I found myself back there a day or two later. I had to take a look at what, where, why, how – all that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It wasn’t that difficult getting all the way up here, but it was a bit complicated getting back down the steep incline while managing my camera and pack. These are freight tracks, ones which are somewhat infrequently used – once or twice a day, I reckon. I’ve seen video of trains moving along the tracks here, which display the polished steel rails you’d associate with active RR tracks. A Wheeling and Lake Erie train set was moving through in the video I saw, but I couldn’t tell you if this is exclusively their right of way or not.
I hung around up there for about a half hour with my fingers crossed, but then I got bored and slid back down the steep hill to the greenway below. I’ll be back, next time with a sandwich and thermos bottle of water, and just wait it out. Trains are a lot like fishing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I shot a few shots down below, with nothing terribly special to show for the effort, frankly. The nearby Saw Mill Run Boulevard, named for this waterway, is a primary arterial roadway that connects to the Liberty Tunnel on one side and the West End Bridge (amongst other destinations in either direction) on the other. It also connects to two other primary arterials called Banksville Road and West Liberty Avenue. These three roadways have secondary and tertiary high volume roads that branch off and lead out into the residential neighborhoods of the South Hills in this part of Pittsburgh.
Back tomorrow with something different at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
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Seldom Seen Greenway
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
About a 15 minute drive from HQ in Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont is the neighboring South Hills community of Beechview. Along a very busy arterial roadway called Saw Mill Run Boulevard is found a 3/4 of a mile long trail called ‘Seldom Seen Greenway.’ A recent visit was paid.
There’s a rail trestle at the entrance, and the pathway in from the parking area follows the flowing waters of the Saw Mill Run waterway. Based on olfactory observation, Saw Mill Run receives a bit of wastewater flow from the surrounding residential areas.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rail trestle at the entrance has a finely wrought brick tunnel, which is something that kind of jumps out at you. A lot of time and effort went into the masonry, and given that what you’d normally encounter in a spot like this would be unadorned concrete, it makes me wonder why the expense was undertaken to create this sort of fascia.
The entire path is graded. Pavement is present. It seems there’s a group who looks after the place, but this is an ‘official’ public place and recreational path.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s opportunity to get down to the water from the path, although in many places that opportunity is either quite steep or obstacles like patches of Poison Ivy occlude one’s intentions to do so. The sloping hillsides leading down to Saw Mill Run are fully wooded.
The waterway itself is largely shallow and only a few inches deep, but there’s a couple of spots where the bottom drops away to a few feet and the water flows quickly across the gaps. My guess is that if you were a teenager in Beechview, this is one of the places where you would go to escape parental or adult oversight and smoke the devil’s cabbage.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Every time I try to say what kind of a bird a bird is, I just get it wrong so instead I make up names for the Avians. Thusly, your looking at a Nine Fingered Radish Hen in the shot above.
I actually do know that’s a duck, so you don’t need to tell me that. What kind of a duck? Ask an Audubon, Bro.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Above the trestle at the entrance there are two other levels of rail infrastructure. After returning to HQ and poking around on the internet, I discovered that the top level tracks are still active. On this first visit though, I didn’t climb up there to investigate.
I’m actually quite pleased to have found this place, so close to HQ. This will be a great spot to take short walks when time is short. There’s also a dedicated ‘Seldom Seen’ parking lot, so double win. As you’ll discover at the end of this post, I’m now seriously in need of this sort of place.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m going to require a portfolio of spots like this one, after all. Near the house, separated from traffic and distractions. There’s lots of training underway here in Dormont. What kind of training, you ask?
Meet the newest member of the family: Moe the Dog. He’s 5 months old, and whereas he only weighs about 35 pounds, he’s nevertheless a ton of fun. That’s my new Pennsyldoggie.
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Can confirm the ‘sylvan’ part
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has mentioned the multitude of recreational trails in the Pittsburgh area before. As has often been described, walking around with the camera isn’t just another one of my obsessions, rather I have to walk a certain number of miles a week to maintain a good state of health. That’s how this whole deal got started, all those years ago, when a younger but already quite humble narrator first marched off – with palpitant heart – towards a fabled eidolon called Newtown Creek, camera in hand.
