Posts Tagged ‘Dormont’
Mole Hills
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Historic research – which I’m definitely not doing – revealed something to me recently about the ‘zone’ that I’m dwelling within.
That zone is specifically called ‘Dormont,’ which is a small community, surrounded by much larger municipalities, in a larger region called ‘The South Hills.’ The ‘zone’ sits right at the edge of Pittsburgh’s official municipal border, and in the case of HQ, that border is literally across the street from me with differently colored street signs facing each other on the parallel corners.
OK – the ‘big neighbors’ next to Dormont are Beechview (which is part of Pittsburgh), Brookline (part of Pittsburgh), Mount Lebanon (its own thing), and Bethel Park (its own thing). Regionally, these communities are part of a larger area referred to as ‘The South Hills,’ which is geographically expansive.
Think the border of Queens and Nassau County, for the New Yorkers.
The shot above is from one of the crossroads, found along West Liberty Avenue (Route 19 Truck). The POV has me standing at the edge of Brookline, looking towards Beechview where the McDonalds is, with Dormont towards the left.
So – why was I standing here? What’s the deal? Did I go get a Big Mac?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Coal. It’s coal that brought me here. Coal is something I’m just starting to learn about, and it’s fascinating.
Check out this great page at Brooklineconnection.com, discussing the Oak Mine, which undermines this entire area. The location shown in the third shot on the linked page is where I was peregrinating about for the shots in today’s post. Other nearby mines were operating all the way up until the 1980’s, apparently, but this one is meant to have shut down in the early 20th.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One drove over to Brookline, parked the car, and then set out on foot to see if there was any observable remnant of the mine.
An enormous masonry structure, which appears to be a retaining wall, was jammed into the hillside. Closer inspection of the structure revealed that it was not a retaining wall, and that the large masonry blocks were stuck at least two deep into the hillside.
It seems that Brookline in particular was a central node for harvesting coal meant to serve the residential market, with estimates stating that 90-95% of the area is undermined.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As an aside, Brookline has a Flatbush Avenue within it, and a Queensboro Avenue, and there’s an Fordham Avenue there too. There’s only one true place on this planet, and the Brookline people kind of acknowledge that – despite replacing ‘lyn’ with ‘line.’ Ever read Roger Zelazny’s ‘The Chronicles of Amber’? It feels like that sometimes, to this Brooklyn Boy.
That building pictured above is a little chicken wing fry shack, but notice that its foundations don’t seem to match up with the brick building. Could this be where the first electronic vehicle scale, at the mine, in Pittsburgh was installed?
Ok… that’s obscure tech stuff… You’d drive your horse drawn wagon onto the scale, and the combination would be weighed. Then they’d fill your wagon with coal and weigh you again. The differential is what you owed the mine. Similar systems persist today, in the waste handling industry and for businesses that move rocks and soil around in trucks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This shot is from directly across the street, within the parking lot of that McDonalds from the first shot.
This coal revelation has explained so many things about Pittsburgh to me. Why do these vehicular streets – built out in the 1940’s or later – follow serpentine routes? High speed routes built for cars don’t do that.
Answer: there used to freight rail alongside of, and predating, these roads, and the roads followed the tracks.
Everything is starting to make sense now.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All this coal business does raise a few new questions for me, which is cool, and it also revives an older one.
The oldest question, actually, and the only one that really matters…
Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
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Pushing out to the point
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A brief interval in the unending torment caused by the cold and snow which encapsulated life here in Pittsburgh – or at least my own – from the last week of January through most of the month of February, arrived.
Bands of snow, some heavy, had been omnipresent for weeks. Temperatures plunged outside, but lasagnas and meats were roasted within HQ. When an afternoon in the high fifty degree range was predicted, one sprang forth once more unto ruin and the world’s end.
One scuttled up the hill from HQ to the T light Rail Station. Soon, your humble narrator found his pre corpse standing on a platform at the T’s Potomac Station, heading for downtown Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This station (Gateway) is where I debarked the T, and it’s within that downtown part of the T service which operates as a subway, utilizing an old freight line’s subterranean tunnel which has been retrofitted to accommodate a modern mission and the needs of the rolling stock.
