Posts Tagged ‘North Side’
Yinz confuse me, yo
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swindell Bridge to North Shore, part seven.
That’s the same Norfolk Southern train seen in yesterday’s post, transiting over Pittsburgh’s Merchant Street Bridge, on the city’s North Side. There’s been a decent number of bridges seen during this scuttle, huh?
When these shots were gathered, specifically on the 9th of April, a great tumult had seized Pittsburgh, in advance of the forthcoming NFL Draft event. Workers were everywhere; obliterating graffiti, painting things, filling potholes, etc., and a large number of street closures here on the North Shore, where the Draft would play out, were enacted. Lots and lots of wind blown garbage was collected, from both highways and river fronts/
The powers that be called it ‘the immaculate collection.’
Even we happy pedestrians were ejected from our tenancy over the sidewalks during this interval, on these affected streets, and many detours were introduced.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now, this pathway which the ‘detour’ signage directed me towards is one that is commonly transited by scores of people, but there are explicit ‘Private Property’ and separate ‘no trespassing’ signboards seen all over the place back here.
In accordance with my normal policy of respecting that sort of thing, I’ve not walked through here once during all of my scuttles. There’s a proper ‘street’ path you can take instead, which is actually a lot more direct, so why trespass if you don’t need to?
This time – though – the government’s signage people were telling me to trespass, so… gotta follow the law, right?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Some members of the Urbex crowd think me timid. That’s ok, but I don’t have a Police record. You?
I’ve got a lot of ‘rules’ based on lived experience.
The ‘youngins’ don’t remember when packs of wild dogs prowled around in Brooklyn, for instance, but I do. Don’t want to mess with the junk yard dogs, and the Mafia isn’t just a thing in the movies. It’s real.
Just the other day, during a scuttle which I’ll be discussing in a few posts from this one, I turned a corner and saw some guy dancing around with a knife in his hand behind a building, and near a waterway that I was interested in grabbing a shot of. ‘Noped’ out of that one, right quick.
When you spend your time in potentially dangerous places, you’ll often meet potentially dangerous people.
Also, yes – the Newtown Pentacle time warp is still in effect – as I’d really been ‘hitting the bricks’ and ranging all over the place in March and April.
As stated above, these shots were gathered on the 9th of April, and the posts are being written on the 27th of that same month. If I’ve got my scheduling right, you’re reading this in early June.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So… this was the pedestrian detour path.
It’s running through one of the ‘overflow’ parking lots nearby the stadiums. The ramps above are a combination of Route 28 and the various bridge ramps that it feeds into.
The big wall on the left is a rail berm, carrying tracks which lead back to the Merchant Street Bridge, and that rail trench in Allegheny Commons Park, and eventually back to the Conway Rail Yard and beyond. Whew.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This area is regularly transited by street people, which is something I can report from observation. It ‘ain’t so nice’ under these ramps, lots of highway noise, and you can observe little piles of ‘precipitant’ from auto exhaust soot which is lurking everywhere. Blech!
This shot looks back at where I was.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One got to walk through a decent amount of that sooty zone under the highways before sunlight began factoring back in. An Allegheny Valley RR unit was just idling up on the tracks, for a long while. I hung around to see if anything was going to happen and then got bored.
Back tomorrow with the end of this one.
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Where other people live
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swindell Bridge to North Shore, part five.
Yet another abandoned residential building, seen on Pittsburgh’s North Side, and captured while mid scuttle on a medium length walk. That blue sticker on the door is what a Pittsburgh condemnation notice looks like.
Much of the building stock in this ‘zone’ miraculously avoided demolition, during two 20th century seismic waves of urban renewal, which ravaged nearby blocks and neighborhoods. The ‘zone’ used to be part of a separate municipality called Allegheny City, which Pittsburgh annexed at the start of the 20th century.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Having written about the Borough of Queens back in NYC, endlessly documenting how the warnings of LIC’s last Mayor – Patrick ‘Battle Axe’ Gleason – that ‘if the Manhattan people ever get a hold of us, the first thing they’ll do is export all their dirty industries to LIC’ – played out.
Looking around LIC, at the Midtown Tunnel, and the LIE, and the train yards that serve Manhattan and not Queens, and the waste transfer stations and the rendering plants and… and… yeah, we can state that Gleason was right in his assessment.
A similar process played out in Pittsburgh. Need a highway? North Side. Prison? North Side.
