Posts Tagged ‘Lawrenceville’
Penn Avenue and the Doughboy
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For some reason, Pittsburgh has started showing me ‘cool cars’ on my walks, although in this case it was a fire engine red scooter. Must have been hard to find a color matching helmet. Also, speaking as an ex-New Yorker – you just leave your helmet outside on the bike?
Really, people leave their cars and homes unlocked out here. Sometimes, you’ll encounter a car in a lot, with a running engine and the driver’s side door either ajar or wide open, just sitting there ready for stealing. I’m from Brooklyn – and often – my challenge in Pittsburgh is not doing any of the Brooklyn things – even if it’s just to ‘teach you a lesson.’
This is Pittsburgh’s ‘Sixth Ward,’ incidentally.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This ‘sixth ward scuttle’ of mine was steadily moving down Pittsburgh’s Penn Avenue, and I was specifically in the Lawrenceville section at this stage. One of the landmarks along the route is a memorial to the 3,100 soldiers from the sixth ward who were lost during WW1.
They call this ‘Doughboy Park.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This statuary is found at 34th street and Penn Avenue. It’s used as a landmark by the locals, I’m told. A ‘meet me at…’ sort of thing.
I enjoyed a quick sit down, and then rose back up to complete the day’s constitutional. Now that I can reliably walk again, I just can’t get enough of the activity.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking to the north, there’s that industrial zone in which we took a walk back in April, with this shot offering a nearly opposite view from the perspectives offered above. Notice that rail trestle against the tree line, that’s right about where I was walking in this post.
It’s time for an ankle talk – It seems that I’ve overcome the pronounced limping which saw me walking around like the Batman villain Penguin for a while. Striding is back. Things still get weird when steps are on the menu, and my biggest ‘ankle hangover’ problem at the moment involves small and discrete movements of the foot during locomotion. For instance: stepping on a raised sidewalk seam and having my foot rotate forward, or back, can often turn into a bit of an ordeal. Heavily sloped surfaces moving upwards and away from me remains an issue as well.
It’s been a year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s part of the 33rd street rail bridge which that school bus is passing under. This is one of those transitional zones, what I used to describe as the ‘angle between neighborhoods’ back in NYC. On the other side of the bridge, it’s the start of the ‘Strip District.’
I was going all the way downtown, so this was basically the middle point of the walk, about 2 and change miles in. These days, I shoot for five or six miles at a pop. Hopefully, by the time it gets well and truly cold I’ll be averaging seven to eight miles rather than five to six. Given where things were for me at the start of 2025, I’m just glad to be able to do whatever the hell I want to do, whenever the hell I want to do it again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the 31st street Bridge, and here’s another view of it from Rialto Street, and another one from a walk over the thing.
Back tomorrow with more.
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Don’t touch
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Continuing with a scuttle between Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville and the Downtown area in today’s post. Scroll down to past posts from last week, for prior ruminations on robotics and AI, and see where this walk started.
As mentioned in those posts, wherever it was possible, your humble narrator’s path stuck to the ‘way’ or alley streets for this scuttle. Just happens that there’s rail tracks along this particular way, but my fever dream of catching a train moving around back here didn’t come true this time. Again.
The gentrification fires burn brightly in both east and west directions from this industrial area, like book ends. It’s all a part of the ongoing recovery from the regional collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh over the last 40 years. Nowadays, they’re building autonomous vehicles and battlefield robots here, whereas just a few blocks distant it’s ‘affordable housing’ and ‘YIMBY’ sentiment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This trestle is part of the 33rd street rail bridge, which spans the Allegheny River and connects to the northern shore nearby Etna and Millvale.
For those of you keeping score, this walk started at Pittsburgh’s 50th street, so 17 blocks in with a few tessellation’s north or south, while underway. The reliable measure in NYC was always ‘20 blocks are a mile,’ but that’s based on a predictable grid. There is no such organizing principle here. Pittsburgh was a boom town, and if an industrial entity wanted a large campus that broke a grid, they’d get it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After passing under the rail bridge, I was walking into somewhat familiar territory, so decided to mix that up a bit. As mentioned, I was trying to stick – as much as possible – to the alleys.
