Posts Tagged ‘Bridgeville’
Chartiers Creek, Bridgeville
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Chartiers Creek, in Pennsylvania’s Bridgeville.
First – allow me to say that I’m new to this urban waterway’s story, so if I get something wrong as far as your lived experience, please leave a correction and ‘get me smart about it’ in the comments section.
Second- This waterway has historically received an absolute ocean of mine runoff over the last century, emanating from several historical coal mining sites extant along its course. I’m told that it was quite common to see these waters running a bright orange, not too long ago.
It seems that iron, and pyrites, are commonly found in the layer cakes of Appalachian soil – alongside coal, shale, dolomite, sandstone, and limestone.
When a coal mining shaft exposes formerly sealed away minerals to the atmosphere, oxidation occurs, causing ‘rusty’ water to collect below. Natural processes, like springs, carry the runoff water up to the surface.
The flowing waters of mine runoff display an acidic PH level, due to all of those dissolved metals, and is fairly toxic to fish and other littoral forms of life.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The design and operation of a mine involves two critical factors – ventilation, and the management of ground water. When the mine closes, nobody is pumping out the water anymore so a vast reservoir of the liquid forms within these manmade voids. Water always wins, so it gets out of the mine and up to the surface.
The State’s environmental people have apparently been working with both the Feds and Bridgeville, for several years, on a huge remediation process here. Spending the public’s tax money on cleaning up a corporate caused, and quite historic, problem. Sounds familiar, no?
Down below, the largest mining outfit here in Bridgeville was the ‘Pittsburgh Coal Company’s Bridgeville mine’, which was in operation for around 35 years and carved some ten million tons of bituminous coal up and out of the depths. That was just one of the mines here, the largest one albeit, but there were a LOT of smaller claims being worked hereabouts.
Remember, here in Bridgeville, you could observe coal seams at ground level in Colonial and early Republic times, on surface outcrops of rock. Lots of smaller deposits were literally just worked into at ground level, with miners digging straight horizontally into the hill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that the coal seam, just like all the other rock in the Appalachian Mountains, is folded up in jagged depositional layers, a condition which is due to the range’s long tectonic history. These mountains and hills are older than the dinosaurs, and were once attached to what’s now Scotland.
PA’s Department of Environmental Protection has a cool scholarly explanation of the coal seam’s geology available.
As this land shifted about, over hundreds of millions of years, some sections of the coal got folded up in different ways, and at odd angles, in the layer cake – a ‘syncline,’ for instance, or an ‘anticline.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I did mention that I’ve been reading up on all this stuff, didn’t I?
A lot of what I’ve been witnessing here in Pittsburgh over the last few years offers a similar storyline. An industry appears with lots of plucky small players, then a ‘king’ emerges who dominates them and monopolizes the sector. That Dominar then abandons the industry after extracting as much money as possible and unloading it on someone else, then the ‘Captain of Industry’ would move their family and household to Fifth Avenue in NYC – leaving behind environmental, economic, and societal devastation here in Pittsburgh while they slept on a bed stuffed with dollars in Manhattan.
‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’ indeed.
I’ve described my viewpoint of Pittsburgh’s History, out loud, as ‘they practiced the darkest form of Capitalism out here.’
A hundred years later and the people who profited from the mines are long gone, whereas the modern day taxpayer has to foot the bill for cleaning up the mess that they left behind. Captains of Industry Robber Barons indeed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Chartiers Creek, pictured in today’s post, has been receiving an awful lot of investment and attention from that modern day municipal kitty in recent years, thereby.
Just south of Bridegville, in the town of South Fayette – there’s the Gladden AMD Treatment Plant, which treats mine water with hydrogen peroxide and removes nearly 1,000 pounds of iron from the flow daily. A passive treatment system, dubbed the Wingfield Pines Conservation Area, uses settling ponds and an aeration fountain to filter some 43 tons of iron from the water annually. There’s all sorts of of smaller projects going on to ensure shoreline stability and enhance the ‘littoral’ zone.
