Posts Tagged ‘Crosstown Boulevard’
Pittsburgh’s FNB Tower, and pedestrian hell
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Shiny. Your humble narrator found himself wandering about in a quite urban section of Pittsburgh, nearby the brand spanking new 26 story FNB tower. It sits at the foot of the Hill District, and it’s the most easterly of the tall buildings that are considered to be ‘DownTown.’
My interest in the building itself is fairly minor, as it’s just another office building occupied by the financial industry, but the area it squats upon is fascinating to me. There’s an urban highway interchange here called Crosstown Boulevard, which I’ve mentioned in the past.
Interestingly enough, somebody seems to have a plan to deck over the chasm here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This zone is another one of Pittsburgh’s horror shows, from a pedestrian point of view. It’s designed for cars and trucks, period.
There’s lights and walk/don’t walk signs found around the occasional crosswalk, mind you, but the setup hereabouts is ‘don’t cross the street here, instead you cross way over there, and then there, and then way over there, and then you can work your way back to the opposite corner from where you started.
Amazing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The centerpiece of downtown, and the tallest building in the city, is the U.S. Steel Tower. USS maintains a small footprint in the building these days, with the structure’s naming rights – and the vast majority of office space within – being currently occupied by employees of health care giant ‘UPMC.’ University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a non-profit, incidentally.
Have to say – the legends about Pittsburgh’s health care system being top notch are true, at least in my experience. They did find a cure for Polio out here in Pittsburgh, a couple of generations ago, after all. The health care situation hereabouts was a huge contributor to picking Pittsburgh as our new home base after leaving NYC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Alternatively – I’d mention that it’s also a challenging and somewhat confusing drive, navigating around this section of Pittsburgh behind the wheel of a car. The various ramps and interchanges overlay each other, and it’s not always clear which direction you’re meant to travel in. As is the case with a lot of things here in Pittsburgh, ‘you need to know which lane you’re going to need to be in’ before you get there.
The signage pictured above indicates traffic routing towards the Liberty Bridge, and the Fort Pitt Bridge, with both spans leading out of the center of Pittsburgh and towards the South Hills region via Crosstown Boulevard.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s where those ramps lead, Crosstown Boulevard itself.
To the left is the Bluff or ‘Uptown’ neighborhood where Duquesne University is found. The traffic lanes pictured above lead south to either the Liberty Bridge and Tunnel, or towards the ‘Boulevard of the Allies,’ which provides automotive traffic opportunity to head eastwards and towards interchange with an interstate.
Great transportation infrastructure here, as far as getting drivers moving quickly away from a congested downtown. Awful transportation infrastructure, as it provides few or any departures to local streets, which causes these highways to have a blighting effect on the communities they run through. Also, sucks to be a pedestrian anywhere near this complex.
As mentioned above, there’s a proposal to build a deck over this traffic pit, one which would support a linear park.
When he was still Astoria’s NYS Assemblymember, I tried to convince Zohran Mamdani that decking over the Grand Central Parkway trench in Astoria, and creating a linear park on top of it, would be the best thing that happened to that side of the neighborhood in generations. Most sure fire thing you can do to send real estate valuation into the stratosphere is build a park nearby existing buildings. Documented, that.
I tried selling the idea to Gianaris too, but they both came back with ‘great idea, but do you know how much that would cost?’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My plan for the day was fluid. Intentionally, I had left HQ with a fairly vague notion of the where’s and how’s. Wanted to follow my nose for this scuttle, and see where it led me. Come with?
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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“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.
Annoying places with lots of footprints
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I spend a lot of my ‘walking around time’ hereabouts at the risible edges of Pittsburgh, so for this day’s scuttle I decided to start things off at more or less the dead bang center of the ‘Golden Triangle’ section, which hosts ‘Downtown.’ Said area is the financial and political center of the city, county, and region.
Big buildings, looks like a city, but actually a very large town, Pittsburgh is.
