Posts Tagged ‘Gateway Clipper’
earthward dreams
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Gateway Clipper excursion boat I was a passenger on executed its turnaround on the Allegheny River and started back towards the confluence it shares with the Monongahela River where they both transmogrify into the singularity of the Ohio River. My visit to Pittsburgh was winding down, and a humble narrator had been working behind the camera, and marching around, more or less continuously for about 48 hours since arriving in the city via Amtrak.
As regular readers of Newtown Pentacle will tell you, it’s normally all Queens and Brooklyn most of the time, and it was a genuine pleasure to see sights like the ones above for a change. Learning new things, too. Miss that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Right about the moment when we passed by the monument to Fred Rogers, another native son of Pittsburgh memorialized on the waterfront, that’s when I said “screw it” and found the onboard bar. An ice cold bottle of Yuengling Beer in my grasp, for the first time in a couple of days I switched the camera to “off” and just chilled out on the boat for few minutes. “Yiz got’s to stop’s and smell’s da roses every’s now and den” as they’ll tell you here in Pittsburgh.
It actually had been a wonderful day, in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
September found me in several places, and I’ve detailed the travels, photos, and brief research I’ve done on these places in recent weeks.
72 hours in Burlington, Vermont: leaving from NYC in ultimate abyss, exploring the Lake Champlain shoreline in awed sessions, the Ethan Allen Homestead and Intervale in immemorial lore, Church Street and downtown in waxen mask. Burlington was analyzed during sunset in doubly potent, we visited Shelburne Farms in appalling seething, reel irresponsibly, took a boat tour onboard the Spirit of Ethan Allen on Lake Champlain in viscous end, returned to the downtown Burlington area in grew hoarser. I found a rail yard and an epic sunset in new equilibrium, and returned to NYC via Amtrak in white fungi.
In untellable secret, the camera and I attended a wedding in Watertown, NY.
7 hours in Washington D.C. saw me boarding a train and heading to the Capitol in swelled alarmingly, arrived at the National Mall and explored a bit in slackened speed, hovered about, whereupon a look at Union Station was offered in rolling hills.
I’ll put together a similar list of all the Pittsburgh posts at some near point in time. I had to board a train at about 6 a.m. the next day to get to my next Amtrak destination. It ain’t over till it’s over, lords and ladies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After rounding about the Golden Triangles’ Point State Park and onto the waters of the Monongahela River, the Gateway Clipper boat returned to its pier at Station Square on the south bank of the River. That volatile Pittsburgh weather I’ve mentioned several times got to work again, and the temperature dropped into the low to middle 50’s. I was, of course, wearing shorts. Since I was traveling, I had no pants, just shorts.
A quick jab at my phone summoned a Lyft rideshare car to my aid, which got me back to the AirBNB acting as my home base for the stay. Images were downloaded off the camera, batteries charged, phone calls back home made. I washed up, relaxed for a few minutes, and went back out in search of dinner. Cheeseburger, and another Yuengling – that was my agenda, but I had one last thing to do first.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I decided that it would be an excellent idea to firmly locate the relative position of the Amtrak station’s location to my AirBNB. I was so severely sleep deprived when I got to Pittsburgh that I barely remembered how I got from point’s A to B. Given that I’d have to be back out on the streets when it was still dark out to catch my train… a bit of advance wayfinding was engaged in, and just look at what I came across!
Pictured above is what was once the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Pittsburgh Union Station. It’s still called that, but these days it’s a ritzy apartment building and has been since the 1980’s, whereas the modern day train station – called an annex, officially – is… well… ahem… it cannot be described as being architecturally distinguished. It’s actually reminiscent of a two story Soviet doctor’s office with Amtrak logos nailed to the walls, and a couple of escalators that lead to a train shed.
