Posts Tagged ‘Amtrak’
terrestrial gravity
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Day two in Pittsburgh began before the sun came up, and I was showered/dressed/ and charging the camera batteries up for another bridges heavy shot list. The day’s weather forecast was perfect for me – middle 60’s, breezy, and a bit overcast but no rain.
At the center of that shot above is the tallest building in Pittsburgh. It’s the 58th tallest building in the United States, and used to be known as the USX tower. Today, it’s the called the U.S. Steel building, and it’s the HQ for that company as well as UPMC – the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – whose illuminated logo adorns the summit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, the shot above was total serendipity. I was throwing out a bit of garbage I had generated over the last two nights in the AirBNB at the Clark Building, and this is the view from the garbage room, which looks towards the Alcoa building on the Allegheny River’s north shore and the 10th and 9th street (Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson) bridges. I walked out onto Liberty Avenue at about 7 in the morning.
First thing on my list was breakfast, and since throughout these travels the heavy pancake/bacon/egg deal had served me well, I was looking for a diner or coffee shop to purchase a meal of that type. A bit of quick googling revealed a spot just a few blocks away, but it didn’t open until 8 a.m. so I had a little time to kill. After a cup of steaming black coffee was obtained at a convenience store, I was on my way.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pittsburgh seems to have a lot of alleys. They also haven’t turned all of their downtown parking lots into condominiums with the proviso that you should ride a bike or you’re an asshole, or intone that you hate minorities if you oppose more luxury housing, the way they do in NYC. It’s almost like Pittsburgh has other industries whose opinion matters, beyond the one offered by big real estate, when the Electeds are making decisions here.
Naturally attracted to shunned places, I had to walk through a few of them. I spotted this hilarious sign in one of those alleys.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While “photowalking” to breakfast, I spotted lots of intriguing and fairly old municipal buildings like the Firehouse pictured above. I also observed that the infamous Midwestern “Opioid Epidemic” has taken over a lot of lives hereabouts. Drug and addiction treatment centers abounded, and I saw hundreds of people waiting on line for their little plastic cups of orange liquid (methadone) who all wore the tell tale mask of heroin use on their faces. That sucks. I don’t wish that life on anyone, even if they did it to themselves. Heroin breaks people into little evil pieces, and turns them into shadows. You can call it OxyContin if you like, but it’s heroin. This drug epidemic is the actual consequence of going to war in Afghanistan, by the way.
Poor bastards.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An old downtown department store was receiving a lot of attention from construction crews when I passed by, and luckily this amazing public timepiece wasn’t being demolished by them. Just look at that thing. Jeez. Talk about gilded age, huh.
Most of the historic building stock encountered was reminiscent of the early 20th century examples you encounter in Manhattan’s financial district. Ornate Neo classical facades, street level grand entrances, lots of massive stone structure punctuated with enormous plate glass windows. Cathedrals of Capitalism. Unlike NYC, setbacks for upper floors didn’t seem to be a thing here, and you have all of these dark and shadowed alleys between and behind which expose the “works” of the buildings – the HVAC piping, electrical hookups, and so on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After breakfast, I summoned a LYFT ride share to carry me to my first destination of the day on the south side of Pittsburgh on Mount Washington. Formerly called Coal Hill, the prominence was dubbed Mt. Washington in 1876. It hosts the two inclines – or Funicular Railways – and is on the south side of the Monongahela River. Mt. Washington offers an elevated point of view from which any visiting photographer is obliged to actuate the shutter. Ultimately, most of my second day in Pittsburgh was spent in close association with Mt. Washington and the Monongahela River. The boat tour I had purchased advance tickets for would leave its dock from this side of the city later in the day.