Now… here’s where some ‘nitty gritty’ that I’m not a hundred percent sure about begins to come into play. I was cutting down what turned out to be Eloise Street. Eloise is a bit more of an alley than it is a street, but what I was wondering was ‘am I in the Mexican War Streets historic district?’ I used to be able to point to the exact border between Astoria and Woodside or Sunnyside, so this sort of pedantry means a lot to me.
According to Google AI:
- The Mexican War Streets in Pittsburgh’s Central Northside is a historic district renowned for its restored 19th-century Victorian row houses and tree-lined streets. Developed in the 1840s, the area features streets named after Mexican-American War battles and figures, including Buena Vista and Monterey. It is a vibrant residential neighborhood, featuring community gardens, the Mattress Factory art museum, and proximity to Allegheny Commons.
- Key Aspects of the District
- Location: Situated in the Central Northside, adjacent to Allegheny Commons, and within walking distance to Downtown.
- Architecture: Characterized by restored late Victorian, Greek Revival, and Italianate row houses, often with unique architectural details.
- History: Originally the “Buena Vista Tract,” the neighborhood was developed for residential use in the mid-19th century and is recognized for its successful urban preservation efforts in the 1970s.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The ‘main drag’ is a block away, and facing Allegheny Commons Park. There’s retail businesses there, and that hospital which you see on the HBO TV show ‘The Pitt.’ Medical offices, retail businesses, one truly great pizza joint. It’s nice.
Me?
I don’t navigate through this section often, as I’m usually moving a lot closer to the river, and I generally tend to avoid residential streets. It’s never good if- the humans notice me slopping along, and pointing a camera at their homes.
Additionally, driving wise, it wouldn’t make sense to interact with these narrow streets unless you had to. One scuttled along, with the eventual goal of connecting to the T Light Rail, for a ride back to HQ at the end of this walk.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Interesting housing stock, have to say. ‘Disturbingly heterogeneous’ is how I’d describe what’s on display. Again – just like Western Queens.
This area is easy walking, as a note. Mostly flat.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s quite few ‘gems’ back in here, and this is quite a desirable neighborhood to live within, if you can afford it. It’s a bit more ‘urban’ than I’d want these days, but when we were moving out here from NYC nearly four years ago, this neighborhood was actually one of the places we considered living.
Thing is, I’ve got a strong desire not to share a wall with anyone anymore.
This is something realized when end stage planning the move from Astoria, and it’s why we ended up in ‘the burbs.’
I don’t have to worry about the old lady/cat hoarder who lived next door to me in Astoria having a fire anymore, or why the common wall we shared with her was always wetly bulging in from her side. Nor am I still concerned about my upstairs neighbor falling asleep while drunk, forgetting that she was deep frying something on the stove (same neighbor once fired up a BBQ – in the house). Nor do I have a bookie pulling up in front of my house at seven in the morning, every day, yelling ‘Mario, where’s my money, Mario,’ anymore.
Haven’t had a roach or a mouse randomly turn up in the house for nearly 40 months, either. That’s a record for this ex-New Yorker.
Yeah, there’s a lot of things I don’t miss…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That one is a beauty, I tell’s ya. Turns out it’s all kinds of historic.
According to Google AI:
The cottages located at the intersection of Resaca Place and Eloise Street (formerly known as Civil Alley) in the Mexican War Streets Historic District are classic examples of the neighborhood’s mid-to-late 19th-century architecture.
- Architectural Features Scale and Material: Most homes in this area are approximately 20 feet wide and two stories high, constructed primarily of brick, though some rare wood-frame structures exist.
- Design Styles: The district showcases a mix of styles, predominantly Italianate and Second Empire, characterized by ornate woodwork, stone or marble fireplaces, and high ceilings.
- Independence: Unlike row houses in other cities that were built as unified blocks, these cottages were often constructed independently, leading to subtle variations in height and detail between neighbors.
- Neighborhood Context Historic Significance: The streets were named by William Robinson Jr. in 1847 to commemorate battles and generals of the Mexican-American War (e.g., Resaca de la Palma).
- Preservation: Saved from demolition in the 1970s by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, many of these cottages have been meticulously restored from a state of disrepair into “refined beauties”.
- Layout: The district is known for its walkable, tree-lined streets and narrow alleyways like Eloise Street, which often house smaller carriage houses or modest cottages originally intended for workers or as auxiliary structures.
Back tomorrow with more.
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All downhill, buddy boy
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swindell Bridge to North Shore, part four.
Continuing with an interesting walk, from the Perry Hilltop section down to Pittsburgh’s North Shore along the Allegheny River. See last week’s posts for predicate and other details. This section of the walk was headed down Perrysville Avenue, towards the Federal Street Extension.