Luckily, there’s escalators down here. There’s a kind of a brutalist approach to a transit station going on here architecturally speaking, with big slabs of concrete tossing massing shapes about. It’s a pretty steep set of stairs leading down here from street level, which always triggers my weird PTSD step related thing.
I mean… it’s not that weird, I broke my ankle on a set of steps… so… it’s not like I’m irrationally afraid of flying or getting eaten by sharks… at least, not beyond any sort of normal level of concern that one should display about that sort of thing… what can I tell you?
I’m all ‘effed up.
One uses the elevator, thereby, while going down to the platforms here, instead of those triggering stairs. In the context of this post, I was heading ‘up,’ so I rode the escalator.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The plan for this scuttle was born out of frustrations during my prior outing, as described in last Friday’s missive.
Point State Park was the next destination.
Normally, I’d walk over either the Fort Pitt or Fort Duquesne Bridge’s from there, but I had zero trust that the foot paths might be clear of snow and ice due to recent experience. Instead, I’d head ‘up’ the Monongahela River and cross over to the South Side at Smithfield Street.
It’s great to wander about but you really need to have some sort of destination and plan in mind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one looks back at ‘Downtown’ from the path in the prior shot.
Weather conditions and this utter municipal failure to clean up snow and ice, writ large, have reduced me down to walking in a park – damn it. I’m pretty tired of being constantly thwarted by the weather, at this stage of unending winter. Bah! What the hell, Pittsburgh…
Who can I talk to? Who would I call? Fixable… is this fixable?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I could always just stay at home and walk on a treadmill or something, but I’d soon grow so bored with that… I’d pluck out my own eyes just for ‘lulz.’
Honestly, my intrinsic nature is to just sit on my butt reading comic books. Scuttling about is often motivated by an artistic ‘need’ to go shoot photos. Maybe it’s an autistic need… I don’t know… but the point is… bored, boredy, bored and taking a walk punctures boredom nicely. Beyond boredom, I also need to move and exercise in order to keep the plumbing within the pre-corpse chugging along. The meat tuxedo requires regular shake down cruises.
Saying that, this is my annual challenge – getting out and about despite an inclement climate. As mentioned in an earlier post, you’d be hard pressed to find, should you click through the years and years of archived missives here at Newtown Pentacle (links to the right of the page), any series of posts from January or February in which I was not complaining about cold weather in a similar manner, so maybe this set of frustrations is something meta-thematic?
Rise above. Fix the world.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At Point State Park, ramps allow pedestrian and bike egress to both the Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne bridges. I was tempted by the Fort Pitt one, but given that I was in the ‘zone’ where the ramp touches down on the south side just a couple of days previously and it was completely impassable… I decided to go with a more reliable path.
I’d hang a left instead!
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
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Operation Рогачка
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As has been mentioned several times, your humble narrator has somehow managed to recreate his ‘lead time,’ that interval between the capture of these photos and the subsequent writing of the malarkey, as relates to the day that the post publishes and reaches your inbox or social media whatever.
As of this moment, while I’m actually typing out this missive, it’s early morning on the 19th of February, and the photos embedded herein were gathered on the tenth of that same month.
Just in case you were wondering why it’s still the height of winter here, and you’re likely seeing the birds returning in mid March. You’ve got a bit more winter coming your way, by the way.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This sort of frigid season just frustrates me. Gets in the way.
Looking back into the archives here at Newtown Pentacle, you’d be hard pressed to not find a January or February posting that doesn’t complain about winter weather, its depravations, and its boredom.
Write a book, they tell me. Yeah sure… that’s simple.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Admittedly, Pittsburgh got whaled in 2026 by what local meteorologists describe as an extraordinary and historic winter season, as judged by their local standards.
Personally, it’s been a pain in the butt.
Week long stretches where even driving was fairly impossible. Forget walking, except in narrow corridors where you could reasonably expect – and be disappointed – to find that the snow and ice have been cleared from the pavement. Given the lingering psychological hangover of the ‘orthopedic incident,’ wherein I shattered my left ankle and then had it surgically reconstructed leading to a long and excruciatingly painful recovery period, ice and snow conditions are just ‘No Bueno.’