More next week – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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certain circumstances
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After eating dinner at one of Pittsburgh’s iconic Primanti Brothers restaurants, one got busy on his evening plans. The camera was rigged up for low light/night shooting, and a humble narrator got to work. Pictured above and below are sections of PPG Place, a 1984 vintage six building commercial real estate complex built and primarily occupied by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass outfit. The main 40 story building, whose ground floor entrances sit behind that fountain, is the corporate headquarter for PPG. The entire deal is clothed in plate glass, some 19,750 panels (over one million square feet of glass) of it, which is why it looks like an early 1990’s CGI background. Wet glass, LED lighting, weird look and feel. PPG has operated out of Pittsburgh since 1895.
The PPG complex sits on six square blocks or one square acre, replaced a department store called Guskey’s, and it’s construction revealed a cornucopia of archaeological finds ranging from Native American to early Colonial and pre industrial uses of the site. The main tower is the third tallest building in Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned several times in the last few weeks, on this particular interval of travel, one felt compelled to record the scene whenever and wherever a fountain was discovered. This wasn’t much of a fountain, in comparison to what I saw in Washington D.C., but there you are. Apparently, during the holiday season and winter months, this plaza is converted over to be an ice skating rink. It’s a fave for Pittsburghers, apparently, with high occupancy rates and several newspaper polls listing it as the voted on choice for “best building” in the City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fourth tallest building in the City of Pittsburgh is nearby, which is called “Fifth Avenue Place” officially, but is colloquially called Highmark Place. 31 floors, and completed in 1988, it’s the HQ for a Highmark subsidiary called Jenkins Empire Associates. Highmark is a non profit health insurance organization which also owns several for profit medical insurance and reinsurance companies. Basically – Highmark is the corporate entity that Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield have reorganized themselves into.
The building was originally meant to be a bit taller, but city zoning officials squashed that. The 13 story tall spire atop the building was an attempt to lay claim to the original height that the architect planned for, and with all the hub bub over the zoning deal it was never transmitted to the City that the spire/mast was designed to sway up to three feet when high winds hit the top. It seems that the first time this sway was observed, Pittsburgh’s First Responders shut the downtown area down fearing that something catastrophic was about to occur.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Developed by the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in 1964, this “caught my eye” structure – with its fascinating load bearing external diagrid and framed tube steel exoskeleton – was built on the footprint of an old Wabash Terminal Train Shed. When it opened as the IBM Building, its principal tenants were the IBM corporation on floors 1-4 and U.S. Steel on floors 5-13. It was bought by the United Steelworkers Union in 1973, and the labor organization’s offices are still housed therein.
A bit of skyscraper trivia is offered here. The same people who designed the external structure of the building also did the World Trade Center in NYC. Just like the WTC, the structure of the building is outside the walls, and within the only structural supports are at the center of the thing surrounding the elevator and plumbing/electrical cores. Neat!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My next stop was yet another fountain, this time being Pittsburgh’s “big kahuna” at Point State Park. It’s found at the “tip of the spear” on the river delta formed by the three rivers – Ohio, Allegheny, Monongahela. 36 acres in size, this Pennsylvania State Park was opened in 1974. Its fountain is the iconic center of the larger metropolitan region, and Pittsburgh’s reclamation of its post industrial waterfront really started with the opening of this park. The fountain sits where the on and off ramp of two bridges used to be found, the Manchester and Point Bridges.
The park incorporates the remains of Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne, which were important fortresses during the French and Indian War (1755-1764) and although I’m largely ignorant about the details of the conflict here at the ‘forks of the Ohio,” there’s a nearby spot referred to as “Washington’s landing” so… George Washington.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The one Allegheny River Bridge between Point Park and the 31st street Bridge I didn’t show you yet is pictured above, the so called “Bridge to Nowhere” or Fort Duquesne Bridge. It carries Interstate 279 (North Shore Expressway) and Interstate 376 into and out of Downtown Pittsburgh and also has a pedestrian walkway in the lower deck. It’s got a steel bowstring type span of 426 feet, and provides a water clearance of 46 feet. It opened to traffic in October of 1969.
