The T is neat
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the 5th of January, one rode the T light rail from Dormont into Downtown Pittsburgh. One of the shots I was looking for is seen above, depicting a T line unit entering the 2001 vintage First Avenue Station after crossing the Monongahela River on the Panhandle Bridge. There seems to be an entire gaggle of law enforcement type offices nearby, including the city jail. There’s also a newly opened and fairly large homeless shelter a couple of blocks away from this station.
First Avenue Station is connected by a sky bridge to a large municipal automobile parking lot. Parking prices on the “Golden Triangle” of Downtown Pittsburgh hover somewhere between 6$ and $10. Just yesterday, on a separate scouting mission, I encountered a lot nearby the terminal stop of the T on the North Side nearby the Carnegie Science Center and the stadium that the Steelers play in which would’ve let me park “all day” for six bucks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The North Side station nearby the stadium is a terminal/turn around stop, and it’s also where the T goes underground into a former privately held rail road tunnel that’s been converted over for transit usage, which allows it to cross the Allegheny River. It’s also the start of the “free zone” stops downtown. That free zone goes all the way to the other side of the Monongahela River at the Station Square stop, which is on the other side of that river and where the Panhandle Bridge’s tracks lead to. Leading away from Station Square and into the South Hills, that’s where you’re going to have to pay a fare – $2.75 for me, but it’s a zone system. They use “Connect Cards” which you can get at the local supermarket as well as kiosks downtown, or cash, to collect your due.
I left the car back at HQ for this particular day. I’ve been feeling really constrained by the vehicle in some ways. I love being able to just ride up on something and get a shot, mind you, but it’s “photowalk” not “photodrive.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The first shot is a T coming into Pittsburgh, the one above is one heading out of the city. My plan for the day was pretty simple, I’d take the T into town, walk around for a bit and grab “crime of opportunity” shots while shlepping towards the pedestrian walkways of the Smithfield Street Bridge across the Monongahela and then board the T on the “south side” again to get back to Dormont.
That parking lot, though, the one connected by the sky bridge… it beckoned.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the lot, the one above was gathered. There was actual security on duty at the lot, but they didn’t seem to give a hoot as far as my activities went. I walked up a few flights of stairs and found a fairly high vantage point to shoot from.
There’s another T unit entering Pittsburgh, via the Panhandle Bridge. Service is about every 15 minutes, although it changes depending on the time of day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Panhandle Bridge sits alongside a vehicle bridge dubbed the Liberty Bridge. The latter carries a fairly high volume road that leads to the Liberty Tunnel, which are punched through the base of Mount Washington. When I’m driving home from extant points, this is the bridge and tunnel to which I’m now a member of “the bridge and tunnel crowd.” Actually, they don’t say that here.
Further, I haven’t encountered any shade yet from a city dweller towards me living in a suburb. I’ve heard Dormont natives deride the people who live literally next door to Dormont in the Mount Lebanon community, which is a good deal wealthier than the former. They call them “the Lebo’s” and offer tales of “Karen” style behavior being regularly displayed “over there,” which is about a mile distant.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My T fascination temporarily sated, a humble narrator made his way down and out to the sidewalk. As mentioned, there’s a lot of jail business happening in this section. There are Bail Bondsmen outfits occupying storefronts, and you see cops of all kinds wandering about doing cop things. The ramps and infrastructure of the Liberty Bridge and the “Boulevard of the Allies” occupy the sky, and the sidewalks are shadowed. This isn’t a “friendly” area, if you know what I mean.
More tomorrow from Downtown Pittsburgh and a continuing exploration of this amazing American City 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.
foggy Homestead
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the many things that’s super intriguing to me about Pittsburgh, something that I’ve just dipped my toe into at this stage, is the abundance of “rail to trail” infrastructure hereabouts. As is the case with a lot of things here in this part of the country, the Government types have inherited a lot of land to manage that used to be used for the Steel industry or some other “mill.” The company which owned this sort of land is long gone, and the property has ended up in the hands of the “State.” By state, I don’t necessarily mean Pennsylvania, instead I’m using that word in the Machiavellian sense.
