Posts Tagged ‘Oakland’
End of week, odds and ends
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few odds and ends photos from my recent exploratory visit to Pittsburgh’s Oakland. Popped this one out from behind the wheel of the Mobile Oppression Platform on my way home while stuck at a light.
The bridge in the distance is called the 30th street Bridge over the Monongahela River, but truth be told, I was pulled in by the painted “B&O” Railroad logo on the overpass. If that’s original… it has to date back to when I was in high school and that was before Metallica.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
See that shot above? Panther Hollow, that’s all I’m going to say. I know what time to be here, and now I know where it is. At the right time, and this is the right place, there’s going to be a train in future iterations of his shot.
I’ve now got two locations scouted for the “money” rail shots. Right place, not the right time.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back home in Dormont, and Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself successfully went out for drinks and dinner and then took mass transit back home. That’s the T street car leaving the Potomac station at beer o’clock.
Back next week with more from Pittsburgh, lords and ladies.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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God almighty
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scuttling about in Pittsburgh’s Oakland, along a fairly random path, one encountered several amazing religious buildings. Pictured above is a Jewish Synagogue, dubbed “Rodef Shalom,” which was designed by Henry Hornbostel – who is better known back in NYC as the designer behind the Manhattan Bridge’s accoutrements. Hornbostel also worked on Queensboro, Hell Gate, and Pelham Park Bridges for NYC. The congregation’s website can be accessed here.
One intends on finding a way to get invited into this building with the camera sometime in the future. The sheer scope of this building is colossal, and it promises to be something far more grandiose within than the Eldridge Street Synagogue in Manhattan.
That’s the purpose of scouting, incidentally. Didn’t even know this was here before I was walking past it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A couple of blocks away, these amazing mosaics were adorning a Byzantine Catholic Church. This particular church is dubbed the “Holy Spirit Byzantine Catholic Church.” Everybody knows that I’m a fan of photographing the ritual life of the Catholic Church in particular, and that I’m absolutely floored by Orthodox or Greek Churches. There’s a combination? Another institution that I’ve got to find some social engineering solution for getting the camera into.
Scuttling, always scuttling. One thing about Oakland, unlike the rest of Pittsburgh, is that there didn’t seem to be many opportunities to use a public bathroom. Most of the “street life” in this zone was focused on the campus of the university, with an absolute dearth of shops and restaurants, at least in the section that I was in. I did tug on the entrance doors of both the synagogue and church, but they were locked. This wasn’t exactly the sort of place where “watering the bushes” would be embraced by the local Gendarmerie either, so a certain sense of uneasiness set in.
This sort of created a time limit for me. Tick tock.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fortress like building above caught my eye, and it turns out that it’s the “Central District Catholic High School.” Amongst its many, many famous alumni is Horror Movie legend and Monessan native Tom Savini.
One negotiated his way back to the parking lot where the Mobile Oppression Platform was waiting. It was just about “rush hour” in Pittsburgh and Our Lady of the Pentacle was cooking dinner back at home.
On a side note, strictly from the transplanted New Yorker’s POV –
Pfah, they call this traffic? You want traffic, try the BQE at 8 in the morning. Traffic… traffic doesn’t move at 30 mph, or even 15 mph. Traffic is when you turn off the car on the LIE in Maspeth and get out of the thing to stand on the highway and have a quick stretch. Traffic is three hours to get from Queens to Staten Island, or an hour and a half from Astoria to Flushing because Biden’s in town… traffic…
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Walking in Oakland
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The section of Pittsburgh where you’ll find the campuses of major universities – notably University of Pittsburgh or UPITT and Carnegie Mellon (as well as hospitals and medical centers, several museums, and a gaggle of religious buildings) – is called Oakland. Oakland is divided up into distinct sections, but I’d be lying if I could tell you anything about them yet. The shots in todays post are from my literal third visit to the area since moving here, and the last time I was here it was all indoors at a museum.