Whew. All of this Pittsburgh stuff that you’ve seen here at Newtown Pentacle for the last two weeks was literally captured in one day between 7 a.m. and about midnight. It started raining again while I was capturing the bridge shot above, so I double timed it back to the street and caught a cab back to the AirBNB. Starting tomorrow – Day two. I was just getting started on day one, and had to contend with the weather, and I also had tickets for a boat tour of the rivers nested in my pocket for day two. The things I saw…
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other constellations
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned in prior posts, a humble narrator took his camera on vacation in September. The camera wasn’t bored, but it’s been trapped here in NYC since arriving from Japan at the end of 2020 due to COVID restrictions and all that, so I wanted to show it what other parts of the USA look like. Amtrak takes you places, and one of the places we went together was the pretty city of Pittsburgh.
One left the rented room in Pittsburgh early in the morning, after having received weather forecast warnings about a powerful line of storms meant to arrive in the area where their three rivers converge about 4:30 p.m. Accordingly, one’s activities for the day had been built around this. After exploring both sides of the Allegheny River frontages, a humble narrator began scuttling back towards the AirBNB I was staying at in downtown Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the PPG tower. Pittsburgh Plate Glass, that is, and if there’s an “Empire State Building” in this city, I guess that’s the one. Proper photographs of the thing will be offered tomorrow, the shot above is a bit more of a “snapshot” than it is a photograph.
On the way back to my room, I picked up some coffee and a couple of bananas at a 711. Also as mentioned, the temperature when I left in the morning was about 60 and over the course of the day it had risen to about 85 and it was quite humid. One had been out wandering and walking all day and I was perspiring.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The AirBNB was in a former office building which had been converted over to residential usage called “The Clark Building.” Apparently, it used to be the regional HQ for Warner Brothers, was built in 1928, and I was staying on its 23rd floor. The elevation provided a front row seat to the oncoming storm, and after a quick shower and change of clothes, the window was first rolled up and then the tripod was deployed so that the camera could watch the show.
I really was hoping for lightning, but c’est la vie, huh?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For about 90 minutes, rain and wind pummeled Pittsburgh, and according to the local news I was watching on my phone, a tornado had set up nearby the Allegheny county line that caused no small amount of damage. Me? I was sitting pretty, drinking coffee and enjoying a banana.
I also took this opportunity to offload the day’s photo effort from the onboard memory cards of the camera to the laptop which I had carried with me all the way from Queens in NYC. I recharged the batteries and wiped down the equipment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After the front had passed, the temperatures dropped back into the low 60’s, and there was still a bit of occasional drizzly rain coming and going. Around the corner from the Clark Building, an ornate movie theater was observed with a lit up marquis advertising a showing of the “Wizard of Oz.”
When in Rome, as the saying goes, and since I required a meal at this point – as I had long ago digested the pancake breakfast quaffed nearby the Heinz Factory on the north side of the Allegheny – I headed for a nearby outpost of Pittsburgh’s iconic “Primanti Brothers” sandwich shops.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Primanti Brothers sandwich is a “cholestival festival.” I ordered the menu item they called “The New Yorker.” How could I not, after all? Pastrami, Corned Beef, french fries embedded in the sandwich… delicious, but it’s a cardiologist’s nightmare made manifest on a plate. I washed it all down with a couple of pints of Yuengling, which is apparently a locally manufactured beer. After eating, I gathered my crap together and decided to remain busy.
Tomorrow – night shooting in Pittsburgh.
“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.
great elms
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The AirBNB listing described the accommodation as having the “best views” of downtown Pittsburgh. Have to admit, they were pretty awesome. My Amtrak chariot arrived at Pittsburgh’s Union Station right on time at 11:44 p.m. I had ridden on Amtrak’s Capitol line here from Washington D.C., and the train continued on without me to its eventual terminus in Chicago.