In the Homestead section, there used to be an enormous steel works which sputtered through the 70’s and finally gave up the ghost in the 1980’s. It’s the one where the infamous Homestead Strike occurred. The vast majority of the plant’s footprint has been converted over to a development project called “The Waterfront.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Set along the Monongahela River, the Homestead plant was served by several rail lines. One of these defunct lines has become part of the “Great Allegheny Passage” trail, which incorporates – amongst others – the track beds of the B&O and P&LE Railroads into a combined bike and hike path. One of the spots where you can both access the path and park your car is found at the Homestead Pumphouse, which is the trailhead for the Steel Valley section of the larger GAP.
The weather in Pittsburgh is always dynamic and changes by the hour. When I visited the Homestead Pumphouse on January 2nd, it was an unusually warm day which followed an unusually cold few days. The Monongahela flows out of the mountains of Southern Pennsylvania and West Virginia where it was even colder than it was in Pittsburgh, so when that cold water hit the warm air – fog erupted.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One such as myself cannot resist photographing in such conditions, and I got busy. When things warm up a bit in the coming weeks, I’m planning on about a three miles there and three back walk along this section of the Steel Valley trail, where I’ll be walking over rail bridges and finding a certain point of view that I’m desirous of photographing the U.S. Steel Mon Valley works from.
What an absolute pleasure it is to discover new things. It’s been a while.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The entire time I was at this location, I was wondering if that rail bridge was active or if it was one of the decommissioned ones you can walk over that was part of the trail. As I found out while driving out of the “Rail to Trail” parking lot later on, when it was far to late to get a shot of the freight train that suddenly appeared and was starting to cross the bridge – it’s active.
It’s the “Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge,” aka the “Pemickey Bridge.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Across the water, that’s the skeletal remains of the Carrie Blast Furnace rising out of the mists of the Monongahela. Carrie is home to the Rivers of Steel outfit in Swissvale, whom I’m planning on having fun with during the spring and summer months. It’s a National Historical Landmark, Carrie is, and the Rivers of Steel people apparently offer boat tours and other programming that I’m interested in attending. About two miles down river from here, on that side of the Monongahela are the Mon Valley Works in Braddock, PA.
Our Lady of the Pentacle hasn’t described me as looking “like a pig in shit” yet, but all of this is quite exciting to one such as myself.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the Homestead Pumphouse, which is set up as a historic landmark and public park, there’s all sorts of gear left behind from the steel mill days on display. That thing in the shot above is apparently a ladle.
I’m still in the exploration phase right now, regarding Pittsburgh. I’m working a series of 20-30 minutes from HQ sites right now, scouting out places which I’ll return to when weather and season are a bit friendlier than what January in Western PA offers.
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.
steep, man, steep
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator decided it was time to visit a few of the local establishments in my new neighborhood of Pennsylvania’s Dormont that serve adult beverages, and explore the “scene” as it were. Most of the commercial activity in my new zone is car based, but as you’d hope, there’s a few drinking parlors found in direct proximity of the T light rail station – pictured above – which is, coincidentally, about a 15 minute walk from HQ.
That’s the “Potomac” station for the Red Line T in Dormont. The street it runs on is called “Broadway Avenue.” Apparently, when they established Dormont, the idea that guided the naming of the roads here including the offering of “a town without streets,” so every street is an ‘Avenue’ instead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Broadway Avenue is more or less the high point hereabouts. I don’t know if it qualifies as a “ridge” or not, but all of the streets which cross it fall off in altitude and drop down into valleys. It’s not uncommon for the roads here to be set at a 15-20 degree angle. The steepest street in North America is nearby, in the Beechview section, dubbed Canton Avenue.
