Posts Tagged ‘Monongahela River’
heading home
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After exploring a bit around the First Street Station on the T, in downtown Pittsburgh, one took a bit of a walk and decided on how my path back home via the light rail service would shape up. A brief scuttle soon found me perambulating across the Smithfield Street Bridge and crossing the Monongahela River towards the south side, as the locals would refer to it. Conversations with these locals will often result in a suggestion to check out a spot with a goofy name like “Deadman’s Hollow” or “Girty’s Run,” or some other fun nomenclature. I have to remind them that I’m still learning how to reliably drive back home at this stage of the game.
It was a lovely day in Pittsburgh, for early January, with air temperatures hovering in the high 40’s and low 50’s with calm winds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Monongahela itself was carrying a significant amount of what appeared to be soil. This river flows, I’m told, out of West Virginia to the south and along its route it transits through first wild and then rural areas where its tributaries carry a not insignificant amount of solute into the river. The closer you get to Pittsburgh, the more industrialized and developed the banks of the river get, and the entire region of its transit in this part of Pennsylvania is referred to as “The Mon Valley.”
My plan for the remainder of the day was simple, but Pittsburgh didn’t comply with my wishes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I spotted the T crossing the river on the nearby Panhandle Bridge, which was described in earlier posts this week, while walking across the Smithfield Street Bridge.
My plan, as it were, involved getting several loving shots of freight rail trains moving along the south shore of the river.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
None appeared, despite the absolutely fantastic framing that I was so proud of finding for the shot. When you’re going after trains, it’s a lot like fishing – sometimes they’re not biting no matter how patient you are.
C’est la vie, huh?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I did get a tugboat, however, so there’s that.
I’ve been seeing a bunch of these river tugs moving about, towing mineral barges of what looks like coal or coke.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While walking to the T stop on the south side at Station Square, I did get a train photo – a Norfolk Southern unit moving along an elevated trackway carved into Mount Washington. I’m working out how to get a bit closer to this track, somewhere where a better angle of view with something that “says Pittsburgh” in the shot. In NYC, as long as you have the Empire State Building somewhere in view – bam, that’s a NYC photo. Sense of place, and all that.
Back next week, with more from my initial attempts to explore Pittsburgh and its environs.
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The T is neat
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the 5th of January, one rode the T light rail from Dormont into Downtown Pittsburgh. One of the shots I was looking for is seen above, depicting a T line unit entering the 2001 vintage First Avenue Station after crossing the Monongahela River on the Panhandle Bridge. There seems to be an entire gaggle of law enforcement type offices nearby, including the city jail. There’s also a newly opened and fairly large homeless shelter a couple of blocks away from this station.
First Avenue Station is connected by a sky bridge to a large municipal automobile parking lot. Parking prices on the “Golden Triangle” of Downtown Pittsburgh hover somewhere between 6$ and $10. Just yesterday, on a separate scouting mission, I encountered a lot nearby the terminal stop of the T on the North Side nearby the Carnegie Science Center and the stadium that the Steelers play in which would’ve let me park “all day” for six bucks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The North Side station nearby the stadium is a terminal/turn around stop, and it’s also where the T goes underground into a former privately held rail road tunnel that’s been converted over for transit usage, which allows it to cross the Allegheny River. It’s also the start of the “free zone” stops downtown. That free zone goes all the way to the other side of the Monongahela River at the Station Square stop, which is on the other side of that river and where the Panhandle Bridge’s tracks lead to. Leading away from Station Square and into the South Hills, that’s where you’re going to have to pay a fare – $2.75 for me, but it’s a zone system. They use “Connect Cards” which you can get at the local supermarket as well as kiosks downtown, or cash, to collect your due.
I left the car back at HQ for this particular day. I’ve been feeling really constrained by the vehicle in some ways. I love being able to just ride up on something and get a shot, mind you, but it’s “photowalk” not “photodrive.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The first shot is a T coming into Pittsburgh, the one above is one heading out of the city. My plan for the day was pretty simple, I’d take the T into town, walk around for a bit and grab “crime of opportunity” shots while shlepping towards the pedestrian walkways of the Smithfield Street Bridge across the Monongahela and then board the T on the “south side” again to get back to Dormont.
That parking lot, though, the one connected by the sky bridge… it beckoned.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From the lot, the one above was gathered. There was actual security on duty at the lot, but they didn’t seem to give a hoot as far as my activities went. I walked up a few flights of stairs and found a fairly high vantage point to shoot from.