I staggered out onto the mean streets of Pittsburgh with my 25-30 pounds of luggage, camera gear, and a whole lot of stress. Luckily, the accommodation I’d be staying at was only a few blocks away from the train station and after a couple of hurdles I was some 23 stories up and chilling out in a pretty nice set of rooms. Before you ask – the AirBNB was roughly one third of the cost of several of the local hotels.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After calling home and letting Our Lady of the Pentacle know I had arrived safely, one began reordering “the carry.” Now that I had a secure home base, about 18 pounds of crap could be stowed there while I did my thing out of doors. I’ve been wanting to take the camera to Pittsburgh – with its 446 bridges and multiple active freight train tracks and it’s funicular railways – for a while. I had a plan, one which would start the next day at around 7 in the morning and play out over the next 72 hours.
For now, though, I set up the tripod (after offloading the Washington photos to the laptop) and got busy. The location of the AirBNB was at the Allegheny River side of the hypotenuse formed by the “Iron Triangle” of Pittsburgh’s three rivers. It was across the street from a local train station, which I did not use at all. Like I said – I had a plan, and it mainly involved walking rather than riding although I did use the occasional LYFT ride share car to get from A to B.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are several corporate “powers that be” housed in this area, including Mellon Bank, UPMC, Huntington, and others. There was also a Federal courthouse a few blocks away. Everywhere I looked, there was something interesting which caught my eye.
Despite the dreamless sleep on the Amtrak ride, I was exhausted. Capturing photos drained away any remaining energy or motivation, and I was passed out cold shortly after shooting them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The arrival in Pittsburgh was rather anticipated, but anticlimactic. Their grandiose Pennsylvania Railroad station has been converted over to a luxury apartment building, and Amtrak’s modern day station is somewhat reminiscent of late in the game Soviet municipal transit architecture – minus the chandeliers.
Nearby the Amtrak station is a Greyhound Bus terminal, as is the Pittsburgh Convention Center.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All of the shots looked peculiar to me when I checked my exposure on the camera screen. What’s with all that yellow/orange light, thought I. Suddenly, it occurred to me that since the NYC DOT has nearly completed its decade long conversion of NYC’S street lighting over to the bluish white LED luminaires, old school sodium based lighting now looks weird to me. Son of a gun, it’s true what they say about a frog in a slowly heating pot of water not realizing that its environment is coming to a deadly boiling point, since it happened gradually.
It’s like how lousy a Mayor De Blasio has been makes Eric Adams look good in comparison. He isn’t though, he’s worse. Mayor Adams is going to turn the heat up and boil you alive. Don’t believe me? Go price out a home in Downtown Brooklyn, he’s been Borough President there for the last 8 years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you can see from the clock pictured above, it was now 1:20 in the morning when I made the conscious decision to go to sleep. All told, I had been on the move for nearly 23 hours. Thing is, I was just getting started, and adventure in the Rust Belt awaited.
More tomorrow, from the pretty city of Pittsburgh, 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.
rolling hills
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Union Station in Washington D.C. is where Amtrak is headquartered, and is their second busiest train station with just under 5 million riders passing through it every year. It’s the southern terminus for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, and also handles several commuter rail lines as well as municipal Streetcar and Bus operations for the City of Washington D.C. (local, as opposed to the Federal side of things).
In the late 19th century, Washington was a real mess. Separate rail yards, including ones on the site of what’s now the National Mall, were operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In 1901, Penn RR and B&O RR announced that they had arrived at an agreement to partner up and build what would become Union Station. As part of their agreement, they would abandon and remove the tracks and depots which they had piecemeal installed over the last 50-70 years in Washington. The abandoned land became the National Mall which was partially described in last week’s postings here at Newtown Pentacle.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Union Station was built under the supervision of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. Congress got involved, and “S. 4825 (58th-1st session) entitled “An Act to provide a union railroad station in the District of Columbia” which was signed into law by 26th President Theodore Roosevelt on February 28, 1903. The Act created a Washington Terminal Company (jointly owned by the B&O and the PRR-controlled Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington Railroad) to construct a railroad station “monumental in character.” The budget was $4 million (roughly $98.3 million in modern valuation) but Washington is no different now than it was then, so in the end it cost $5.9 million to build the thing. Grade crossings in the City were also eliminated, which cost the taxpayers about $3 million additional smackeroos.