This – of course – is how I spend my free time on a Saturday morning while my wife is taking a class, in a nearby shop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m still learning about all of this coal ‘stuff.’
It’s led to interesting conversation with a friend who’s a tunnel engineer about how ‘they’ navigated cardinal directions and stayed ‘plum’ while digging underground, prior to modern times and ‘back in the day.’ It seems that piano wire was critical to their efforts, as once it’s under tension it doesn’t sag, and spirit levels could be hung along its length to guarantee you were ‘plum.’
I’ve also learned that the ‘canary in a coal mine’ thing wasn’t due to ‘mephitic gases’ emerging from the deep, as the exposed coal seams robbed the atmosphere of oxygen chemically, via oxidation. The canary’s respiratory system includes a heartbeat that’s much faster than ours, making it a lot more sensitive to a lower oxygen environment. If the caged bird fell off its post, you had precisely eight minutes to get out, and find some fresh air.
Wonder if that’s the origin of the phrase ‘eight minutes to midnight?’
Back tomorrow with something different.
“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.
Bopping in Bridgeville
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Belief exists – within one such as myself – that passing mention of a municipality in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh neighboring the section which Newtown Pentacle HQ is found within – a place and a state of mind called ‘Bridgeville,’ sometime in the past.
At any rate, welcome to Bridgeville, for today’s post.
Here’s a link to Bridgeville’s Wikipedia entry, and one to their official governmental site. There’s a historical society there too, and I’m on my second watch of this great presentation to that historical society, by a fellow named Warren Merritt. Good stuff, that.
Modern day Bridgeville is largely residential, but there’s a significant amount of commercial/strip mall style development there. Texas Roadhouse, a Home Depot, the drivers license center for the State’s PENNDOT agency, basically all the sorts of ‘mall’ style retail businesses you’d expect in a suburb can be found along its ‘Washington Pike.’
That’s what’s here in Bridgeville these days, but there’s a significant historical incarnation of this area, one which made Bridgeville quite a different place in the past.
Coal, the past here was all about coal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle had signed up for a class which was held here in Bridgeville, allowing me a couple of free hours to explore some of the town’s less well traveled sections on a recent weekend morning. I had the car with me, and a long list of saved locations embedded in a Google Map.
Most of the traffic and local populace were involving themselves with the long line of shopping malls defining the modern streetscape mentioned above. I was in an industrial district.
Saying all that, there are many leave behinds from the industrial past to be observed here, with many of these ‘old’ mill buildings – long since modified from their original purpose for the exigencies of modernity – displaying a characteristic masonry design which one has learned to associate with the long shuttered mining operations of the Frick and Mellon Family’s Pittsburgh Coal Company. This corporation became one of the two dominar suppliers for processing coal feedstock into coke, setting prices for both acquisition and end sale. A monopoly, if you would.
That corporation survives into modernity, now calling itself ‘Consol Energy.’ So too do the Mellons and Fricks persist.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the end of the 19th, and especially so during the first three decades of the 20th century, Bridgeville was a coal mining superpower. The ‘Pittsburgh Seam’ is quite close to the surface here, and in some parts of Bridgeville, there were even outcroppings of coal which could be directly harvested at surface level. The coal in this area is Bituminous, as opposed to the Anthracite stuff that is more commonly harvested from eastern PA.
The industrial area I was driving and shooting within is right about here in Google Maps, should you want to have a click around and do some remote exploring. There’s a good amount of activity in these old mills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rail tracks hereabouts likely belong to the Wheeling & Lake Erie RR outfit, but I didn’t see any rail action on this particular morning.
There was definitely a waste transfer operation somewhere nearby, as I saw had seen truck drive into a site through a scale, and I could smell trash. Can’t tell you much about what goes on back here.
Yet.
