Posts Tagged ‘Birmingham Bridge’
Sine fine ambulant
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Alright… in retrospect… it was dumb of me to say ‘yeah, it’s hot out, but that’s no big deal.’ Regardless – it was exercise day, for both the hollowing meat puppet that supports my brain and the camera too, and despite climatological conditions which could be described as a ‘reverse blizzard,’ one set out for a long walk. Within a couple of hours, that was amended to a short walk instead.
Pittsburgh is famously humid. The CBS news station hereabouts has a humidity chart they show, when reporting the weather, which has a top range that is labeled as ‘ridiculous.’ Given the national heat wave’s eye watering temperatures out west, we were lucky that it was only in the middle 90’s here in the Paris of Appalachia, but factor in that ‘ridiculous humidity’ and my utterly fantastic decision to start this walk in the late afternoon… it was ‘shvitzy’ out there.
I’m a real complaint department these days, ain’t I?
Pictured above is the Birmingham Bridge, over the Monongahela River, which I was intent on walking across for some reason.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pure existential misery is what a humble narrator was experiencing. ‘Heat island effect’ was in full force, and the concrete that I was walking on was radiating a hundred and change degrees of heat straight up, while the warrior sun above beat down mercilessly on my $15 Costco brand bucket style fishing hat. The air quality and dew point level was such that if you were to wave your hand through the air, it would be wet by the end of the effort. Yuck.
Regardless, I couldn’t help but grab a shot or two of these blokes guiding their boats onto trailers. There are many, many spots close to the downtown area here in Pittsburgh where you can put a boat in the water.
The spot in the photo above, for instance, is in a public park. That’s kind of awesome, if you ask me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the other side of the river from where I started, and where that park is, there’s an enormous concrete plant which can observed from above. This plant sits in part of the footprint of a ‘used to be, once, long ago’ steel mill called the Eliza Furnace. I-279 is the highway riding on the cliff behind the plant.
These people seemed pretty busy, and there’s a bridge reconstruction project happening all around their operation.
It was a lot hotter out than I thought it would be, and by this point I was already thinking about where I wasn’t going to be walking to. My original plan was about twelve miles long and involved a wide ranging bit of scuttling about. In the end this was a just under five mile long walk.
More tomorrow.
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Hot Metal Night
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Hot Metal Bridge pictured above, and the pathway I was walking here in Pittsburgh was described in this post from February of last year. The burning thermonuclear eye of God itself had slid away from the vault of the sky, and since there really isn’t an extended period of ‘dusk’ in these parts – it gets dark fast. Snap your fingers and ‘boom’ it’s suddenly night time.
I’ve been hankering to do some ‘night work’ again, at any rate, which is something that’s not been on my menu for a while.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I didn’t have any of the equipment normally used for such pursuits along with me on this walk (tripod etc.), rather I was packing a kit of prime lenses so the captures had to be handheld.
No problem there. The prime lenses I had with me are all ‘bright’ with the capability of large apertures. The ‘darkest’ lens I had with me was f2.8 wide open, and the rest ranged from f2 to f1.8 with a couple of them also offering image stabilizer technology. My camera has a built in sensor stabilizer, so coupled with a stabilized lens, that gives me around 6-8 stops worth of wiggle room.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After having walked the Three Rivers Heritage trail from downtown Pittsburgh, alongside the north shore of the Monongahela River, my crossing back to the south side of the waterway was accomplished via the Hot Metal Bridge – a former rail bridge which once connected two sides of a steel mill and has been converted over to automobile/bike/pedestrian usage in modernity.
It got darker with every step I took, which sounds like a metaphor for my entire life, but there we are.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the right side of the shot above is a high technology focused office park where several corporate entities are based. Carnegie Mellon has a building in there too. All sorts of robotics research, work on self driving cars, and other fairly terrifying advancements are being created and tested therein. The land used to be the property of that former steel mill which the Hot Metal Bridge was a part of.
To my eyes, Pittsburgh has done a lot better with its ‘post industrial landscape’ than NYC has. If this was Brooklyn, those buildings with their hundreds of high paying technology jobs would be empty condo buildings full of ‘pied a terre’ apartments that rich suburbanites use as crash pads when they’re in the City, and rent out as AirBNB’s when they’re not.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Birmingham Bridge at center of the shot above, a span which I recently walked over and offered a post about a few weeks ago, with Downtown Pittsburgh rising up behind it.
Luckily, I’d be taking a ride share home this particular evening, as I was heading towards a pub with a pretty excellent bar menu for a dinner date with Our Lady of the Pentacle. This was pretty exciting stuff for us, as we’ve become ‘dirty rotten stay at homes’ since moving out here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lifestyle we’re experiencing here in Pittsburgh is domestically focused, and it’s rare that we even get takeout or go to a restaurant for a meal, or go to a bar when we want to have a drink. Generally, it’s meals at home and stocking up at a supermarket about once a week. The isolation is splendid, but every now and then – usually about once every week, or week and a half, we force ourselves out for some diversion.
This is, of course, a real departure from life in NYC with its tiny kitchens that lack automatic dishwashers or food preparation space, and a multitude of take out options.
Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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Sky walking, Birmingham Bridge
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the last post before my holiday break – during which Newtown Pentacle offered single image posts for the week twixt Christmas and the new year (Happy New Year, btw) – one was describing an interesting walk through Pittsburgh’s ‘Uptown’ neighborhood, and I was threatening to bring y’all along on a walk over the Birmingham Bridge spanning the Monongahela River here in Pittsburgh. I don’t make threats, instead they’re promises, so here we are.