Having grown up in a subsection of a part of Brooklyn called “Flatlands,” that’s next door to “Flatbush,” this sort of terrain continually blows my mind. When you’re driving and you come to an intersection, you’ll notice gouges in the asphalt left behind by people who tried to conquer this terrain at too high a rate of speed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s two ways for me to get to and from the T, with one being quite a bit easier to surmount than the other. The most direct connection to the transit line would involve usage of the street above, dubbed “Lasalle Avenue.” Quite a few of the roads here use pavers rather than asphalt for the surfacing. When a vehicle is negotiating down Lasalle, you hear a grinding vibration from its tires and the pavers clanking against each other.
This particular evening was quite cold and icy, and there were a couple of spots where I was literally standing still and still slipping down the road due to gravity and the abrogation of friction.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While absorbing a few pints of beer, I also absorbed some local knowledge and lore from a couple of the different bartenders who were pouring the libations. Some of it was horrific, an unsolved and truly macabre murder from the 1980’s which occurred near that T station pictured above, and the Bookshop Killer was also mentioned (said Bookshop Killer has apparently gotten got.) I also got advice on restaurants, other bars, and an admonition to visit some wilderness in somewhat nearby Western Maryland for white water rafting. Y’know I’d like to take pictures of white water rafting, but…
After making my way back to HQ, and with a few belts in me, I decided to try and figure out what color the street lights are.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You can adjust the “color temperature” of your shot during the developing process in Photoshop, but as I’ve discovered over the years – it kind of matters what you had the camera set to when you’re capturing the photo. Particularly so in low light situations. It’s the “nitty gritty” side of digital photography, and it’s nuanced by knowing how digital images work when you “look under the hood.” The street lights in NYC create a luminance that’s best captured at about 3400 kelvin, which conquers the cool blue LED street lights. Pittsburgh still uses old school sodium maps, which produce an orange yellow light.
The camera will thereby attempt to build the image primarily on the red plate since that’s where most of the light’s coloration is found, which creates all sorts of problems as far as generating sensor noise. A bit of experimentation has revealed that my new “night setting” for captures in Pittsburgh should be 2800 Kelvin, which forces the pixel depth to build up on the green and blue plates, along with the red. This reduces the grainy noise issue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In daylight settings, I capture at 5200 Kelvin, if you’re curious. If it’s cloudy out, I’ll use 5800 Kelvin to make sure that the sky has something in it beyond just “blue gray.” I’ll adjust the actual color in Photoshop, which pushes the histogram into looking “normal.”
Digital images, of course are generally in RGB mode. If you’ve got Photoshop on your device, you can actually look at the three plates individually. It’s worth analyzing how the image is actually formed up, and why something you did in the field failed or succeeded during the developing process. Shoot for the edit, I always say.
Anyway, that was my big night out in Dormont, Pennsylvania. Something different tomorrow, 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.
back to West End Overlook Park
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On December 29th, a humble narrator negotiated his way back to the West End Elliot Overlook Park in the Elliot section of Pittsburgh in the late afternoon. I offered a couple of shots I’d captured up here at dawn last week, but even while I was shooting those I was thinking “I have to come back here at sunset, this “view” is a sunset thing.” Also mentioned last week, sunset in Pittsburgh isn’t a couple of hours long like it is in NYC, with its oceanic skies. Due to the geography here, the setting sun casts the hard shadow of Mount Washington across the confluence of the three rivers and the city’s center midway through its descent.
One got to the spot in West End with plenty of time to spare and set up my gear. I had a nice conversation with some kid from the surrounding neighborhood, who was imbibing the devil’s cabbage and chilling out. He was the first of several folks I interacted with while shooting.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the West End Bridge over the Ohio River, lit up all sexy like in the shot above. I had erroneously called it the McKees Rocks Bridge in a prior post but received a correction in the comments from one of you brilliant people.