Weather permitting, I try to get out every other day for a walk of at least a couple/three miles, and then really burn out a lot of steps once a week with a 5-10 mile scuttle. Short ones, long ones. That’s the plan, anyway.
A recent short walk saw me marching around north of the city, up in the Glenshaw section, at ‘Fall Run Park,’ which I’ve described here before.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’d been uncharacteristically dry in the region when these photos were taken, about 3 weeks without measurable rain had passed by, so the waterfall pictured above was a bit of a trickle this time around. This park is built into a valley’s slope, so the way in actually offers pretty decent ‘cardio.’ I try to walk at the same speed whether it’s up or down, pushing at the hill in the same steady stride I’d use on a flat surface. That really gets the ticker ticking, I tell’s ya.
It’s odd, having produced so many pretty photos of ugly things over the years, to be pointing the camera at something positively… nice. I keep looking for a leaking 50 gallon drum, or maggots on the corpse of some critter… but everywhere you look, it’s nice.
Weird, no horror.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is one of those specialty shots which I’ve described in the past as being ‘focus stacked.’ There are multiple shots with different focal points and exposures which are stitched together in the image above. Everything is acceptable as far as sharpness, from the foreground to the background, which is the point of the exercise. There was a filter on the lens, a 10 stop Neutral Density. That allowed me to slow the exposure down as well, creating the mirror surface water but also retaining a bit of the surface texture of the flowing water.
Not the best thing, composition wise, but while I’m out exercising my body, I like to also use a scene like this to play around with what the continually evolving digital photography workflow can do. What… there was a lot of bending involved and I actually had to stand in the water… screw off.
Back next week, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Carrie Furnace, part 4
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Having completed a full circuit of the surviving sections of the Carrie Furnace in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale, while participating in a ‘Photo Safari’ event offered by the Rivers of Steel outfit, a humble narrator decided to cap off the effort by stepping back inside the structure where the morning got started.
I don’t know if this is Furnace #6 or #7 pictured above, but they’re the only ones left over from the centuried history of this section of the larger U.S. Steel Homestead Steel Plant.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s difficult to convey the scale of this place, even in photographs. Those three yellow rectangles in the middle of the shot above are park benches used for visitor’s seating, for a reference. This must have looked like – as Mark Twain described it – hell loosed upon the earth, prior to the plants closure in 1986. Imagine it – coked coal fires and molten metal flying around. Hundreds of workers pulling levers and turning wheels, all sorts of gigantic machinery moving around…
I wasn’t able to find a historical video of Carrie at work, but here’s a 1981 educational film reel from Periscope which describes the steel making process at another American mega mill. There’s some interesting local documentarian work happening right now about Pittsburgh’s Industrial past and its workforce, so check out ‘City of Steel.’ If you’re interested in seeing what the railroad and industrial activity at a working steel mill – The Edgar Thomson Works, which is about a mile or so away from Carrie – looks like, check out the AMAZING Time Lapse photography offered at ‘Fort Frick.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m guessing that this thingamabob is… actually, I’m really in no position to guess but I think that the thingamabob is called a ‘torpedo car.’ Hardest thing in the world for most people, me in particular, is saying ‘I don’t know.’ It’s better to profess ignorance than to say something stupid or wrong, but one does lead to the other. Ignorance can be fixed, usually by reading a book or something. Stupid, on the other hand… it stays with ya.
I’m also really, really trying to not start sentences with ‘Actually’… I’ve also developed a pet peeve which revolves around people saying ‘We’ when discussing social issues in public. ‘We.’ Who’s ‘We,’ and did y’all have an ‘effin meeting to decide and agree on what youse all think before you showed up to point a finger at something ya don’t like but were too afraid to say “I” in public and stand behind an opinion so you say ‘We’? …we… sheiste.
I digress.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I finished up the excursion to Carrie Furnace more or less where I first mounted the camera up on the tripod. The interval was nearly over, and a few last shots were on the menu for me to get.
The shot directly above is a parallel view of the first shot in todays post, captured when the sunlight was at its morning zenith. Uggh… as mentioned – Worst time of day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s artwork interspersed with all of this relict technology, which is something I didn’t focus in on at all during this series. There’s metal sculptures here and there, and one or two of the pieces are gigantic – notably one of a stag’s head. It’s a pretty inspiring place, this.
