Posts Tagged ‘Downtown Pittsburgh’
Pittsburgh Scuttle, ignoring the phone
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a warm but comfortable day in Pittsburgh, and your humble narrator was scuttling along all peaceful and calm. I had my headphones with me, but wasn’t listening to anything on this walk. Phone was in my pocket, and I don’t ‘check it’ on any sort of regular basis.
I like to maintain situational awareness when out and about in populated areas. Wasn’t worrying about getting ‘jumped’ or anything like that, instead I just enjoy hearing the staccato song of a city. The sound of people joking around, or telling workplace horror stories, just… talking to each other…
Dozens of people were milling about, and all of them had a smart phone held directly in front of them in the manner of a small shield, which held their gaze. Everybody had headphones going, too. Nobody talked to each other, or formed into friendly conversational groups.
The office working smokers, on their smoke breaks, were all smoking solo, while staring at their phones, as they silently smoked.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One picked his way through the streets, with the fairly inhuman architectural plans of these curbside monoliths positively looming.
My toes began to point towards the Monongahela River shoreline.
There’s a few routes to that waterfront which are possible, on foot, from the position pictured above. Two of them would see me scuttling past a homeless shelter and the city jail, a section where there’s always a large and boisterous crowd on the sidewalks, whereas a different and familiar route could provide me with the desired egress and maintain solitude.
Off I went.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Regular readers of Newtown Pentacle might recall a post, describing a walk around Duquesne University which had published back in July, wherein an antipodal view of the corner above was discussed.
I should mention, again, that the Newtown Pentacle time warp effect has deepened. These photos were captured at the end of June! The words are being typed into existence at the end of the second week of July! If my scheduling is correct, you’re seeing this in early September.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I found myself back at the portal to the Armstrong Tunnel, which was utilized to get to the other side of the Bluff.
One is incredulous at the manner in which the smartphone has completely altered human social interactivity in just under twenty years. Fascinating to me as well that people don’t talk to each other casually anymore, for fear of getting into a conflict about ideological interpretations of the news of the day, and that’s likely what’s wrong with our ‘body politic’ these days.
Luckily, I don’t feel bound by this new etiquette. Old one either.
A good friend of mine once said, before I moved out here to Pittsburgh from Queens, that ‘you don’t have to talk to everyone you see, y’know,’ to which I replied ‘what?… but… yes… yes, I do.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Truth be told, I’m absolutely busting with stuff to talk about at all times. It’s always been kind of a problem for me. Always got in trouble in school for talking out of turn. Hell… I started a blog to get some of it out.
The cell phone thing is weird to me. Sometimes I’ll be out, at a bar or restaurant or something, and there’ll be a table of younger people who are apparently all friends but not talking to each other. Instead, they’ve all been focused in on whatever their individual scrolls are feeding them. Sometimes they’ll show each other the screens, and laugh or scowl.
Your humble narrator has long treated online folderol in the same manner that I do television watching. Something to do while you’re bored and ‘alone’ at home, and not appropriate activity when in a social setting. The whole point of going out is to interact in ‘meatspace,’ where there are consequences for your iniquity or rewards for your glamour.
Yeah, I do understand that it’s ‘work’ you’re checking in to on your phone, at 8:50 p.m. on a Saturday night.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The humans are a curious lot.
I’ve witnessed multiple people just striding blindly off the curb and onto busy streets while paying 100% of their attention to that little screen on their phone, ignoring the multi ton vehicles which are whizzing about them. Not even a glance.
For one such as myself, this is astounding.
It’s everything I can do to try and not pay as much attention as possible to every single tiny or semi-hidden detail of a landscape which I’m temporarily inhabiting… as ultimately – you really, really have to watch out for incoming zombies, at the very least.
Only chance you’ve got with a horde of zombies is that you can see them coming, but you’d probably smell them before you saw them, so… Pay attention and be prepared to evacuate. A ‘shelter in place’ during a zombie outbreak is a death sentence.
People are strange, but I’m somehow always stranger.
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.
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
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.
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.
Clamps, clamps, clamps
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Your humble narrator had been involved in a fun scuttle for a couple of hours, when the photo above was captured.
Depicting the Fort Pitt Bridge over the Monongahela River, this and a couple of the other shots in today’s post were shot in the name of testing out a new piece of gear, recently added to the camera bag.
I should mention that I’m obsessed with unique camera support devices. One of the few spaces wherein I ‘tinker’ revolves around building novel support mechanisms for the camera. I’m forever attaching tripod heads and ARCA Swiss plates to all sort of things – bean bags, blocks of silicone, you name it.