To start: Birmingham Bridge is a positive infant compared to other Pittsburgh Bridges, having opened for business in 1977. Its function is to connect Uptown and the nearby Hill District (on the ‘Golden Triangle’ peninsula) with the South Side neighborhood (found on the south shore of the Monongahela River).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s an enormous concrete outfit found on the peninsular side’s shoreline, which the Birmingham Bridge’s roughly seven stories of altitude offers a nice view of. There’s 64.8 feet of clearance below the span, and the bridge’s length is some 1,662 feet end to end.
It’s a ‘steel bowstring arch bridge,’ and Birmingham replaced an earlier structure which was called the Brady Street Bridge. Birmingham has six vehicular lanes, and there’s the combined pedestrian/bike lane on which a humble narrator claimed temporary residence during this walk.
To my understanding, there were still Steel Mills and Coke Ovens on both sides of the river when this bridge was erected – operated by the Jones & Laughlin company, but both large footprint industrial sites having since been razed and redeveloped since then.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The distance of this ‘long walk’ a humble narrator was slogging through is best described using landmarks. The T streetcar station I began my scuttling at is located beneath the 64 story U.S. Steel building, which is the tall gray structure at the top right of the shot above.
Stout, the building has become a handy navigational icon for me, which is used in the same manner that I used to employ the Empire State Building, back home in NYC.
As a note: this post is being written on Christmas Eve, and for the first time in a year – I’m actually feeling a bit homesick. I just listened to the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” and an actual emotion bubbled up into my sterility of thought and one of the eyes became a bit moist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Birmingham Bridge connects to the South Side neighborhood, on the Monongahela River’s southern shore, specifically to a ‘main street’ called East Carson Street. The former footprint of the J&L steel mill in this area has been redeveloped into an incongruous mixed use development that’s called the ‘South Side Works.’ This very modern development sits alongside centuried residential buildings, which makes the somewhat ‘shopping mall’ esthetic of the South Side Works somewhat visually shocking and out of place. There are also residences in the South Side Works area that are nestled in amongst the shops, all of which seem spacious and modern, but an urban shopping mall is definitely not where I’d want to dwell.
After all those years in Astoria, what Our Lady of the Pentacle and I desire is suburbs. Trees, deer on my lawn. Quiet at night and dark, and if you hear an emergency vehicle’s siren, that’s a remarkable moment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Saying all that, a mental picture of ‘what used to be, long ago’ is beginning to form for me here. Weird thing about Pittsburgh as compared to NYC, is that despite having hosted both British and French imperial armies at one time, and having a significant number of ‘young George Washington’ stories associated with it – most of the really interesting things about Pittsburgh start up around the time of the Civil War. NYC, Boston, and… Philadelphia… had already been crowded shitholes for better than 200 years by that point.
I was always more interested in the 1800-1960’s portion of NYC history than the colonial or modern eras, so this probably isn’t terribly surprising.
Speaking of – I gotta figure out where the spot that Lewis and Clark set out from on the Ohio River is. I’d like to see that propitious point of geography, or at least stand upon it. Touchstones, right?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Melancholy for old times, absent friends, and familiar places notwithstanding, this post was meant to simply discuss a walk over Pittsburgh’s Birmingham Bridge. It’s funny, but allowing my thoughts to drift and cast about is one of the things I enjoy so much about these long walks. Pondering while wandering?
Back tomorrow with the end of this particular adventure, which will conclude the tales of adventure and discovery during this first year in Pittsburgh. Happy New Year, lords and ladies.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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South Side Train
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is taking the week off from the usual folderol, and on offer are single shots captured sometime in the last year since relocating from ‘Home Sweet Hell’ back in NYC to Pittsburgh.
Pictured above is a CSX freight train at a grade level crossing on the South Side section of Pittsburgh, with the Birmingham Bridge behind it.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Kwazy Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year to you all. 2024 is going to be a real whopper, I think.
“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.
Monongahela Scuttle
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A ‘short walk’ day was upon me, but a humble narrator was feeling a bit lazy. Combatting ennui, I forced myself out of HQ and drove down to Pittsburgh’s South Side Park with its accompanying section of the Three Rivers Heritage trail for a short scuttle. As mentioned yesterday, this section is an easy 15-20 minutes drive from HQ.
That’s the Birmingham Bridge, over the Monongahela River, in the shot above. At the time of this writing, which is a couple of weeks ago as far as when you’re seeing this post, I’m nursing a sore back. The tenderness of the saddle region was earned during a long walk, one which included scuttling over that bridge from a frankly disturbing section of Pittsburgh that’s called ‘Uptown.’
More on that in a couple of weeks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had keyed in another LibriVox audiobook for this walk, this time “A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Vol I, written by John Bagnell Bury’ and was struggling to get past the notion of somebody writing a history book about prehistoric times. I mean… it’s prehistoric… so…
It’s a fairly old text, as the author died in 1927, and many of its descriptions of Minoan Greece have been upended in recent years by ongoing archaeological discovery occurring in both the islands of the Peloponnese, and in Egypt. There’s a lot of inference injected into the text emanating from the classical Greek and Roman historians, and philosophers, which has ended up being contradicted by actual evidence of the Minoan civilization that was formerly buried in the soil.
Still, it’s an interesting listen and doesn’t lead to the death of brain cells and compassion like social media does.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Can’t describe how happy I was to visit with a Combined Sewer Outfall along the way. I miss the sewer plant in Brooklyn most of all, for some reason. Had a lot of interesting times there, and I saw things most do not.
My goal for the day wasn’t really about the photos, but I took a bunch of shots while scuttling along anyway. I’ve always got the camera with me, never know what you’re going to see, and the only shots you miss are the ones you didn’t take. I’ve got lots of motivational mottos. Another one is ‘steel on steel, it’s the worst sound around.’
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 