I found myself standing in front of the ‘St. Benedict the Moor’ Roman Catholic Church, at an ‘angle’ between ‘Downtown,’ and the ‘Hill District’ which is found on – literally – Centre Avenue.
Should I ever manage to actually start my ‘sacred spaces’ photo project, which I’ve been threatening to do for years now, St. Benedict is one of several local churches that I’d love to be able to set the tripod and camera up within.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Purposely, other than the starting point, I didn’t craft any sort of real plan for this scuttle other than to witness things on foot which I’d only seen while hurtling past in an automobile. Opining regarding this subject is an old trope for me, but you really cannot ‘see’ anything when moving at vehicle or bicycle speeds. While walking, all the ‘nitty gritty’ stuff becomes apparent, allowing one to ‘see.’ Wandering, it’s important.
This area is a politically sensitive one, with a history of awful racial stuff mixed in. Once upon a time, this section of Pittsburgh was the local equivalent of (historical) East Harlem back in NYC – a civilizational center point for the region’s working and middle class black community, replete with lots of home grown cultural institutions. August Wilson, Teenie Harris, and a lot of other cool artists, and writers, and musicians, emerged out of the Hill District’s ‘milieu’ – ‘back in the day.’
In 1961, Pittsburgh decided it would rather have a hockey stadium than a functioning black community here. The City ‘urban renewed’ the neighborhood away, built the ‘Civic Arena,’ and then a few decades later they tore that first stadium down, building another just a few blocks away for the Pittsburgh Penguins. That also demolished a bunch of people’s homes to make way for the ‘greater good.’
The footprint of the long gone civic arena is enshrined, by a multi acre plateau of commercial parking lots that serve the newer stadium.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To the west, the office buildings of ‘DownTown’ Pittsburgh, as seen from one of those parking lots where people used to live and love.
A bit of new construction has recently concluded, which saw an office building for the ‘FNB’ outfit rise from one of these lots. The project had been underway for a while when I arrived in Pittsburgh nearly four years ago, and it’s just in the last year or so that it’s become an occupied and busy building.
Urbanism and modern development projects generally aim to have a positive effect on not just the building lot itself, but the hope is often to promulgate an economic and social halo around large projects. You’re planting a tree, why not do a garden too – and since you’re planting a garden – what about a park instead? Bus shelter?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Thing is, they really don’t grasp this concept in Pittsburgh.
Paying a hot dog guy to set up his cart at the end of this walkway for a year just might induce might pedestrians and office workers to go take a walk, and the presence of pedestrians just might spur other vendors into some sort of entrepreneurial action. A shop, or even a bench with a bit of shade… ‘something’ to ‘draw’ people this way or that…
It was just unrelenting sunlight, and the tyranny of the real, as I walked towards the de facto sidewalk of an urban highway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve described Pittsburgh’s office buildings as ‘inhuman in scale’ in the past. That’s a high handed statement, even for me… but…
This style of architecture isn’t consequential of humanity, instead we’re just meant to adapt into, and thereby become consequential, because of ‘it.’ Post WW2 American architecture is ‘effed up.
Buildings in Pittsburgh don’t seem to be required to have ‘set backs,’ so they soar up in straight lines and create ‘perma shadows’ on the streets around them. The office buildings’ ground floors are either occupied by empty lobbies with security desks, or high end ‘white tablecloth’ restaurants with menus designed for a businessman’s three martini lunch rather than ‘grabbing a quick bite.’ Either way, this scheme doesn’t lure ‘life’ towards itself.
You can walk no more than a few blocks in a row in this area until you find yourself having to risk your life by running across a highway onramp at a stop sign or traffic light. Pedestrian concerns were, at best, an afterthought to the generation who governed over this buildout.
Again – they had a Rachel Carson in Pittsburgh, not a Jane Jacobs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the new FNB (First National Bank) tower mentioned above.
Shiny.
Glad I brought the polarizer filter with me on this walk.
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.
As one scuttles above, so too below
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Jesus Christ! Mary, Mother of God!