A bit of trivia encountered while reading up for this post is that the neighborhood that Union Station was built in used to be called Swampoodle, and it was a “lawless shanty town populated by Irish, Italians, and Negroes” where public drunkenness and other licentious behavior was common. There were livestock pens, and a collection of shops that housed tin smiths. By October 27, 1907, Swampoodle was gone, as that’s when Union Station opened for business and the B&O’s Pittsburgh Express first arrived, to much fanfare.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m told that there are 32 station tracks at Union Station. 20 of them enter from the Northeast, with the remaining 12 entering the facility via a tunnel under Capitol Hill. I’m sure there’s a lot of nuanced commentary that could offered by a rail historian or dedicated rail fan, but one prefers not to dwell too deeply on such matters unless he’s forced into it. Unlike Sunnyside Yards, I do not want to be in a position to tell you who the field engineer for the Pennsylvania Rail Road was.
It’s during the time period that this station was built that the America we know in modernity was being created. Petroleum was replacing coal, cities were enacting sanitary and health codes, foreign military adventures had become normal, and the idea that a non European country might be able to single-handily dominate and control an entire hemisphere of the planet had emerged. It was during the interval of Union Station’s construction – in 1903, specifically – that the Wright Brothers began flying. The Civil War was a bad memory that fathers and grandfathers told their children about.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In 1971, the private capital version of rail road companies in the United States collapsed into bankruptcy, and President Richard Nixon nationalized the assets. Conrail was created to handle freight, Amtrak to handle inter city passenger travel, and the inner city and commuter rail businesses were allotted to a number of regional authorities – MTA, SEPTA, and so on. In the case of Union Station, the Federal Department of the Interior was put in charge of the place. Badly maintained, by 1983, it became apparent that a change was required if Union Station was to be saved. The Reagan administration transferred joint ownership of Union Station to Amtrak and the Federal Department of Transportation.
Far more renovations and rethinkings of the space occurred for me to pass on, but suffice to say that a significant and very expensive amount of work occurred here, resulting in gorgeous public areas like the grand hall – pictured above – being returned to their (somewhat) original glory. Union Station as you see it above reopened in 1988. There’s still work to be done, in both operational capability and the historic preservation spheres, and Amtrak keeps on talking about a fairly expensive vision for the future.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Great Hall/entrance is meant to be a waiting room, and when it’s time to start moving towards your train, you enter the concourse. That’s where the Amtrak counters are, as well as a series of shops and restaurants.
On a personal note, man oh man was I tired at this stage of the game. It was about three in the afternoon, and I had left HQ in Astoria at 2:30 in the morning for a 3:30 a.m. train to D.C. I had wandered out into the National Mall at just after 7 a.m. and began shooting with the characteristically brutal “hot” of Washington oppressing me. I got pics of several interesting POV’s while engaging in a frustrating Covid era search for something to drink and a place to… ahem… use the toilet. I made it all the way down to the Potomac and then had to meet up with an old friend for lunch. Sleep deprived doesn’t begin to describe my state.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator was thereby pretty loopy by the time this shot was taken. Honestly, I almost forgot to take it. The next leg of my September travels would involve a 7 hour and 40 minute Amtrak ride, and I’d be getting off the train at 11:44 p.m. Before boarding, I had slurped down a huge cup of coffee at Union Station, and my intention was to use the travel time to offload the Washington shots from my camera onto the very heavy laptop I was carrying with me. There’s a whole process to this – focus check, is it worth keeping, horizon straightening, cropping, key wording – before I even start to address what the color and tonality of the final shot will be. About one out of ten shots makes it through this process, and maybe one out of five of those makes it here.
Truth is that I fell asleep about a half hour after boarding the train, and remained passed out for about six hours. Sleeping in public is so outside of my ordinary mindset that I’m still shocked about it.
Human, all too human.
“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.
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