The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Dat’s what dey call’s da ‘Boulevard of the Allies,’ round these parts. Turns out that the pedestrian pathway leading to the Liberty Bridge which I’d been looking for is part of ‘it.’

There’s a regular ground level street with the same name found just west of this structure, but this approach span and the bridge itself represents nearly a half mile of steel and concrete that rises multiple stories up from the ground. This elevated section in particular is ‘mega massive.’ It cloverleafs with other high speed roads like ‘Crosstown Boulevard’ and they all feed southbound traffic first to the Liberty Bridge and then into the Liberty Tunnel, and or the P.J. McArdle roadway, on the south side of the Monongahela River.

Down under, that’s Pittsburgh’s Second Avenue.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This is what that view looks like from Second Avenue. There’s an odd collection of buildings down here, including a homeless shelter and the City jail. There’s also a lot of Law Enforcement related stuff down here, lots of cops milling about, and signage suggests bail bondsman activity. The street is somewhat forbidding, and is populated by people who are obviously down on their luck. I guess that includes me, so there you go.

As it turned out the place where you could access that pedestrian walkway over the Liberty Bridge pictured above was found where the Boulevard of the Allies first becomes airborne, which is also more or less the titular end of Second Avenue.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A humble narrator continued on his way, towards the other side of the river, but I was all excited by the points of view on offer.

As mentioned, this is one of the routes which I drive all the time getting to and from. HQ is about 5 or 6 miles away to the south, on the other side of Mount Washington in the Dormont section of the South Hills.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s the Liberty Bridge. With the approaches, this 1928 steel cantilever bridge is 2,663 feet long and is said to carry some 63,000 vehicle trips a day. Like most of the bridges you encounter in this region, there’s a protected by concrete barrier pedestrian and bike path. What happens when you get off the bridge on the other side is a bit less thought out than you’d like, but there you are.

Scuttling on, ever forward, that’s me.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s Pittsburgh’s Light Rail – the T – which has just left its First Avenue Station. The elevated track goes underground into an old freight train tunnel which has been converted for the T’s usage, nearby. Ultimately, its terminal stop is on the North Shore of the Allegheny River, which is where this particularly narrative choked walk began last week.

In real time, this was an afternoon. The photo opportunities were a bonus, as what I was engaged in was actually exercise related. The old program which used to be religiously obeyed in Queens is back. One day out for a couple of miles there and back, one day not, with some grandiose multi mile physical effort playing out on the weekend or whenever it’s possible. The particular walk being described in these posts isn’t one of the grandiose ones, rather it’s a short one.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One of the things which made Pittsburgh attractive was the quality of its healthcare space. The post industrial recovery plan which they’ve been following here for a few decades is referred to as ‘eds and meds.’ ‘Eds’ refers to the universities and research spheres, and ‘meds’ to a saturation of hospitals and healthcare outfits found here. Doctor appointments in Pittsburgh are a completely different banana than they are in NYC. The docs don’t have to book seven patients an hour in order to cover the rent.

Since moving here, and particularly after describing Newtown Creek to the doc, lots of tests got ordered. I’ve been poked, prodded, sampled, and scanned in the name of creating a baseline to judge my future degradation and dissolution against. Last Friday, while drinking my morning coffee, an alert came in that results from one of the recent irradiations had revealed that I haven’t got Lung Cancer. Yay.

Tomorrow – the shots I was after on this walk.

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