My ‘spidey sense’ for danger operates at historically acute levels these days, since I still cannot run due to the ongoing after effects of the orthopedic incident, but given that I was feeling happy and secure with zero worries – I decided to pop the headphones in to the ear holes for this section of the scuttle.
The weather had been uneven here, one day cold and the next hot.
This was a warm but breezy day, and I was wearing shorts with a cotton hoodie sweatshirt up top. A new camera bag that I’ve acquired is working out, although there’s a couple of modifications I need to make.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few weeks ago, frequent commenter George the Atheist asked if ‘all I do is walk around.’ My answer was no, but what I specifically write about here revolves around my long walks. If the question was ‘do I enjoy doing anything besides walking around thusly,’ my answer would be ‘no.
I’ve hit that stage of life where everything just sucks. Restaurant meal? We could have done better for less at home. I don’t want to sit in a movie theater, attend a live concert, or see a play. I’ve become incapable of playing along with a conversation I’m disinvested in. Particularly so if the topic revolves around some kind of sportsball competition. Patience is not something I do anymore. If you’re boring me, I’m out, and I’m easily bored.
I’m more interested in what Boeing or Raytheon is doing than I am in following news about professional athletes, or anything like that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was never a sports kid.
Played a few games with the kids on the block, but soon discovered that ‘I ain’t no athlete.’ Your humble narrator was always a comics and sci-fi nerd instead. Want to talk about Federation’s ‘First Contact’ protocols? How about the macro economics of the Star Wars Galaxy?
If you told twenty year old me what nearly sixty year old me gets up to, I wouldn’t have believed it. That long haired angry kid didn’t make many good decisions, and unfortunately neither does the gray haired and somewhat less angry old man that now wears the same but quite scarred up skinvelope. I like to think that what I get up to now is kind of fun.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This route had quite a few abandoned structures along the way, which were incontrovertibly sitting between occupied residential structures, ones that were obviously maintained with love and attention. So weird.
As mentioned during prior posts about Pittsburgh’s North Side, what I’m seeing here is aftermath. This ‘zone,’ I’m led to understand, used to be territory, fought over by local ‘entrepreneurs’ during the crack era.
Things are a lot quieter and safer up here than they used to be, I’m led to believe.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a public housing project along this route, so maybe that’s why this area seems to host so many abandoned or shut-up homes due to the blighting effect of reputation. As a former New Yorker, the idea that a house or property could just sit there empty, less than a couple of miles from the center of the city… it’s madness.
For yet another Brooklyn analogy, this part of the street that I was scuttling down might be analogized as being a lot like Pittsburgh’s ‘Nostrand Avenue.’ It almost makes it to the ‘center,’ but not quite.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Federal Street Extension path becomes just plain ‘Federal Street’ where the ground begins to flatten out a bit.
My plan for the day involved breaking off this particular route, as Federal Street’s route ends in about a half mile – and then wandering for a bit – following my nose as it were.
More tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Swindell Bridge views, Pittsburgh
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swindell Bridge to North Shore, part two.
Your humble narrator journeyed over to Pittsburgh’s North Side and the neighborhood of Perry Hilltop, in order to access the pedestrian walkways of the 1930 vintage Swindell Bridge.
The span is in pretty bad shape, with both state and city’s inspectors describing its condition as ‘poor.’ Rust, concrete issues, you name it. When you get up close, you can actually see the various flaws, and they’re fairly terrifying if you know what you’re looking at. I kind of do, and it is.
That hill which the interstate (I-579/279) bends around to the right, and right on the other face of the landform, is where the amazing Rising Main city steps, mentioned a few weeks ago are found.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Blighting of urban areas isn’t accomplished simply due to a high speed road’s actual course just on its own. You’ve also got to factor in the service roads, ramps, and uselessly wooded areas which act as sound dampeners… so there’s also lots and lots of additional concrete, tons of vehicle and pedestrian barriers, and few or zero accommodations for humans who are not within motor vehicles.
Given other recent experiences, which will be discussed in forthcoming posts, I guess the walking public should just be grateful for that single sidewalk which is visible on the access road at the far right.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally, I drive the route pictured above maybe once or twice a week. I may bitch and moan about these high speed roads, but I do use them as well, so the hypocrisy is fully on display here. As I always said, the only NYC I knew during my time there was the one that Robert Moses left behind…
It’s a very, very easy thing to exceed the speed limit here, follow the flow of traffic and before you know it – you’re going 20mph over. There is little, if any, Police enforcement of speed limitations on Pittsburgh’s highways, unless it’s a holiday weekend and the cops are doing a ticket blitz – of course.