As mentioned, I’m meant to be returning to this spot at the end of July, during the sunset to dusk to twilight period between 6:30-9:30 p.m. Looking forward to the adventure of that and thinking about bringing a few LED lamps along with me as well in case I need a bit of accent light here and there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Well, that’s what I did on that particular weekend morning, here in Pittsburgh. What an adventure. Check out the Rivers of Steel people’s offerings here at Carrie Furnaces if you find yourself in the Paris of Appalachia and want to do something a bit off the beaten track.
Back tomorrow, with something else!
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Carrie Furnace, part 3
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Continuing the series of posts from my visit to the Rivers of Steel ‘Photo Safari’ at the Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale section.
Actually, I don’t know if Swissvale is it’s own thing – town, village, borough – or what. This ‘commonwealth’ business out here is fairly inscrutable, as offered here in the Keystone State of Pennsylvania. You’ve got towns, cities, boroughs… HQ, for instance, is in the Borough of Dormont, but if you were to send me a letter you’d address it as ‘Pittsburgh.’ Additionally, my place is found in Dormont, but the guy across the street from me lives in Pittsburgh (City of…). It’s weird, man.
It gets even more complicated when it comes to Cops and Fire coverage in Pittsburgh. There’s Sheriffs, and Constables, and ‘regular’ Police. The local departments seem to be trained for the day to day stuff, whereas if there’s a homicide or something really complicated they’ll first call out the ‘DT’s’ from Pittsburgh PD, and then above the PPD Detectives there’s the Pennsylvania State Troopers who handle all sorts of high level stuff but who also do the regular cop duties when needed. I haven’t seen any of these Troopers yet (you wouldn’t miss them as they wear Smokey the Bear hats with the chin strap) and supposedly there’s a whole other Federal level of law enforcement here as well, including FBI and the rest of the alphabet agencies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the two posts prior to this one, it was mentioned that that I had somewhat free reign to wander about large sections of the Carrie Furnace site, with my camera mounted up on a tripod. I moved in an anticlockwise or widdershins direction. This had a lot to do with the position of the sun, and was a little bit influenced by an intellectual game I play with myself.
It was a fairly warm day, and that rarest of things in Pittsburgh – a clear sky – allowed the radiation of the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself to cascade to the ground unimpeded. Sol Invictus, amirite?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The remains of a rail connection and a crane are found on the Carrie site. Location wise, on the other side of that graffiti’d wall is a sloping and quite wooded bank of the Monongahela River. The graffiti is intentional, and several panels of the wall were displaying rendered mural paintings in addition to the more traditional tags and letterform stuff. They do workshops for this art form here, and in addition there are classes which teach aluminum, and iron, sculptural casting technique.
After this post publishes, I’m certain that several people will be compelled to leave a comment describing the function and history of the rail line and the privately owned (‘private’ as in owned and operated by U.S. Steel) freight rail service that used to feed raw materials into the plant. Have at it, railfans!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the old locomotive units is actually on display.
A humble narrator continued to circle the remains of Carrie Furnace, clicking the camera’s shutter as I went. I wasn’t trying to do anything too fancy, just working the scene. Whenever you ‘come in cold’ to a place like this, you need to ‘look up, down, all around’ since there was zero prep other than the basics. You also can’t let yourself bog down and spend all your time focused on one thing, or another, because you don’t know what’s just around the corner. I know a lot of photographers who would just stroll in, take a single shot and say ‘one and done.’ That ain’t the Mitch way.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I figure that if you’ve got three hours, which I had, that’s 180 minutes you don’t want to waste. Plenty of time afterwards to chat with the other participants. I wish that I wasn’t there between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but there you go. Just about the worst part of day for light. Good news? It wasn’t raining. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind the rain if we were there at dusk, or dawn.
The even better news? I have Tix for another Photo Safari at Carrie Furnace in late July which starts at 6:30 p.m. and goes till 9:30 p.m. Now that I know what to expect, I’ve already started planning for that one. As long time readers will tell you, I like low light.
Bwah hah ha.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Tomorrow’s post will finish describing the circuit around Carrie Furnace. This was absolutely one of the most exciting things I’ve gotten to experience here in Pittsburgh, and that’s saying something.
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 