I was walking around the periphery of the campus enjoyed by Duquesne University, and this statuary is part of the Catholic University’s outdoor collection. It’s the centerpiece of a memorial for lost WW2 soldiers who were former Duquesne Students, that’s dubbed as ‘The Victory Garden.’
Here’s a shot of the signage, and here’s a page from American Legion about it. Couldn’t find the name of the sculptor, and I did look.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I negotiated my way from the statuary, and started heading back to the non-campus streets. They were fairly steep.
This section of my day was ‘phase one’ of a longer scuttle – which would play out all day and frankly – exhaust me. By the time I got back home, it was a quick dinner and then early to bed. I’ve mentioned that it’s gotten a bit warm around these parts, even so back in early May when these shots were gathered. It pretty much went directly from Spring to Summer in Pittsburgh, seemingly overnight.
Yes, the Newtown Pentacle time warp is indeed still in effect. Shots are from May 11, words are being typed on June 8. If my scheduling is correct, this post publishes on July 10, a Friday. From my current point of view, you’re ‘wizard’ as you know how the future comes out.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One found himself at the edge of another high speed road that was busted through an urban landscape, in the name of progress and traffic flow. This is an older example of this sort of urban renewal, called the Crosstown Boulevard (and it’s one which Robert Moses had a hand in creating!).
Crosstown Boulevard is a road in a trench, which is connected to multiple enormous concrete and steel ramps. It leads into the center of the City, through an area where urban renewal went horribly wrong to the north, then goes through a different area destroyed by urban renewal in the center of the city (pictured today), then branches off in multiple directions towards more examples of the sort of blight which urban renewal projects often bring found to the east, south, and north.
Pennsylvania is actually still up to this sort of nonsense, and is building a brand new tolled highway not too far away from here, which is blighting its way through neighborhoods and businesses all in the name of the common good, and it is dubbed the ‘Mon Fayette Expressway.’
Wow. Learn from history. Please.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s a section of the Crosstown Boulevard complex pictured above.
It forms the western border of the Bluff/Uptown/Duquesne Campus.
According to Google’s AI, dubbed Gemini, there are approximately 45,000 to 52,000 vehicles trips through this corridor every day. Admittedly, I’m often driving one of those vehicles, as this is how I get ‘there’ from ‘here’ a bunch. Don’t want to stand on a soapbox about this subject without admitting that I’m a sinner too.
Thing is, this used to be a productive part of Pittsburgh with office buildings and homes. Instead of organic privately based capital growth, you’ve instead got a thoroughfare designed to have people drive their money quickly away from Downtown Pittsburgh towards a distant suburb, and they’re going to spend it there instead of where they earned it.
That economic dog don’t hunt.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It legitimately sucks to be a pedestrian hereabouts, walking blocks and blocks just to get around all the highway ramps.
Funny thing is that Pittsburgh City Hall is only a few blocks away from this spot. All the politicians will tell you how ‘walkable’ Pittsburgh is. The surrounding architecture in this part of Pittsburgh is what I describe as ‘inhuman.’
Monolithic, building campuses are set back great distances from both the curb and sidewalk, with humanity incidental to and not welcomed into the designs. I’ve offered observations about the inhumanity of Philip Johnson’s PPG plaza before.
‘Opinions are just like ‘iceholes,’ everyone’s got one.’ My dad used to say that in a more colorful fashion, usually when I scolded him for driving too slow back in Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the bottom of the Bluff, pretty much directly beneath that crazy set of metal ‘City Steps’ I was standing on in yesterday’s post, some 10-12 stories above, is the Armstrong Tunnel.
This bit of infrastructure had been under construction for the first couple of the years I’ve spent here in Pittsburgh, but Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself actually had scuttled through it before, during an ‘Open Streets’ day in May of 2024.
This tunnel was going to be how this particular chicken got to the other side, I had decided, as it’s got a dedicated and protected bike and pedestrian lane with concrete separation from vehicle traffic. Win!
Back next week with more – 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 