The enormous 42 story building prominently occupying the shots in todays post is the UPITT campus’ Cathedral of Learning.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I really hadn’t planned a route for this exploratory scuttle, and instead used the Cathedral as a waypoint for navigation purposes. The Mobile Oppression Platform was stowed away on the roof of a for-pay parking garage, where I paid the highest fee I’ve encountered so far in Pittsburgh for parking – $15 for about three hours. The parking garage was part of the Carnegie Mellon campus, and on the exit stairs taken back down to the street there were a set of doors that led to a set of bleachers on the Carnegie Mellon campus overlooking some sort of sports ball field which also had a running track around it.
I’m still very much in scouting mode these days, and on this particular afternoon I wanted to travel light. Didn’t even bring a camera bag. Had a spare battery and a lens cloth in my sweatshirt pocket, the 85mm f2 was on the camera and a 35mm f1.8 lens was in the coat pocket of the filthy black raincoat which I call my “street cassock.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I spent a couple three hours wandering around and looking at what was on offer for perusal. This sort of area, given the high profile “Ivy League” nature of its institutions, is what an archaeologist would call a “ritual center.” People want their particular “deal” to be noticed and acknowledged by the up and coming generations of cultural and political leadership in such ritual centers, so they spend big when building monuments to a spiritual path or political ideation.
There were several grandiose and architecturally distinguished religious structures in the area, some of which will be discussed tomorrow. I found the Carnegie Mellon campus area to be a bit architecturally sterile, personally, but I didn’t venture too far into it from the street side and thereby I don’t really have a fully formed opinion to offer on the subject.
More tomorrow.
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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.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself were desirous of getting out together and experiencing something new to us here in Pittsburgh. So we hopped into the Mobile Oppression Platform (my pet name for the Toyota) and drove over to Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, where the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is located. Parking cost $10, and non member admission tickets ran us $25 a head.
I’ve been to the British Museum in London, and quite obviously – the American Museum of Natural History back in NYC – so I’m a bit jaded by scale and scope, but this is one spectacular institution here in Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 115,000 square foot museum was founded by Andrew Carnegie back in 1896, and is one of several cultural institutions which the founder of U.S. Steel endowed while feeling guilty about the Homestead Strike and massacre. The museum also incorporates an art museum into its design, and you can move freely between the two once inside. It was a cold day in Pittsburgh, and a Sunday, so there were lots of family groups moving around inside with their kids. The Oakland neighborhood surrounding it hosts multiple cultural institutions and churches, in addition to the university properties.
We saw several interesting exhibits, notably the Alcoa Foundation Hall of American Indians and Polar World: Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life. As is usually the case with a museum, we didn’t see everything on the first go.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of the art on display during this visit was eminently modern, and the curatorial intention seemed to revolve around hot button modern day political issues. It was a nice space, and a great collection. Apparently the museum’s total collection include some 22 million individual specimens and artifacts, with some 10,000 items on public display.
There’s a lot of behind the scenes science work going on, we were told by museum staff. This includes the so called “Alcohol House” which is where they store the remains of collected animals and plants for future curation or study in sealed jars of alcohol.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The mineral rooms were fascinating, and quite well presented. Normally this is the sort of thing which a humble narrator walks right past, but this particular exhibit pulled me right in.
An old friend of mine once described walking around a museum like this as producing a psychological haze which he described as becoming “uberplexed,” a nearly narcotic level “high.” I can tell you, I was uberplexed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The big draw at the museum, obviously, involves Dinosaurs. Several diorama displays were on offer, and every kid in the museum was required to walk into this room and throw their arms into the air while yelling “rawwr.”
Ever wonder how different this experience would be if instead of ‘Dinosaur’ we used ‘Gigachicken?’ I’ll betcha that Dinosaurs would have probably tasted delicious – grilled with a bit of salt and pepper and maybe a squeeze of lemon. As a human, it’s my responsibility to assess first how I would kill one, then wonder what it would taste like. Alpha predators have to alpha, yo.