Union Station in Pittsburgh opened in 1903, 4 years before it’s namesake in Washington D.C. and 7 years before NYC’s Old Penn Station. The two Union Stations in Pennsylvania and Washington were designed by a Chicago architect named David Burnham.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This was pretty much the last photo I captured on Day Two in Pittsburgh, which is kind of appropriate – no?
As mentioned, I had an early call with Amtrak. It was time to start stuffing all my clothing and camera gear back into the bags, and loading my carry back up. A bit of straightening up in the AirBNB followed, whereupon a set of clothes was set out for early morning deployment and the next adventure. After a meal, and a quick inventory of my bags, sleep ensued.
Another far away destination still stood between me and home.
More tomorrow, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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unexampled flight
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Onboard a Gateway Clipper excursion boat, here in Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh, the Captain navigated us around the “Point” of the Golden Triangle and off of the Monongahela River and onto the Allegheny River. Pictured is the confluence of the “Three Rivers” where the two form the one and the Ohio River begins.
That fountain above is the centerpiece of Point State Park, and was discussed in a prior post dubbed “certain circumstances.” When I was here, on Day One of my 72 hours in Pittsburgh, it was nighttime. The shots in today’s post are from Day Two.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above are, from the top – the Fort Duquesne Bridge (also briefly profiled in the post linked to above), and the three smaller yellow bridges beyond it are the Sixth Street Roberto Clemente, Seventh Street Andy Warhol, and Ninth Street Rachel Carson bridges – discussed in similarly brief fashion in this post – dubbed “human clothing.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Gateway Clipper tour guide intoned that the reason why everything “Pittsburgh” is colored black and yellow dates back to its founding, and is related to how they came up with the romantic sounding name “Pittsburgh” in the first place. The City picked up its moniker in 1758, when a British General named the area in honor of a back home politician named William Pitt, the 1st earl of Chatham. From an American history POV, we remember this politician as “Pitt the Elder.” It seems that the feudal standard colors of the Pitts were black and gold.
Pittsburgh stays on “brand” all these centuries later, with black and gold municipal goodness; its bridges, its Steelers NFL team, Penguins NHL team, and the Pirates MLB uniforms. According to the tour guide, the gold color, as commercially supplied, is called “Aztec Yellow.”
That brings me back to the old days, “Aztec Yellow” does, I tell’s ya… reminds me of the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca, the god of wizards and darkness often referred to as “the smoking mirror” lest invoking his name summon the entity. Tezcatlipoca was often depicted by the Nauali Priesthood of Tenochtitlan as man with obsidian black skin wearing yellow war paint, or simply as a Jaguar.
Nerrrrrrrrrrd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Continuing up the Allegheny River, we encountered the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge, whose details and specifics were also discussed in the posting linked to above – dubbed “human clothing.” As mentioned on that occasion, captured also on Day One of this 72 hour portage, this is a very active railroad bridge.
Once the Gateway Clipper passed underneath it, the turnaround point for the excursion would be reached.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator normally reacts with horror at the sort of architecture employed by a structure called the “David L. Lawrence Convention Center,” or colloquially the “Pittsburgh Convention Center,” but this massive 1.5 million square foot facility is actually pretty cool looking and a nice accommodation of the space. A section of it is cantilevered out over a highway or high speed road of some sort, as well as the Three Rivers Heritage Trail bike and pedestrian pathway. This is just past the “Strip district.”
It’s where I got my shots of the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge the day before, along the waterfront path.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Behind the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge, which had one of those seemingly half mile long Midwestern freight trains you hear about moving over it, that’s the “Veterans Bridge” truss bridge, and the 16th Street David McCullough Bridge in descending order.
Wow, it’s almost as if I had planned out my 72 hours in Pittsburgh to involve collecting a systemic catalog of the Golden Triangle’s bridges and interesting points, found on the Allegheny River between 31st street and Point State Park, and then the Monongahela River side Bridges and both Inclines – Monongahela and Duquesne – between Point State Park and the Smithfield Street Bridge. It’s almost as if the entire mission could then be visually summed up and compiled, via the rapid fire shooting and focal points offered by a 60 minute tourist boat excursion covering much of the same ground I had already travelled on foot.