Sated by this early part of my morning, your humble narrator pointed his toes back towards the path he got in here using.
My plan was to shlep about for the rest of the day, following a colonial era pathway which has been turned into a ‘main drag’ street in modernity. Shouldn’t be too ‘physical,’ I said to myself.
It’s all downhill from here, essentially.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So, I mentioned that this nearly century old bridge is in pretty lousy condition, right? The bus people aren’t allowed to use it anymore due to weight restrictions, and there’s weight limits for cars and trucks as well. In a couple of spots, concrete jersey barriers are placed, reducing the bridge down to one shared lane.
When I got a bit closer to one of the closed sections where the jersey barriers are, I decided to take a closer look. Holy shmigoley!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The expansion joints! A plate of metal was welded against this expansion joint to keep it from further separating. Holy Monroley!
I’ve seen drawbridges over Superfund Sites in Queens with better joins. Sheiste.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I walked back out to Perrysville Avenue, but this time I went under the Maple Street Bridge, where that high tension power cable had sagged down to about shoulder/head level.
What could go wrong there?
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.
Perry Hilltop and the Swindell Bridge
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This missive is the start of another multi-day series of posts.
Welcome to Perry Hilltop, a plateau neighborhood found in the larger Perry South section on the North Side of Pittsburgh.
This walk, and the series of posts which fell out of it, began right about here. Efforts have been underway to explore Pittsburgh’s ‘North Side,’ which is the former ‘Allegheny City,’ a separate municipality that Pittsburgh annexed at the start of the 20th century.
These photos were gathered on the 9th of April.
As is my habit with such matters, I’ve been following ‘street corridors’ which overlay the past. Modern roads are chosen, obviously, whose path more or less mirrors the historic ones which were cut through the woods and cliff faces.
In the case of this walk, it’s Perrysville Avenue and the Federal Street Extension areas (which you’ll be see in over several incoming posts) which were originally set up as a plank road, between the Allegheny/Ohio River shoreline and less settled areas found up in the hills, with the path ultimately leading to some colonial era Military Fort up north.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The start of this series of postings, however, starts with a tiny bridge which leads to a larger one.
I’m told it’s called the ‘Maple Avenue Bridge,’ a 1929 ‘riveted cantilever truss,’ and I didn’t need to look anything up to tell you that it’s in a deleterious state of repair. There’s even an electrical supply cable sagging down over the thing, hovering right about shoulder height, as measured from when I scuttling along on the roadway’s sidewalk below.
This trip started with one of my one way cab rides from Dormont, which dropped me off right across the street from Maple Avenue Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First thing that happened after getting out of the car, some kid walked up to me and asked me if I had any ‘smoke.’
I said ‘nope,’ don’t have anything on me to smoke, and asked him if he was hoping for a cigarette or something. He clarified ‘smoke’ as ‘weed’ and then made clear that he was seeking to sell me some. This misunderstanding and interaction amused both myself and that local entrepreneur. The kid wandered off, whereas I got busy with the camera.
Capitalism, huh?
The 1930 vintage E.H. Swindell (aka East Street) Bridge awaited.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Swindell Bridge is pretty huge, a little over a thousand feet long and five hundred and forty five feet high. It connects two hilltops, spanning the ‘East Street Valley,’ which the I-579 and I-279 high speed roads run through down below.
The Swindell Bridge is – observably – in a horrible state of repair, and a $27 million rehabilitation project is meant to kick in either at the end of this year (2026), or early 2027, which will seek to address its many issues.
As linked to above, they’re going to try and spruce up the Maple Street Bridge as well, and there’s an areal ‘safe streets’ project which is theoretically going to be implemented concurrently with these other projects.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one looks down from the Swindell Bridge, at the interstate corridor below. As always, I need to state that I love the parabolas, curves, and massing shapes which are created by highway engineers.
Additionally, I hate the historic storyline that resulted in these visually interesting shapes being created. That tale included the demolition of more than 800 homes, and alienating the thousands of families who used to live down there, in the East Street Valley. Bah!
This view look north, although it kind of bends a little bit to the east too.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking south/west from the Swindell Bridge, Downtown Pittsburgh just kind of appears, peeking out from behind a hill. It should be mentioned that for the last nearly four years, I’ve been saying that ‘I’ve got to walk over that bridge sometime,’ while referring to the Swindell Bridge, while driving on the ‘Parkway North.’
That’s what the Yinzers call this road.
Check! Another one off my list.
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.
The Newtown Pentacle 