Posts Tagged ‘Fort Pitt’
Shiver, me timbers
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above is a typical street in the part of Pittsburgh that HQ is now located in, in the section dubbed as “Dormont.” After a week long interval of wintry weather, a day long break without freezing rain or snow occurred and despite the temperature being in the 20’s – a humble narrator needed to get out and take himself a nice long walk. I left the snow covered car parked in the driveway at HQ, and used the T light rail to get from Dormont to Downtown Pittsburgh, which is called “Dahntahn” by the born -N- bred types. There is, I should mention, a fascinating regional accent here in Pittsburgh.
The T costs $2.75 to ride into downtown from Dormont. It’s about a 20 minute ride, and after running on regular streets alongside vehicular traffic for a bit, the light rail moves first onto an exclusive to its use steel bridge, and then it shares a closed roadway with several bus lines. I’m still trying to figure all this out, as a note.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Infrastructure, infrastructure. At the left hand side of the photo above, shot through the window of the T while it was traveling on the elevated trackway mentioned above, is the entrance to the Liberty Tunnel which carries automotive traffic from the South Hills under Mount Washington and to the Liberty Bridge over the Monongahela River. The tunnel is fed by a series of primary and secondary arterial roadways which are in turn supplied with traffic by the local streets, as well as providing interchanges with high speed roads which are classified as local, State, and Interstate. Pittsburgh sits at one of those points in the interstate system where several major roads cross or combine.
The T carried me into Downtown Pittsburgh, and I disembarked the service at the Gateway Center stop. I was desirous to scout a bit in the business and governmental center of the City, on foot. There is an abundance of interesting “robber baron” era architecture found in Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Navigating the streets of Pittsburgh is something I’m getting better at. It’s confusing for this transplanted New Yorker, as they didn’t lay this place out using a grid system. The streets are often long helixes or curvilinear, traveling around the footprint of long gone factory and mill complexes, or railroads which are no longer there.
The shot above looks towards the ice and snow covered Mount Washington, on the other side of the Monongahela River, and the Duquesne Incline.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My goal for the day, and of course it was only about 20 degrees out, was to scuttle over the Fort Pitt Bridge’s pedestrian walkway. One has a stunning admission to offer here – I wasn’t wearing the filthy black raincoat, or as I refer to it “the street cassock,” on this walk. It’s just not warm enough, the raincoat, and one has been forced to buy an actual winter coat. I purchased a brand which I’ve noticed most of the Pittsburgh blokes favor, a Carhartt, at one of the local sporting goods stores. It’s toasty warm, a bit too warm for certain situations actually, and one was wrapped up tight. I had the whole winter layers outfit on underneath the coat, with long johns and winter boots and everything.
Don’t worry, the new coat is black in coloration. I haven’t gone native.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a ramp at Point State Park which allows egress to the pedestrian walkway of the Fort Pitt Bridge, so one maneuvered himself in that direction. There’s a bunch of early American history at work within the whole Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne thing, which involves George Washington and the French and Indian War.
As far as the atmosphere goes, it was overcast, which is somewhat typical for Pittsburgh – the 5th cloudiest City in these United States. Once I was scuttling along at a good pace, the temperature wasn’t too hard to handle, and I wasn’t even wearing gloves at this point. Wearing gloves when you’re all bundled up isn’t always the best idea, since your body needs to vent heat from somewhere and you don’t want to start getting sweaty under all those layers.
As mentioned above – it’s a pretty warm coat, the Carhartt.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I found the walkway path right where the internet said it would be. It wasn’t a trick.
Tomorrow, a walk over the Fort Pitt Bridge.
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certain circumstances
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After eating dinner at one of Pittsburgh’s iconic Primanti Brothers restaurants, one got busy on his evening plans. The camera was rigged up for low light/night shooting, and a humble narrator got to work. Pictured above and below are sections of PPG Place, a 1984 vintage six building commercial real estate complex built and primarily occupied by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass outfit. The main 40 story building, whose ground floor entrances sit behind that fountain, is the corporate headquarter for PPG. The entire deal is clothed in plate glass, some 19,750 panels (over one million square feet of glass) of it, which is why it looks like an early 1990’s CGI background. Wet glass, LED lighting, weird look and feel. PPG has operated out of Pittsburgh since 1895.