That’s crazy, right, as I’m an idiot man child with a camera scuttling through junk yards and along riverbanks, right?
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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.
prodigious time
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator will offer once again that he is no railroad historian. The business tricks and trades associated in the modern day with venture capitalist firms, patent portfolios, and technology companies are the only analogue one can point at to analogize the complicated world and finances of the 19th century railroad business in the United States. It was a great way to get rich, or go bankrupt, and sometimes both. Capital intensive industries like rail always attracted the big players with fat wallets who could afford to gamble. There’s a reason you associate names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan with rail in this era. In the case of the 1875 founded Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, whose surviving Pittsburgh campus along the Monongahela River has been converted over to a shopping center and entertainment complex called “Station Square,” I’m just going to refer you to a Wikipedia page which can describe their entire complicated story to you better than I can.
Besides, I’m a lot more interested in the second oldest steel bridge in the United States, pictured above and below, which is dubbed “Smithfield Street Bridge.” It’s the third bridge to offer a crossing of the Monongahela River at this location, with the first wooden one dating back to 1818. That bridge (dubbed the Monongahela Bridge) stood until the Great Fire of Pittsburgh in 1845, which destroyed a third of the City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The second bridge here was a wire rope suspension bridge built by a certain fellow named John A. Roebling. It wasn’t designed for heavy traffic, and used eight spans to cross the Monongahela, so Roebling’s version was replaced with this 1883 vintage lenticular truss type bridge seen above. It’s 42 and a half feet above the water, uses two spans of 360 feet each to cross the river, and is (on ramp to off ramp) 1,184 feet long.
The Smithfield Street Bridge was designed by Gustav Lindenthal, whose masterpieces are the Hell Gate Bridge and the Queensboro Bridge back in Queens’ Astoria and Long Island City sections respectively. How’s them apples, for a fella seeking to escape NYC and see something different for a few days, after a long pandemic?
So – the bridge this version replaced was designed by the guy who built the Brooklyn Bridge, and the 138 years old replacement is by the guy who built the Hell Gate (with Pittsburgh’s American Bridge Company) and Queensboro (with Henri Hornbostel, of course).
Nerrrrrrrrrrd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lenticular truss deal involves the large curved structures visible above, which act as tension springs bound to the masonry piers. As a point of trivia, the masonry is original to the Roebling version of Smithfield Street Bridge. It’s a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a National Historic Landmark, and is listed by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. Streetcar service operated on this span until 1985, which has since been moved to the Panhandle Bridge. Apparently, this bridge also boasts the highest count for pedestrian crossings in all of Pittsburgh, as the Station Square development offers commercial parking lots that are patronized by downtown commuters.
Smithfield Street Bridge has had its roadways widened twice to accommodate traffic volume and changing usage since it opened in 1883. Its somewhat modern day pop culture claim to fame is an appearance in the opening scene of the 1983 Jennifer Beals movie “Flashdance.”
Who knew?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the deck of the Gateway Clipper, the camera had a great platform from which to capture the scenery. There’s the Golden Triangle side of the Monongahela River, with the mate of the masonry railroad bridge pier I showed you yesterday. Behind that, on the landward side, are preserved historic district buildings from the old days of industry as well as newer construction. I think – as in I’m sort of not sure if I’m right or not – that these masonry towers were part of what was called the Wabash Rail Bridge, when there was still a span here.
The Monongahela River is considered to be the 17th most polluted river in the United States. The Ohio River is #1, which Monongahela feeds into. The Monongahela River is 130 miles long, and flows northeasterly out of West Virginia into Pennsylvania, where it turns northwards, and then joins with the Allegheny River here in Pittsburgh to form the headwaters of the Ohio River. Its entirety is managed for navigability by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who maintain a minimum depth of 9 feet using locks and dams. Legend has it that the name “Monongahela” is an English language portmanteau of Native American words meaning “falling banks” or “where banks cave in.”