Messes with my head while scuttling along, this.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One was heading back to HQ in Dormont at this stage of my day, and the ‘T light rail’ station at nearby Station Square was the destination.
All told, this walk was maybe four to six miles long.
It’s become a fairly standard exercise and photowalk corridor for me, this ‘Dormont to North Side, then to South Side’ thing.
I’ll take the T to one of the stations on Pittsburgh’s North Side and then whirl and twirl over to the South Side to catch the light rail back. In warmer weather when the pavement is more reliably passable, the north/south path usually includes the West End Bridge.
Given the number of abandoned properties on the south side of the bridge, at Pittsburgh’s Carson Street, that path had been avoided as it was likely a skating rink down there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a short wait, maybe ten minutes, before a Red Line T appeared (pictured is either a Blue or Silver Line). Soon, I was happily sitting down onboard one of the light rail units, and the trip back to Dormont only takes about 20-25 minutes from Station Square.
It was my turn to cook dinner, so I headed home and got busy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Boneless chicken breast cutlets, with a little glug of olive oil on top and then a bit of salt and pepper. I put a cleaver flat on top of them and give the knife a couple of hard whacks to flatten out the meat and ‘stick’ the seasoning into the meat. Into the air fryer for 16 minutes at 400 degrees. On the stove, a pot of bow tie style pasta was boiled, and combined with a sauce that was formed up from a bit of feta cheese, a bag of frozen chopped spinach and also a bag of peas, and there was also a few tablespoons of Greek yogurt in there. Another glug of olive oil went into the veggies and dairy sauce concoction to loosen it up a bit, before adding in the pasta bow ties. Squeezed a lemon over the whole pasta affair and mixed it up thoroughly. Yum.
One of the lifestyle differences between ‘back home’ and ‘here’ is that you pretty much cook all your meals at home here, as opposed to eating the unhealthy and expensive junk offered at take outs. This ain’t NYC where your kitchen is tiny and it’s actually cheaper to order in. I’ve got a full size kitchen in Dormont with lots of counter space, and a nearby Aldi.
The dinner effort resulted in a big meal for two, a few scraps of chicken which somehow fell into Moe the Dog’s mouth, and then four lunch sized containers of left overs. Worth doing, and it was fairly healthy as well.
Back tomorrow with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
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Operation Run, gun, and Hey Now
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It had been about three weeks since a ‘big’ winter storm had blanketed Pittsburgh in about a foot and half of snow, and that weather event also accomplished the arrival of arctic air, here in the Paris of Appalachia. Said atmospheric incursion installed frigid conditions which persisted for the better part of a month.
The shots in today’s post (and in several subsequent ones) were gathered during a short scuttle on February the 10th of 2026. As you might discern, my efforts at maintaining ‘lead time,’ as far as when these posts publish in relationship to when the photos were actually shot is currently well ahead of schedule and working out. One less thing to worry about, for me.
Of course, it’s likely that early spring has started in the northeast, as you’re reading this, and here I am reminding you of a hard winter. I’ve always offered others a glimmer of darkness, just as the sun begins to rise. I’m like a dark cloud on a sunny day, or an irregularly shaped mole on someone’s ass which suddenly starts to bleed. This is part of why everyone hates me. Pariah.
This was kind of a short walk, and ‘the path’ was governed by endemic ice and snow conditions, and the frosty horror was adhering to sidewalks and roadways. My ‘way’ was decided for me, in many cases, by these frozen accretions and the paths around them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After debarking the T Light Rail service, which had carried my pre-corpse into town from Dormont, one set upon a northwards path.
Whereas the air temperature on this particular day was measured as being in the high 30’s, the ground temperature was still sub zero after long intervals of single digit and below zero temperatures. Any melt water coming off the snow pack instantly froze onto any concrete or masonry it touched, forming sheens of fresh and super slippery ice.
‘It was slippy aht,’ as the local Yinzers might offer, in the regional dialect.
I didn’t really have a set goal for the day, as you really can’t plan around finding out a four to five foot tall wall of plowed snow is blocking your path, in random places. One followed his nose, thereby.