There’s another T unit entering Pittsburgh, via the Panhandle Bridge. Service is about every 15 minutes, although it changes depending on the time of day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Panhandle Bridge sits alongside a vehicle bridge dubbed the Liberty Bridge. The latter carries a fairly high volume road that leads to the Liberty Tunnel, which are punched through the base of Mount Washington. When I’m driving home from extant points, this is the bridge and tunnel to which I’m now a member of “the bridge and tunnel crowd.” Actually, they don’t say that here.
Further, I haven’t encountered any shade yet from a city dweller towards me living in a suburb. I’ve heard Dormont natives deride the people who live literally next door to Dormont in the Mount Lebanon community, which is a good deal wealthier than the former. They call them “the Lebo’s” and offer tales of “Karen” style behavior being regularly displayed “over there,” which is about a mile distant.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My T fascination temporarily sated, a humble narrator made his way down and out to the sidewalk. As mentioned, there’s a lot of jail business happening in this section. There are Bail Bondsmen outfits occupying storefronts, and you see cops of all kinds wandering about doing cop things. The ramps and infrastructure of the Liberty Bridge and the “Boulevard of the Allies” occupy the sky, and the sidewalks are shadowed. This isn’t a “friendly” area, if you know what I mean.
More tomorrow from Downtown Pittsburgh and a continuing exploration of this amazing American City at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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foggy Homestead
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the many things that’s super intriguing to me about Pittsburgh, something that I’ve just dipped my toe into at this stage, is the abundance of “rail to trail” infrastructure hereabouts. As is the case with a lot of things here in this part of the country, the Government types have inherited a lot of land to manage that used to be used for the Steel industry or some other “mill.” The company which owned this sort of land is long gone, and the property has ended up in the hands of the “State.” By state, I don’t necessarily mean Pennsylvania, instead I’m using that word in the Machiavellian sense.
In the Homestead section, there used to be an enormous steel works which sputtered through the 70’s and finally gave up the ghost in the 1980’s. It’s the one where the infamous Homestead Strike occurred. The vast majority of the plant’s footprint has been converted over to a development project called “The Waterfront.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Set along the Monongahela River, the Homestead plant was served by several rail lines. One of these defunct lines has become part of the “Great Allegheny Passage” trail, which incorporates – amongst others – the track beds of the B&O and P&LE Railroads into a combined bike and hike path. One of the spots where you can both access the path and park your car is found at the Homestead Pumphouse, which is the trailhead for the Steel Valley section of the larger GAP.
The weather in Pittsburgh is always dynamic and changes by the hour. When I visited the Homestead Pumphouse on January 2nd, it was an unusually warm day which followed an unusually cold few days. The Monongahela flows out of the mountains of Southern Pennsylvania and West Virginia where it was even colder than it was in Pittsburgh, so when that cold water hit the warm air – fog erupted.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One such as myself cannot resist photographing in such conditions, and I got busy. When things warm up a bit in the coming weeks, I’m planning on about a three miles there and three back walk along this section of the Steel Valley trail, where I’ll be walking over rail bridges and finding a certain point of view that I’m desirous of photographing the U.S. Steel Mon Valley works from.
What an absolute pleasure it is to discover new things. It’s been a while.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The entire time I was at this location, I was wondering if that rail bridge was active or if it was one of the decommissioned ones you can walk over that was part of the trail. As I found out while driving out of the “Rail to Trail” parking lot later on, when it was far to late to get a shot of the freight train that suddenly appeared and was starting to cross the bridge – it’s active.
It’s the “Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge,” aka the “Pemickey Bridge.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Across the water, that’s the skeletal remains of the Carrie Blast Furnace rising out of the mists of the Monongahela. Carrie is home to the Rivers of Steel outfit in Swissvale, whom I’m planning on having fun with during the spring and summer months. It’s a National Historical Landmark, Carrie is, and the Rivers of Steel people apparently offer boat tours and other programming that I’m interested in attending. About two miles down river from here, on that side of the Monongahela are the Mon Valley Works in Braddock, PA.
Our Lady of the Pentacle hasn’t described me as looking “like a pig in shit” yet, but all of this is quite exciting to one such as myself.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the Homestead Pumphouse, which is set up as a historic landmark and public park, there’s all sorts of gear left behind from the steel mill days on display. That thing in the shot above is apparently a ladle.
I’m still in the exploration phase right now, regarding Pittsburgh. I’m working a series of 20-30 minutes from HQ sites right now, scouting out places which I’ll return to when weather and season are a bit friendlier than what January in Western PA offers.
More tomorrow.
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Buy a book!