The new addition is a ‘Super Clamp.’ Clamp, clamp, clamp.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It needed some modification, ‘out of the box,’ to fit my particular ‘use case scenario.’ Specifically, an extended bushing which introduced instability into the mount needed to go. I ordered a smaller bushing from Amazon which I swapped in – a tripod mount screw size (1/4 inch 20 turn) on one side and tripod head mount size (3/8ths 16 turn) on the other. That allowed me to securely attach a tripod head to the thing.
I screwed a ten stop ND filter onto my lens for these, to ‘slow’ down the flowing waters of the Monongahela and capture reflections.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The beauty of this device is that it allows me to clamp my camera onto fences, poles, even fire hydrants – offering a rock steady mount.
Given that I was quite taken with the thing’s performance, it’s become a regular carry ever since. My problems have now transferred over to the lens filters themselves. The ones I’ve been carrying – for years and years – are screw on filters, which are a pain in the neck to manipulate in ‘the field.’
My problem is encapsulated in the shift to the next shot.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had time to unscrew the filter, and ‘rekajigger’ the camera settings away from ‘long and loving’ exposure over to a ‘freeze the moment’ setting, for this shot. It isn’t always the case that I can do this quickly enough, so I often miss stuff when the camera is set up for filter usage.
Accordingly, I’ve spent a bit of cash on a new set of lens filters, which use a magnetic system in lieu of the screw in system. You do have to screw an adapter into the lens, which is ferrous in composition so when a magnet enabled filter gets close to it, the glass disc just snaps right into place.
Just got these delivered, at this writing, so the verdict is out on whether or not I pissed away my money, or if the things will work as I hope and help rather than hinder my efforts. I’ve been ‘feeling’ longer exposures again for some reason.
Comparing the two bridge shots above, you can really discern the amount of color cast which my older filters alter the scene with. All ND filters have a ‘cast,’ some more severe than others.
Also, clamps.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Can’t miss a Towboat shot though, can I?
Gotta say, I’m missing the smell of salt water these days, and it’s been a long time since I was on anything but a tourist boat.
This is about when I heard the hissing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This Canadian Doofus was angry at me.
A bit of recent research in this direction revealed that – in Pittsburgh at least – the Canada Gooses segregate into two groups. There’s a purely migratory population of them, and there’s a static one which occupies the waterfronts all year long – even in winter. The latter are larger in stature and weight, according to the Pennsylvania environmental peeps. These monstrous iceholes enjoy Federal and State protection, and their only natural predators are Coyotes, Eagles, and Owls.
These predators don’t mess with adults like the one pictured above – mind you – instead preferring to pick off either the newborn Goslings, or sick and or elderly adult Gooses who can’t fight back.
I stand by my conviction that Canada Geese, as a specie, are dicks.
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.
Remains, my day
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Luckily for my aching feet, a construction project was underway and performing maintenance on the T light rail’s track beds, so I had to tack on a bit more distance in order to get to one of the stations which wouldn’t be affected by this project. First Avenue Station was the new goal. Lean into it, I did. Yes, I could have taken a bus, but that would be cheating.
Luckily it’s all downhill from here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is one of the ‘main drags’ in Downtown Pittsburgh, dubbed ‘Liberty Avenue.’ There’s a T station under that building with the ‘KL Gates’ branding, but it was one of the stations receiving the maintenance attentions from the T’s parent agency – dubbed PRT.
I headed through the thick of things, towards First Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The dark shape on the left is the US Steel building, currently occupied by the healthcare giant UPMC, and beneath it is found the ‘Steel Plaza Station’ of the T, which was also under construction.
Center of the shot is the newish BNY Mellon building. To the right is the entrance to the Koppers tower, which I’ve been on the roof of, during a tour.
Behind it is the sun, which is a self perpetuating thermonuclear reaction happening in space that pumps heat, light, and other forms of radiation away from its celestial body.
Captain Obvious has thereby spoken, to which General Vocabulary replies ‘indubitably.’ Sergeant Pedantry has some notes they’d like to discuss, however.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking down Pittsburgh’s shadowy downtown, and you can really see the price paid for not insisting on building setbacks in towers for Pittsburgh’s building codes. ‘Perma-shadows.’
They had a Rachel Carson out here, not a Jane Jacobs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finally, one had First Avenue Station in sight. Ffft.
I will fully admit to the practice of ‘drag assing’ at this stage of my scuttle. Luckily, there’s a working escalator at this station.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finally, I got to sit down again, on the T.
As the crow flies, this scuttle was something like seven miles, but with all of my peregrinations added in, this ending up being about a ten mile long scuttle – at least according to the phone app which I use to measure such things.
Back tomorrow, with something different – 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 