The PPG complex sits on six square blocks or one square acre, replaced a department store called Guskey’s, and it’s construction revealed a cornucopia of archaeological finds ranging from Native American to early Colonial and pre industrial uses of the site. The main tower is the third tallest building in Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned several times in the last few weeks, on this particular interval of travel, one felt compelled to record the scene whenever and wherever a fountain was discovered. This wasn’t much of a fountain, in comparison to what I saw in Washington D.C., but there you are. Apparently, during the holiday season and winter months, this plaza is converted over to be an ice skating rink. It’s a fave for Pittsburghers, apparently, with high occupancy rates and several newspaper polls listing it as the voted on choice for “best building” in the City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fourth tallest building in the City of Pittsburgh is nearby, which is called “Fifth Avenue Place” officially, but is colloquially called Highmark Place. 31 floors, and completed in 1988, it’s the HQ for a Highmark subsidiary called Jenkins Empire Associates. Highmark is a non profit health insurance organization which also owns several for profit medical insurance and reinsurance companies. Basically – Highmark is the corporate entity that Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield have reorganized themselves into.
The building was originally meant to be a bit taller, but city zoning officials squashed that. The 13 story tall spire atop the building was an attempt to lay claim to the original height that the architect planned for, and with all the hub bub over the zoning deal it was never transmitted to the City that the spire/mast was designed to sway up to three feet when high winds hit the top. It seems that the first time this sway was observed, Pittsburgh’s First Responders shut the downtown area down fearing that something catastrophic was about to occur.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Developed by the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in 1964, this “caught my eye” structure – with its fascinating load bearing external diagrid and framed tube steel exoskeleton – was built on the footprint of an old Wabash Terminal Train Shed. When it opened as the IBM Building, its principal tenants were the IBM corporation on floors 1-4 and U.S. Steel on floors 5-13. It was bought by the United Steelworkers Union in 1973, and the labor organization’s offices are still housed therein.
A bit of skyscraper trivia is offered here. The same people who designed the external structure of the building also did the World Trade Center in NYC. Just like the WTC, the structure of the building is outside the walls, and within the only structural supports are at the center of the thing surrounding the elevator and plumbing/electrical cores. Neat!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My next stop was yet another fountain, this time being Pittsburgh’s “big kahuna” at Point State Park. It’s found at the “tip of the spear” on the river delta formed by the three rivers – Ohio, Allegheny, Monongahela. 36 acres in size, this Pennsylvania State Park was opened in 1974. Its fountain is the iconic center of the larger metropolitan region, and Pittsburgh’s reclamation of its post industrial waterfront really started with the opening of this park. The fountain sits where the on and off ramp of two bridges used to be found, the Manchester and Point Bridges.
The park incorporates the remains of Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne, which were important fortresses during the French and Indian War (1755-1764) and although I’m largely ignorant about the details of the conflict here at the ‘forks of the Ohio,” there’s a nearby spot referred to as “Washington’s landing” so… George Washington.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The one Allegheny River Bridge between Point Park and the 31st street Bridge I didn’t show you yet is pictured above, the so called “Bridge to Nowhere” or Fort Duquesne Bridge. It carries Interstate 279 (North Shore Expressway) and Interstate 376 into and out of Downtown Pittsburgh and also has a pedestrian walkway in the lower deck. It’s got a steel bowstring type span of 426 feet, and provides a water clearance of 46 feet. It opened to traffic in October of 1969.
Whew. All of this Pittsburgh stuff that you’ve seen here at Newtown Pentacle for the last two weeks was literally captured in one day between 7 a.m. and about midnight. It started raining again while I was capturing the bridge shot above, so I double timed it back to the street and caught a cab back to the AirBNB. Starting tomorrow – Day two. I was just getting started on day one, and had to contend with the weather, and I also had tickets for a boat tour of the rivers nested in my pocket for day two. The things I saw…
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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.
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