Again, that weird topology of Pittsburgh asserts itself, even in aboriginal place names. The polluted status of the river is chalked up to the presence of steel mills and mining operations found outside of the city, and historic pollution from the era of steel production here in Western Pennsylvania.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Gateway Clipper narration was very good. I say that as someone who often fulfills a similar function in NY Harbor, speaking onboard Circle Line and other excursion boats about the hidden wonders of the East River and its tributaries like Newtown Creek or the Gowanus, the somewhat boring Hudson River, or Staten Island’s Kill Van Kull and Bayonne’s Port Elizabeth Newark. I made it a point of tipping the guide with a ten dollar bill to show some professional “esprit de corps.” He seemed a bit surprised by the tip, actually. If you’re in Pittsburgh, I can recommend this boat tour.
Pictured above are the on ramps of the Fort Pitt Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Where those onramps lead is the Fort Pitt tunnel. It’s a bit different than the sort of river bottom tunnels we have in NYC, where traffic going in different directions move in parallel courses. The Fort Pitt tunnel uses two stacked bores through Mt. Washington, with Golden Triangle/Downtown Pittsburgh bound traffic moving through the upstairs, while South Side/West End bound traffic uses the downstairs. It seems that there actually four tunnels that are struck through Mt. Washington, but this is the only one I’ve got a picture of.
The tunnel opened in 1960, is 3,614 feet in length, 28 feet wide, and offers a vertical clearance of 13.5 feet. According to official statistics, and pre Covid traffic counts, some 107,000 vehicle trips a day move through the Fort Pitt Tunnel on average.
Whew. More tomorrow.
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abnormal toughness
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One last week of posts from my 72 hours in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania starts today. As mentioned in the past, one travelled around the Northeastern United States a bit in September, using an Amtrak rail pass to move about. After riding Pittsburgh’s funicular railways – or Inclines, as they refer to them here – one made his way down to the south side of the Monongahela River and resumed scuttling along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail pathway. Pittsburgh’s volatile weather kept on churning the sky, so it was overcast and in the high 60’s during this part of my day.
Pictured above is the Fort Pitt Bridge. Even for a city of 446 bridges, this 1959 vintage double decked bowstring arch bridge is a fairly major crossing. Fort Pitt Bridge is (entrance to exit ramp) 1,207 feet long, and the main span over the river is 750 feet. It clears the water by 47 feet, replaced an earlier span called the Point Bridge, and is operated by the PennDOT. Fort Pitt Bridge connects downtown Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle” with several local, State, and Interstate high speed roads via the Fort Pitt Tunnel, which is dug through Mt. Washington. It’s apparently the first computer designed bridge, and this structure continues the practice here in Pittsburgh of a bridge having multiple names. It’s also known as the “Parkway West #1 Bridge” apparently.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The boat tour I had a ticket for didn’t leave for a couple of hours, and I was hoping to find someone somewhere to sell me a cold beer. Unfortunately, due to Covid and the economic fallout thereof, this was a somewhat quixotic quest for a humble narrator. I found myself, thereby, at “Station Square.”
Station Square is a 52 acre property housed in the former environs and properties of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad company. There’s a sports stadium (Highmark Stadium), a Hard Rock Cafe, a marina, a hotel, a mass transit “T” station, and a bunch of other chain store hospitality businesses which would be quite familiar to anyone who’s wandered off a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Unfortunately for me, due to Covid, almost everything was closed. Fortunately for me, the practice they seem to employ here in Pittsburgh of creating elevated and public overlook platforms continued. I noticed this bit of kit when walking towards one of those overlooks.