This is where one such as myself belongs, amongst the abandoned rails, and the cast away possessions of the human infestation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As is my habit, I was busy beating myself up psychologically while walking along, but that’s something I’m trying to stop doing so I plugged the headphones into my ear holes and keyed up some music. This time around it was the band ‘Gorillaz.’
Have to download a few albums from the Mountain Goats before my next walk. Love that band.
I listen to this 20 year old song from the Mountain Goats a lot these days, and especially so when all the ankle drama was going on. I will survive this year, if it kills me.
Mountain Goats wrote and performed one of my absolute favorite ‘Newtown Creek theme songs’ with ‘Lovecraft in Brooklyn’ as well. Recommended listening.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was forced off my alleys path for a bit due to a huge construction project. Remember when I mentioned the Gentrification Furnaces glowing brightly? There’s an invisible line somewhere around this set of warehouses where Lawrenceville ends, and the Strip District begins, but I’m ignorant of its actual location. Ask a realtor.
Ok, I mentioned the ankle situation above. Everything was cool on this walk – no pain, swelling, or clicking. Fingers crossed, this experience might be a bad memory at this juncture and ‘fade into black.’
Again: I will survive this year, if it kills me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 31st street bridge was in now front of me. I still had a couple/three miles to go before meeting Our Lady downtown. Lots of alleys coming up.
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.
Walking a line
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The industrial building pictured above, as seen from the streets of Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville section, is the home of Carnegie Robotics. The end of the world is probably being invented in there right now.
There’s an air of dread floating about in my mind when I see industries working in this direction. Developing technology in this direction will lead us out of the current ‘Robocop 3’ reality show we’re all living in, go right through Terminator, and end up being the back story for Dune.
Butlerian Jihad, anyone?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a big ‘H’ on the wall of the Carnegie Robotics property. It signifies the former owner of the site, the Heppenstall Company. Luckily for me, Pittsburgh City Paper’s Chris Potter did a piece on the Heppenstall outfit back in 2006, so I didn’t have to hit the books and do my own detective work.
One kept on walking. Forward, ever forward.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My obeyance to the conceit of following the ‘way’ or alley streets continued, and in this case, I ended up walking along the ballast rock path alongside a set of Allegheny Valley Railroad tracks. I would have been thrilled, were the white whale to have appeared, to capture a photo of one of their train sets.
It’s getting stupid at this point. I’ve learned to predict the movements of two of the four railroads that commonly operate here, and am beginning to figure out those of a third. The fourth – AVRR – is like a phantom.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the 40th street bridge pictured above, a colossal vehicle span connecting the north shore nearby Rialto Street and Route 28 to Lawrenceville.
I had to walk through a company’s parking lot directly after this.
One of the cool things about Pittsburgh is how few shits anyone gives about that sort of thing. Unless you’re messing around and trying to break into the cars in the lot or something, it’s completely uncommented upon and ‘ok.’ What a difference compared to all the yentas who would bug me back in NYC with the ‘what are you taking pictures of’ and ‘who are you with’ comments before telling me that taking photos was a crime and they were going to call the cops on me. I’d laugh when a car of Cops, particularly on the Queens side of the Creek, would pull up and say ‘Hi, Mitch.’
I once had a mob of old Greek ladies chase me down the block, over by St. Irene’s in Astoria, and they were yelling ‘it’s Al Quaeda’ at the top of their lungs after seeing my camera. Yikes!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just as a point of fact, there are no actual laws in the United States forbidding photography – with just a few exceptions – mainly focused within the confines of Military Bases and around Judicial Courts. The ‘rule’ is that if you are in a public space – street, sidewalk, park – whatever – you have no ‘expectation of privacy.’ This is the very ‘right’ that the cops exploit that allows them to put security, red light, or bike lane cameras up wherever they want to. Good for the goose, all that.