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back to West End Overlook Park
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On December 29th, a humble narrator negotiated his way back to the West End Elliot Overlook Park in the Elliot section of Pittsburgh in the late afternoon. I offered a couple of shots I’d captured up here at dawn last week, but even while I was shooting those I was thinking “I have to come back here at sunset, this “view” is a sunset thing.” Also mentioned last week, sunset in Pittsburgh isn’t a couple of hours long like it is in NYC, with its oceanic skies. Due to the geography here, the setting sun casts the hard shadow of Mount Washington across the confluence of the three rivers and the city’s center midway through its descent.
One got to the spot in West End with plenty of time to spare and set up my gear. I had a nice conversation with some kid from the surrounding neighborhood, who was imbibing the devil’s cabbage and chilling out. He was the first of several folks I interacted with while shooting.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the West End Bridge over the Ohio River, lit up all sexy like in the shot above. I had erroneously called it the McKees Rocks Bridge in a prior post but received a correction in the comments from one of you brilliant people.
Alexander McKee, for whom McKees Rocks and both the eponymous bridge and the nearby community of McKeesport are named for, was an early trader based in this region, whom initial research reveals as having displayed a surprisingly modern point of view towards the “First Nation” Native Americans that populated this part of the continent.
At any rate, while I was waiting for the sky and sun to align to my liking, and the local kid whom I was chatting with had departed, I began twisting my tripod head around. “Up, down, all around,” that’s one of my mottoes. A passing couple struck up conversation with me next. They were wearing Steelers gear, and told me that they were “Yinzers” or Pittsburgh “born and bred’s” who had moved out to “the country” a couple of decades ago and were “in town” for a few days to see a theatrical show and attend a sports ball game.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Off in the distance, I spotted the Allegheny Observatory which I had described to you – lords and ladies – a couple of weeks ago. As mentioned in that post, I’m attempting to visit the prominences surrounding the three rivers’ valleys to try and develop a sense of spatial relationship. When you’re driving along on the many, many high speed roads that transect Pittsburgh, it is fairly impossible to do so.
I’ve mentioned that there’s a different “etiquette” as far as driving here, as in with the “Pittsburgh Left,” but there’s also a very different polity at work on the roads. They don’t honk quite as much here, but it’s fairly common for somebody to crawl right up your butt if they think you’re driving too slowly. “Too slowly” in this area means you’re only exceeding the speed limit by 20-30%. Following distance is one of the most important thing to be aware of when driving on a highway. For every ten miles of speed, maintain at least one car length of space between you and the car in front of you. If you needed to jam down on and lock your brakes to screech to a complete stop, the minimum amount of space you’d need to come to a complete stop is one car length per ten miles of speed. Yup – that’s close to a hundred feet at 55 mph, which sounds crazy and unrealistic but isn’t. When I can see the brand of sunglasses you’re wearing in my rear view mirror, that’s way too close. Also…
I’m seriously having to learn a new style of performance driving around here, with the crazy hills and the serpentine curves that bend around prominences or along cliffs. Lots of hidden driveways as well, with blind turns happening at high speed, there’s highway exits that appear out of seemingly nowhere, stop signs on highway entrance ramps… a dynamic driving environment, Pittsburgh is.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
See what I mean about that hard sunset shadow cast by Mount Washington? One hung about at the park overlook, and some woman with a very enthusiastic dog arrived and set herself up nearby to play some sort of steel drum like instrument as the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself disappeared. I was enjoying the jam she was playing and decided that I’d like to stick around until the lights in Pittsburgh came on.
Since I’m a suburban asshole now, I feel like I should refer to this downtown section as “The City” but there’s only one place which I’ll ever use that term for and it’s 400 miles diagonally east and north of here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This post is being written at the end of the first week of January, and it was literally this morning that – for the first time in 5 weeks – I actually had a fond “miss that” thought about NYC. It was bagel related. The bagels here are strange and anemic little things.
Thankfully, Pittsburgh actually has decent Pizza. Finding a pizzeria that does slices is a bit of a deal (they do 8” personal pizzas instead), but the local Pizza is actually pretty good. They tend to overdo it with toppings, giving into the tendency in this part of the country to throw every kind of meat you can imagine on top of the thing, but the thick crust is nice. Thankfully, it’s not the abrogation of all that’s right which… Philadelphia… calls Pizza.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This shot was the one I was waiting around for, and soon after shooting it I decided to get out of dodge and back to HQ in neighboring Dormont. This decision was influenced by the dynamic driving environment mentioned above, as I don’t feel at all confident driving around at night around here and won’t until I get to know these roads and their peculiarities a bit better.
I had a rare moment of spare time, in between “have-to’s” and rainy days, so I decided to try and make the most of an unusually warm week in Pittsburgh over the first few days of 2023. My reward for the efforts of December and November was the few days I had to explore, I’d posit.
More tomorrow at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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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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