That’s a Bessemer Converter pictured above, which sat alongside another piece of industrial equipment left behind from the Steel City era. The old office building of P&LERR is also still standing, and I’ll show you that when the “from the water” shots start tomorrow.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From that public overlook platform, which I guess was the equivalent of about three stories up, a great view of the 1883 vintage Smithfield Street Bridge was there for the taking. This is a verrrrrrry important bridge, from the “history of civil engineering in these United States” POV. Next time I’m in Pittsburgh, I plan on getting all granular about this particular span and photographing every single rivet. That’s how important it is. I’ll talk about the why’s and wherefore to back up my interest in subsequent posts from the water when I was able to get the camera closer to it. Suffice to say, for now, that the second oldest steel bridge in the United States is still standing in Pittsburgh. The oldest steel bridge in the USA is the 1874 Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River in St. Louis, before you ask.
I literally found out about this bridge and its significance while I was physically in Pittsburgh, by the way. I had a prepared shot list and itinerary for the trip, but had also built lots of “serendipity” time into the camera’s schedule. One of the mistakes you can make on a journey like this is to have decided in advance what you’re going to discover or encounter. It’s good to have some sort of structure for your travels, but you also don’t want to limit where the camera wants to be pointed. I had no idea this outlook viewing platform even existed until I was standing in front of it, let alone that it would be publicly accessible, for example.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If I had stuck to a proscribed list, thereby, I never would have gotten the shot above of a CSX freight train roaring along what – I believe – were once the tracks of the B&O railroad which are still quite active here on the south side of the Monongahela River. CSX is a freight railroad operator that is fairly continental in size, ranging along the east coast of the United States and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The company was formed in 1980, and is one of the private capital entities which has grown up in the ashes of the post Conrail/Amtrak era which saw the bankruptcy and collapse of the PennCentral mega corporation which forced Richard Nixon to nationalize the rails as a strategic national asset. Again – I’m not a railfan, or a rail historian. I’m an interested lookie loo, and I highly suggest you read up on this interesting topic, or talk to an actual expert about it. I mainly like taking pictures of trains.
Later in the day, I also witnessed Norfolk & Southern led freight trains broiling through here. The haul in all cases seemed to be a combination of mineral (coal, coke, etc.), tanker, and cargo box cars.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finally, it was almost time to board the boat for my appointed 60 minute tour. A pedestrian tunnel allows one to travel under the rail tracks from Station Square, and I soon found myself on a dock set into the Monongahela River. While I was cooling my heels waiting for the excursion to begin, a masonry structure caught my eye. There’s two bridge towers, bereft of their crossing span, which can be observed on either side of the river. I was told that the span used to operate as a railroad bridge. The rail bridge fed into the Golden Triangle river delta section of downtown, and after the deindustrialization era began it had no purpose so it was torn down. The masonry towers that supported it were left in place and they’re supposedly “for sale” but there are serious limitations on what you can do with them so nobody wants to purchase the things.
The deckhands for the boat tour began to check our tickets and it was time to board the boat. I was alone, of course, but there were probably thirty or so other people on the boat.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gateway Clipper is the analogue of NYC’s Circle Line here in Pittsburgh. They’re been operating in the Steel City since 1958, and employ a small fleet of excursion vessels. The founder of Gateway Clipper was John E. Connelly, who went on to become quite wealthy in the Riverboat Casino business on the Mississippi River, and was also the founder of NYC’s World Yacht which operates out of Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers complex on the Hudson River. He was also, I’m informed, instrumental in developing Chelsea Piers as a tourist and leisure destination.
Gateway Clipper does ferry service for Steelers and Pirates games, but their main interest is in the tourist and “function” business. As I was opining to my NY Harbor pals when I got back to New York, they have a novel solution for high capacity excursion vessels in their fleet – a tug push boat which is permanently affixed to a flat top barge that has a thousand seat catering hall built on top of it. That’s the Empress and the Empress 2 for all of you vesseltracker peeps.
Tomorrow – the long foreshadowed boat tour of Pittsburgh, and revelations about the Smithfield Street Bridge.
“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 