Alexander McKee, for whom McKees Rocks and both the eponymous bridge and the nearby community of McKeesport are named for, was an early trader based in this region, whom initial research reveals as having displayed a surprisingly modern point of view towards the “First Nation” Native Americans that populated this part of the continent.
At any rate, while I was waiting for the sky and sun to align to my liking, and the local kid whom I was chatting with had departed, I began twisting my tripod head around. “Up, down, all around,” that’s one of my mottoes. A passing couple struck up conversation with me next. They were wearing Steelers gear, and told me that they were “Yinzers” or Pittsburgh “born and bred’s” who had moved out to “the country” a couple of decades ago and were “in town” for a few days to see a theatrical show and attend a sports ball game.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Off in the distance, I spotted the Allegheny Observatory which I had described to you – lords and ladies – a couple of weeks ago. As mentioned in that post, I’m attempting to visit the prominences surrounding the three rivers’ valleys to try and develop a sense of spatial relationship. When you’re driving along on the many, many high speed roads that transect Pittsburgh, it is fairly impossible to do so.
I’ve mentioned that there’s a different “etiquette” as far as driving here, as in with the “Pittsburgh Left,” but there’s also a very different polity at work on the roads. They don’t honk quite as much here, but it’s fairly common for somebody to crawl right up your butt if they think you’re driving too slowly. “Too slowly” in this area means you’re only exceeding the speed limit by 20-30%. Following distance is one of the most important thing to be aware of when driving on a highway. For every ten miles of speed, maintain at least one car length of space between you and the car in front of you. If you needed to jam down on and lock your brakes to screech to a complete stop, the minimum amount of space you’d need to come to a complete stop is one car length per ten miles of speed. Yup – that’s close to a hundred feet at 55 mph, which sounds crazy and unrealistic but isn’t. When I can see the brand of sunglasses you’re wearing in my rear view mirror, that’s way too close. Also…
I’m seriously having to learn a new style of performance driving around here, with the crazy hills and the serpentine curves that bend around prominences or along cliffs. Lots of hidden driveways as well, with blind turns happening at high speed, there’s highway exits that appear out of seemingly nowhere, stop signs on highway entrance ramps… a dynamic driving environment, Pittsburgh is.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
See what I mean about that hard sunset shadow cast by Mount Washington? One hung about at the park overlook, and some woman with a very enthusiastic dog arrived and set herself up nearby to play some sort of steel drum like instrument as the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself disappeared. I was enjoying the jam she was playing and decided that I’d like to stick around until the lights in Pittsburgh came on.
Since I’m a suburban asshole now, I feel like I should refer to this downtown section as “The City” but there’s only one place which I’ll ever use that term for and it’s 400 miles diagonally east and north of here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This post is being written at the end of the first week of January, and it was literally this morning that – for the first time in 5 weeks – I actually had a fond “miss that” thought about NYC. It was bagel related. The bagels here are strange and anemic little things.
Thankfully, Pittsburgh actually has decent Pizza. Finding a pizzeria that does slices is a bit of a deal (they do 8” personal pizzas instead), but the local Pizza is actually pretty good. They tend to overdo it with toppings, giving into the tendency in this part of the country to throw every kind of meat you can imagine on top of the thing, but the thick crust is nice. Thankfully, it’s not the abrogation of all that’s right which… Philadelphia… calls Pizza.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This shot was the one I was waiting around for, and soon after shooting it I decided to get out of dodge and back to HQ in neighboring Dormont. This decision was influenced by the dynamic driving environment mentioned above, as I don’t feel at all confident driving around at night around here and won’t until I get to know these roads and their peculiarities a bit better.
I had a rare moment of spare time, in between “have-to’s” and rainy days, so I decided to try and make the most of an unusually warm week in Pittsburgh over the first few days of 2023. My reward for the efforts of December and November was the few days I had to explore, I’d posit.