I didn’t see any AVRR activity, but I did see a bunch of their rolling stock being stored on this siding.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking back where I’d been, and this ended up being my favorite shot of the day for some reason. Everything went right with the exposure and I barely had to ‘touch’ it when doing the developing phase in Adobe Camera Raw. Process wise; the shots comes off the camera, are converted to a format native to Adobe’s software family, they get a basic set of settings governing this, that, and the other thing, are cropped, edited a final time, and then published. I go out of my way not to alter photos in any way other than basic adjusts to contrast and that sort of thing. When I employ a ‘trick,’ like exposure or focus stacking, I usually describe what I did under the photo here. I aspire to journalistic ideals.
Everything you see here is part of the tyranny of the real.
Back next week 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.
Stumbling around in Lawrenceville
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A post or three has been offered in the past exploring the sights and ‘milieu’ of a section of Pittsburgh called ‘Lower Lawrenceville.’ It’s probably got a few other names which I’m ignorant of, but until then I’m going with that. This could be regular Lawrenceville as well.
This scuttle started at the corner of Lawrenceville’s 50th street and BlackBerry Way – right here.
It’s more or less the border between ‘mixed use’ zoning and ‘industrial area’ zoning to my eye. This spot is on the northern/Allegheny River side of the so called ‘Golden Triangle’ of Pittsburgh. My ultimate destination would be back downtown, where I would be meeting Our Lady of the Pentacle at a roof top bar.
In the Pittsburgh area, ‘alleys’ are called ‘ways.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was warm out, but quite tolerable. Your humble narrator was in his usual summer getup, the black cargo shorts with a white Cuban shirt (Guayabera) over a t-shirt. One has begun wearing a flash orange baseball cap these days, as I often find myself walking around wooded areas and hunting is a genuine passion for people out here.
There’s a lot of tech firms set up in this area, with an unhealthy number of companies that manufacture industrial and military robots. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Asimov, but it might be a good idea to start talking about the concurrent development of AI and these ‘destined for the battlefield’ style robots forming a Venn diagram describing humanity’s extinction. Other tech companies in Pittsburgh are working on self driving cars and trucks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Neat old building, right there.
Science Fiction has been warning us about the coming moment for more than a century. I’m not talking about us going instant terminator here, but let’s face it – a sufficiently ‘intelligent’ AI will quickly surmise that the most direct threat to its continued existence is us. What does logic dictate to a networked intelligence there? In many ways, the near future will see the emergence of digital angels and devils. Mass global unemployment will just be the start of the fun. Wait until our new overlords began rationing food and water.
I was recently chatting with a professor from Carnegie Mellon who is working on this technological breakthrough, and my only comment to him was to ensure that some sort of dead man’s switch was present – or a plug – that can be pulled only in meatspace. These AI entities will be able to move so fast that stopping one which has ‘escaped into the wild’ would be exactly like trying to fight an Angel or a Demon. I suppose ‘Djinn’ would be more appropriate in context, due to that class of supernatural entity’s association with light and fire.
In magickal terminology, angels and demons are called ‘the sons of fire,’ and humanity are ‘the children of clay.’
Terrifyingly enough, the CMU Professor fellow had never seen ‘Colossus, the Forbin Project.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One continued on, while pondering this particular end of the world scenario. “The future sucks” thought a humble narrator. For some reason, I decided that I would be walking down several of the ‘ways’ or alleys whenever opportunity presented.
There seemed to be some sort of power plant on the other side of that wall. Can’t tell you much about it at this juncture. I’m sure I’ll do so in the future. Something to look forward to.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These worker cottages caught my eye. Obviously recent renovations have occurred, but what drew me were the clean lines and homogeneous nature of the structures. Neat.