20 guys with spears, working in tandem, that’s how you’d kill it. That’s how they used to do elephants and mammoths. It would also make sense to have dug out a muddy pit in advance, to trap it in one place so it’s easier to poke at with the spears. Gigachicken.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The institution is famous for finding and identifying the Diplodocus speciation back in 1899. The skeletons above are identified as Diplodocus carnegii.
Back tomorrow with more from Pittsburgh, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
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a church on Polish Hill
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the 28th of December, one had an errand to run. It’s seems that the ubiquitous ATM machines of a certain NYC based bank which my accounts are with are not so commonly found here in Pittsburgh. That meant that in order to avoid paying a fee when withdrawing some cash, I needed to drive for a bit in order to do so. I will crawl through broken glass to avoid paying ATM fees, as a note. That’s how I ended up in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, nearby the campus of the University of Pittsburgh or “PITT.”
That’s the literal crowning glory of their campus, called the “Cathedral of Learning.” I know very little about it, but the Wikipedia link attached to the name can explain it all to you, lords and ladies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since I was sort of in the neighborhood, I satisfied my curiosity regarding an impressive religious building that I had spotted from the flatlands of the Strip District on prior outings to this area.
That’s the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, a 1905 structure that hosts a presumptively Polish Roman Catholic congregation. The prominence it is set onto is called Polish Hill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One thing I can report, after my very limited experience here in the Pittsburgh area, is that the neighbors are quite friendly. Several times have I been approached while taking pictures of this or that, expecting the old refrain of “what are you doing, or you can’t do that, or are you in Al Qaeda” that I’ve often encountered. Instead, there’s a real pride in the neighborhood bubbling out of the locals, as in the case of an older gentleman who walked over to me while I was cracking out a few exposures. Before ten minutes rolled by, he told me his whole life’s story before he had to skedaddle off to meet a girlfriend. Dude had to be 80. You go, son, you go!
Most of the chats have been the usual ones – they have a camera that they don’t know how to use and do I know what it’s worth – that sort of thing. The second I open my mouth to speak, and they hear the accent, they’ll ask “where are you from.” When I tell them I just moved to Pittsburgh from New York, they look at me all puzzled and say “Why?”
This has happened several times.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One circled around the church in the automobile, easily finding spots to park in when an interesting point of view appeared. This one is looking north towards the Allegheny River from up on Polish Hill.
A lot of my time at the moment is being spent trying to a) finish the moving process and get established here, and b) learn the jigsaw puzzle of the neighborhoods and roads which form Allegheny County.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s an abandoned looking parochial school just up the hill from Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is one of the very few places I’ve seen graffiti. I don’t know if it’s municipal will or civic pride, but I find it striking how little of that sort of thing I’m seeing. Maybe it’s just how over the top NYC is with graffiti. I’m not talking about the nice “street art” murals kind of graffiti, mind you, I’m talking about “punks” “tagging” stuff.
It’s been very interesting living in a place where the government doesn’t seek to “monetize” you quite as much as the NYC one does. Robot cameras aren’t sitting on the traffic lights, there’s abundant free or fairly cheap parking for motor vehicles, especially so nearby mass transit centers, and when you need to go somewhere only a few miles away you can do so without passing through a crucible of purposely induced traffic jams. You can also go from one section of the metroplex to another without having to shell out an hour’s wages in tolls.
Again, it ain’t necessarily sunshine and handjobs out here, but it’s nice not having an army of professional assholes thinking up new ways to get the buckaroos out of your pocket so they can fund some numbnut’s political ambitions.
Say… how’s d’at fer da most Brooklynz t’ing I’s said inna last few weekz?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I really, really want to get inside this building. I’m positive that I’ll figure out a way to do so, and my desire to photograph whatever glories it contains should be obvious to longtime readers. I like photographing Catholic Churches (Greek ones too!). This is, of course, something I’m going to figure out a way to social engineer some official permission for. I’ve never been one of those guys who walks into a church and just starts shooting without asking. That’s rude.
I mean, I’ve done it, but it was rude. Like I said, this part of the country has manners, and is polite. They also don’t curse as much, if you can ‘effin believe that.
“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 