More tomorrow 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.
finding perspective
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Getting high is kind of a thing when you’re behind the camera. I don’t mean “smokin a doobie,” I’m talking about altitude. Finding somebody who will let me into an office building or up on a rooftop somewhere for a less common point of view is going to take me a while, I reckon.
At the start of the week, I was at West End Overlook park, and later on Polish Hill – both overlook the surrounding area. I’m trying to get a sense of where things are, how the light and weather travel through Pittsburgh, and develop a general geospatial awareness. I’ve mentioned a few times this week that even in Downtown Pittsburgh, it’s fairly easy to park at a metered spot and even simpler to put the car into one of the many multi story municipal lots. By a New Yorker’s standard, the price of parking in Pittsburgh is outlandishly cheap. The lot that I was on the roof of in this and the next few shots cost $6 for an hour, and it would have been $3 an hour afterwards.
Last time I was looking for a spot in Manhattan, a garage in Chelsea was charging $39 per hour. What? Yeah, I drove into the City. Why? Go ‘eff yourself, and mind your own business. Pfah!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one is looking more or less south, towards the PPG building, which is the mirrored job with the castellations. Wish I could tell you in one of my typically granular manners what it is you’re looking at, but I don’t know myself. Yet.
I have done no specific work regarding railroads yet. They’re everywhere here, and it’s pretty normal to spot a freight train going this way or that. So far, I’ve only seen Norfolk & Southern or CSX units. I did learn what the “Pittsburgh Subdivision” is, though.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An observation I’ve made is that there’s a whole big bunch of stuff which the Pittsburgh natives grew up with and consider as being “normal,” and they thereby expect everybody to automatically know these things, and if they don’t they’re “jag offs.” The Pittsburgh Left is one of these things, for instance. It’s all learned cultural expectation, like the way that New Yorkers stand in the street while waiting for the light to change so you can make it across the road quicker when the traffic flow abides. I’ve been a New Yorker, living amongst 8 million other super predators, my whole life. Don’t believe you’re a super predator? Next time you’re on vacation, just try not to start a crime family or a revolution. We’re ready to kill if the kid at the bagel shop is working too slow, if somebody blows their horn too long, or if somebody is wearing too much cologne on the subway.
Also, everybody seems super nice here, which makes me nervous. It’s been impossible for me to not “last thing” check the various locks adorning the house New York style by pulling on the handle, to go outside and check if anybody is messing around near my car… that sort of thing, due to having always lived amongst this group of super predators.
Also, nobody’s this nice, they have to be hiding something… Additionally, Pickup Trucks are just called trucks here. There’s also “pierogi pizza,” which is surprisingly good.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot directly above this one and the one directly above with the “crown building” that looks like a super villain’s lair in it were shot from a second parking lot a few blocks from the first. Both gave me six stories worth of elevation, and together cost me $11. There’s another downtown lot I’m going to hit soon, one which will theoretically give me a point of view over a set of railroad tracks leading off a bridge over a river.
I spent the rest of this particular day driving around Pittsburgh and checking out the various neighborhoods and how they fit together.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s one of the famous “Steps of Pittsburgh” pictured above, in an area called Greenfield. There’s hundreds of these municipal staircases scattered about the City, an accommodation to the terrain. As a note, it’s not a field nor is it overly green.
One of the things I’ve learned is that you don’t necessarily want to live on a street which has the word “run” in its name. That’s “run” as in river run, and during the spring thaw or even just a heavy bout of rain, these low lying valley areas can easily flood out. It’s a “thing” here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things I’m just fascinated by are these extreme changes in elevation – says the kid from a part of Brooklyn called Flatlands. The roads interchange pictured above is part of the reason that the neighborhoods here are so distinct from each other. You’re separated from the next “massing” of people by topography and water, possibly by an interstate and or a rail line too.
What an interesting place Pittsburgh is. Can’t wait to learn more.
Back next week, 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 