I had to get back on one of the avenues, as the alley ‘way’ I was walking ended at stout brick wall. A left was thereby hung, and one marched inexorably on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Plan wise: the first year I was here in Pittsburgh, it was all about the center of things. Second year, the Monongahela River and its communities. Then the ankle situation occurred and I lost most of the third year here to recovery. This next year, I’m planning on working my way up the Allegheny River and seeing what’s what, and where it is.
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.
Transitional zone
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you may recall from last week’s folderol, thy humble narrator was busy scuttling along the Allegheny River side of Pittsburgh, towards its ‘Golden Triangle,’ on a constitutional and exploratory walk. The effort began in Lawrenceville, to the east, and the goal was to get to the ‘Downtown’ section where a T light rail station would provide me with transport back to HQ about five miles away in the Boro of Dormont.
Pictured above is the massive 31st street bridge.
Beyond a bit of exploring on foot, and snapping a bunch of photos, the purpose behind this walk – specifically – was to take advantage of one of the very few places in Pittsburgh that is ‘flood plain flat’ to give the still recovering broken ankle some much needed exercise. Flat walks of this type are one of the legs of a three legged stool for me at the moment, along with walking down steep slopes and negotiating ‘natural’ surfaces. By ‘natural’ I mean walking through grass and soil in semi woodland environments. Still having trouble with sloped surfaces.
If my ankle, hips, and legs ain’t sore at the end of a walk, I didn’t walk far enough. Rebuilding muscle is not very much fun. Nevertheless, push on, push, push, push. I’ve had enough sitting down for a lifetime.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Appalachian soil which underlies the Pittsburgh metro is famous for producing potholes during the winter, as well as promulgating the formation of sinkholes. Seriously, this happened here in 2019. Saying all that, this is precisely the sort of obstacle course which I’d normally dance my way through and barely even notice, but which – at the moment – I need to stop and scry a path through before stepping forward.
My walking speed has suffered tremendously from the inactivity, and I’m currently scuttling along at a speed which most would describe as ‘normal’ or ‘understandable’ but which I call pathetic. I’ve often mentioned here how toxic my inner dialogue is, and this circumstance im in has found me mentally berating myself for breaking the ankle in the first place, like an asshole would. My Jewish mother may be dead, but part of her lives on rent free in my head.
Push on, weakling. Push. Do better. Do more.
This inner voice of mine is quite profane and mean spirited, and it speaks in a dialectical manner that would have been judged as politically incorrect even back in 1980’s Brooklyn, let alone these days. None of this self abuse is ‘machismo’ based, by the way, nor is it sympathy speaking. I just know that I can and will do better if I overlook the pain and atrophied weakness. It’s temporary. Everything is temporary, the tyranny of the ‘now.’
Push, push, push.
One of my literary heroes, and the originator of an oft repeated motto, is Boxer the Horse from Animal Farm, with ‘I will work harder.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Anyway, back to Pittsburgh.
Having just wandered about in the shrinking sclerosis of an industrial zone in Lawrenceville, and having crossed under the 31st street Bridge, I was now officially in a ‘transition zone’ – or as I used to call such areas back in NYC – the angle – between Lawrenceville and The Strip District.
The cognomen ‘Strip District’ refers to an area in Pittsburgh which used to serve the larger city as a food warehousing and distribution center, with rail and boats bringing fresh produce in for wholesale distribution to urban markets and shops.
As I understand it; 19th and 20th century pre-supermarket era, that’s when the Strip’s glory days were. There’s a section of it which is a sort of historic district, with businesses that predate the modern era and seem to be a big part of the multi-generational cultural heritage around here. People drive to this zone, over multiple hours, to then wait on line for a certain cheese to ‘bring’ on Thanksgiving or Christmas or just ‘for the holidays,’ that sort of thing.
I’ve been here a few times since coming to Pittsburgh, but my experiences in the area are fairly limited. There was lots and lots of intriguing stuff on this walk which hasn’t been featured because I have got to know more about it before mentioning it.
More 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.
The Newtown Pentacle 