One had a list of locations to take a scouting look at; a couple of cemeteries, a few points of elevation, and old mill or two, an urban waterway, to see if anything interesting might be visible. I was kind of hopeful about one spot being productive, one that was from up on a high ridge. It wasn’t.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A still active metal mill and factory is present, dubbed as being the Universal Stainless and Alloy Products, Inc. Here’s their corporate site, as well, just for the curious, or even for the stainless steel hungry amongst you – lords and ladies.
This coal business continues to blow my mind, as a note.
A significant amount of the land here in Pittsburgh is undermined, with historical mining using ‘pillar and room’ setups, which are only about thirty to sixty feet down below the ground, here in Bridgeville at least. There are also random and forgotten voids, cut into the trackless depths of the ground.
Before the word went out from the steel mills that they’d only buy coal from one of two suppliers in Pittsburgh – both of which happened to be owned by Henry Clay Frick and or the Mellons, who coincidentally owned the steel mills and coke ovens buying the coal – most of the mining was entrepreneurial in aspect. The order for consolidation by the ‘big dogs’ forced a lot of ‘small potato’ miners to sell their claims off to the nascent monopoly and then go to work for it.
In modern times, the corporate types refer to this sort of monopolistic practice as ‘vertical integration.’ Think about Apple computer, there.
Records were left behind by Pittsburgh Coal Company, about where and how deep they had dug, but the smaller operations which predated the consolidation – not so much. Periodically, surprise appearances of undocumented mine ‘portals’ appear during construction projects, here in the Pittsburgh region.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It appears that the early miners ‘followed the seam,’ in from the hillsides.
As the coal embedded in the Appalachian layer cake here was being dug out, mines also began commercially extracting shale and limestone as well, which are commercial byproducts of digging into that layer cake.
Mole hills. It’s like mole hills down there.
Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
Back tomorrow with more.
“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.
Six unrelated photos
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Pentacle HQ is currently housed in Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont, where the local governing body has been working assiduously to build a sense of community amongst the thousand or so households contained within its confines. On one recent event, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself wandered the borough and got friendly.
One of the neighbors has fashioned himself as the ‘Hogfather’ in honor of the pigs his family keeps as pets. Pictured with them (partially) is the ‘Hogmama’ as the former personage had to go to work that day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Found myself sitting in a parking spot in downtown Pittsburgh one day, and admiring the exterior of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. As soon as I can make it happen, I want to get the camera up close and personal with this building. Wow.
As is the case with these sorts of posts, I crack out a lot of shots during my daily rounds. Most of them are gathered in pursuit of narrative – I’m taking a walk, or I went to a thing, or saw something cool. Posts like this one gather together shots I like, but couldn’t easily fit them into the narrative ‘flow’ of whatever else it is I might be rattling on about.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was nearby the Monongahela River one day, behind the wheel of the car, when I noticed three military helicopters just hanging static in the air over ‘Technology Drive,’ which is another former steel mill site that has been developed as a scholastic and business incubator for next level ‘tech’ that’s populated by Carnegie Mellon and other institutions.
The helicoptors were Air National Guard.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dormont Borough has been busy, and they organized another great event called ‘Porchmont,’ wherein about sixty households signed up to welcome visiting neighbors onto their porch for a ‘get to know each other’ conversation. People put out food and beverages, and one guy named Vinnie was even BBQing Japanese style chicken. Great event, this.
Couldn’t help but get a shot of a passing T light rail from one of my neighbor’s porches.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Bridgeville is practically next door to Dormont. It’s a residential community, but there’s an enormous agglomeration of strip mall development along its main drag. Chain shops, from Home Depot to Walmart and Texas Roadhouse, mainly. On one of the ‘back roads’ an enormous Flea Market can be found.
Our Lady asked me to drive her over for a ‘browse,’ and after parking the car in the Flea Market’s lot, I couldn’t help but get a couple of shots of their enormous flag. Wow.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hey now! This one is from that walk across the Fort Duquesne Bridge described last week. I was zoomed all the way out, but still had to crop the image a bit. That’s the Duquesne Incline in the background, and CSX was heading away from Ohio in a southeastern direction, along the Monongahela River.
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 