It was really all about movement, and staying in it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The first area I scuttled through was right next to what I’ve learned to be the former ‘Clark Bar’ candy factory, of the D.L. Clark outfit. There’s a rail bridge back here, one which I’ve had my eye on for a bit, so I figured…
Hey Now?
Well… the sidewalks were clear at least…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hey now indeed!
Luckily for me, Norfolk Southern’s #4430 showed up just as I arrived. It’s a rebuilt GE AC44C6M model locomotive, which I’m told was originally christened as NS #9212 when it first rolled out of the RR factory in 1998.
It was hauling some sort of black mineral. Likely coal or coke, but unless you know something for sure… don’t guess.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This span (the Merchant Street Bridge) connects to a rail trench which then flows northwards through Allegheny Commons Park, a spot which I’ve visited fairly regularly. These tracks then follow the Allegheny River for a spell. There’s a branch off spur which allows cross river rail connection over the Allegheny at the Fort Wayne Rail Bridge, and then also at the 33rd st. bridge. There’s other rail trestles upriver, and downriver, obviously, but I haven’t shot them all… quite yet.
Hey Now!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Yes, I’m completely aware that I’ve been moving through this area quite a bit in recent weeks.
Here’s why: I can get here pretty easily during inclement weather using mass transit, and given the presence of large institutions like the stadiums, parks, and hospitals found in this ‘zone,’ better odds of encountering pavement where the snow had been cleared exist. Theoretically, at least.
Saying that, Pittsburgh absolutely faceplanted on snow clearance during this season. I don’t think I need to mention the ‘orthopedic incident’ as being psychologically omnipresent while negotiating ice and snow.
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.
Kurz-Bricht von da Lag
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This post wraps up the tale of a short walk in a wintry Pittsburgh, with its frozen over rivers and endemic ice and snow. One had used mass transit to get here from HQ in Dormont, and that’s how I planned on getting back.
Thankfully, now that the orthopedic incident recedes into ‘something that happened,’ I no longer have to rely on expensive ride shares to get around when I don’t want to drive. The T light rail was my next goal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
People here don’t understand it… You’ve got a car in your driveway, why would you…
What can I say, I’m still a New Yorker at heart and unless you ‘need’ to drive somewhere why would you? Part of my allergy to using the car as my sole form of transportation revolves around having to get back to wherever it is that I parked the thing after walking miles and miles. Additionally, as I often opine: you can’t really see anything from a car or a bike as you’re moving too quickly.
I sometimes like stopping off at a bar to grab a drink after a walk, too. Can’t do that if you drove.
Famously, that brewery where I shoot all the CSX trains is a good example of that. Couldn’t engage with pints of beer with the car in tow. Basically, I don’t want to be bothered, and prefer leaving my options open for serendipity. Having to loop back to wherever I parked the car also creates a limitation on my wanderings.
Ultimately, I enjoy riding the trains.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You have to plunge through ‘the cultural district’ to get to the T Station I was aiming for. There’s a theatre or two here, and a few restaurants and bars, with the convention center a couple of blocks east of this spot.
The ‘culture’ they mention in the designation is for the ‘upper class’ version of culture – theatre, and ballets, and opera. Unless you’ve got a ticket for one of these things, the culture you’ll actually observe hereabouts is one that proudly exhorts: ‘Opioids are great, and so are amphetamines.’ A lot of people you’ll meet hereabouts, on the street, will loudly proclaim ‘I don’t give a ‘eff,’ about a broad range of subjects.
The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that you should give as many ‘effs as you’ve got. Life’s like that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I made it to the T’s Wood Street station, and then entered the facility.
A Red Line T soon arrived and thusly I was heading back to HQ.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s what it looks like onboard, if anyone is curious, while riding the T light rail away from Pittsburgh.
Soon, I was back in Dormont and uncomfortably slushing my feet through the snow, back towards home. Maybe four to five miles worth of walking this time around, all told and door to door.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Couldn’t help but get a shot of this enigmatic snowman for my last shot of the day. It was a frustrating walk, this one, but I’ve got to keep moving or I’ll stop moving so there we are.
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.
The Newtown Pentacle 