Posts Tagged ‘Oil City’
St. Joseph’s RC church, Oil City
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When people get rich, suddenly, they generally want to say ‘thank god.’ When people stay rich for a generation or two, they start building churches. In the case of Oil City, there’s a real cracker of a Catholic Church enjoyed by the local parish, dubbed the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church.
Since I was in town, a visit to this particular ‘sacred space’ was on my to-do list. My companion for the day and I strode up to the place, and found the front doors locked, but the side entrance was open and we stepped inside for a somewhat breath taking visit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
St. Joseph was built on a hill found on the north side of Oil City, in a fairly well kept residential neighborhood. I’m told that no matter where you are in Oil City, the spires are visible and provide a landmark which the locals use to navigate the streets with. There were earlier versions of the church on this site, with decidedly lesser structures. The current building was opened in 1894, with the congregation officially having been established in the Oil City/Titusville area all the way back in 1862.
A detailed historical account of St. Joseph Parish is available for inspection at this site. It’s somewhat difficult to read, due to some curious choices regarding typography, but it’s a sound narrative and very well researched.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We entered the building, and found the cavernous chapel completely empty of congregants. One affixed a wide angle lens, the one I was blathering on about last week, to the camera and got busy. I’m told that the church has been quite recently renovated and refinished, in 2020, by a Wisconsin based outfit that specializes in this sort of thing.
I’m told that the architectural style of the building is ‘gothic and late gothic revival,’ but I’m not at all schooled in such matters and cannot speak intelligently about the subject.
Check out this page from archipedia for the details on its style.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This church is ultimately overseen by the Bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania – the ‘Most Rev. Lawrence T. Persico.’ The Bishop, in 2020, combined the nearby St. Stephen Parish with St. Joseph Parish at the request of the local pastor, one Rev. John Miller. It’s all St. Joseph Parish now.
This sort of combination and restructuring is a region wide phenomena which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is undertaking, due to the decline in local populations here in the so called ‘rust belt,’ and it’s a process I mentioned in a post about St. Bernard’s RC church back in the South Hills of Pittsburgh (which has a different Bishop, and Diocese).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What I can say, categorically, is that the interior space in St. Joseph is striking and glorious. Great lighting design, gorgeous stained glass, and kept neat as a pin. As long time readers will tell you, a humble narrator has had a long fascination with photographing ‘sacred spaces,’ and in particular ones belonging to the Roman Catholics.
I seldom use a tripod in these sorts of places, as it seems disrespectful. This time, however, my companion and I were the only ones in the chapel, so I did. My little ‘platypod’ mounting plate was deployed and the camera affixed to it. It allowed me to use flat surfaces in the church itself for the camera to rest upon.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We still had that long drive ahead of us, described a couple of days back in this travelogue, some two and change hours back to Pittsburgh with a quick stop mid journey to drop my traveling companion off.
One thereby bid adieu to Oil City, having also decided to return in the spring for another go at satisfying my shot list and getting the rest of the points of interest I had encoded into a Google Map, which we didn’t get to. The oldest continually producing oil well in the United States is nearby, for instance… and I’m interested in riding on the Oil City & Titusville Railroad as well.
Back next week with something different, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
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The octopus’ garden
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A few days ago, you got to see the Drake Well – the very first commercial oil well in the United States. Regaled, you were, with tales of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush of the late 19th century, and a corporate leviathan named John D. Rockefeller, who formed a monopoly over the new industry which was called the Standard Oil Trust.
An attempt at summarizing Standard’s business practices was made in that post – describing their ‘combinations’ scheme of horizontal integration, which gave Rockefeller and Standard an iron grip on the prospecting, drilling, pumping, transport, pricing, refinement, marketing, and delivery of petroleum to oil’s ‘end’ customers. Over 90% of the global market was under their control, and a near total monopoly over the domestic North American Market was achieved.
Pictured above is the National Transit Building in Oil City, Pennsylvania. This was a regional HQ for Standard Oil during PA.’s Oil Rush. The ‘head office’ was in NYC, specifically the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway, in lower Manhattan.
An excellent history of Oil City’s National Transit Building, and the titan of industry which inhabited it, can be accessed here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Directly across the street, where an oil exchange building that was built by the local entrepreneurs once stood, is the Oil City National Bank Building. Like the National Transit Building across the street, the bank building is part of Oil City’s historic district. My understanding of the history here is that once Standard Oil established itself across the street, the first thing to go was the Oil Exchange, and that the bank itself was a part of Standard’s ‘combinations of horizontal integration.’
Once the local Oil Exchange was closed down, if you had petroleum you wanted to ship to markets on the Eastern Seaboard – you’d have to cross the street and talk to one of the Standard men who represented another near total monopoly – the Pennsylvania Railroad. Need barrels? Pipes? Labor? Talk to someone in the National Transit Building.
You could bet going in that you weren’t going to be paying the same price for services or materials as Standard Oil was. It was also likely that one of the Standard Oil men would make an offer to buy you out, and expand their empire by making you a vassal.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
National Transit Building was completed in 1890, and after the 1911 Sherman Anti Trust judgement against the Standard Oil Trust broke the octopus up, the building and its offices were bought by the three locally headquartered companies of Pennzoil, Quaker State, and Wolf’s Head. The building passed into private hands in 1957, and then in 1993 it was donated to a non profit corporation which subsequently failed to make a go of it. It was empty and abandoned for a spell.
Ralph Nader bought the building in 1995, invested $100,000 in renovating it, renamed it as the Civic Renewal Center and then gifted it back to Oil City. Today, it’s home to artist studios and private offices.
Check out the current management’s website here.
Back tomorrow with more, from Oil City.
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The grass is green & the girls are pretty…
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, this is the same view which I was denied, here in Pennsylvania’s Oil City, due to heavy bank of fog at dawn when I first arrived – as detailed in this post. The POV above is from a small park area, called Murray’s Overlook, which I’d ‘guesstimate’ as being about 800 feet over the municipality, and the branch of the Allegheny River which snakes through it.
Oil City is a spot I’ve been wanting to check out since moving to Western PA. from NYC. As the name of the place might suggest – it’s one of several ‘oil boom towns’ which sprang up during the Pennsylvania Oil Rush during the late 19th century. This used to be the HQ location for Pennzoil, Quaker State, and Wolf’s Head Oil.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oil City achieved its greatest population size in 1930, when it was home to about 20,000 people and had a very busy industrial maritime shoreline that handled the subterrene lakes of oil being extracted from the nearby fields. Industry and large businesses have relocated since, and thereby the population in Oil City has steadily declined over the last century from peak levels. There’s about 9,000 people living here in modernity.
The boom years left behind a stock of beautiful old buildings in the downtown historical area, a particular specimen of which will be focused in on – as a matter of fact – a bit later this week. There’s rail tracks still present in Oil City, but there’s no station anymore and the trains passing through the place are carrying freight.
Well, I guess you can ride a train for part of the year at least, the Oil City & Titusville heritage line, which was mentioned yesterday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The town promotes its historic legacy, in an attempt to draw in tourists, and there’s wooded trails and historic districts and all kinds of stuff to explore here. We parked the Mobile Oppression Platform (MOP) in the lot of one these trails, which follows the shoreline of the Allegheny River (pictured above), and sallied forth on foot.
There’s a bunch of cool bridges here too. I have no idea which one I was standing under… umm, ok… it’s the 1990 vintage Veteran’s Memorial Bridge, which replaced an earlier 1910 version.
Apparently, an apocalypse played out hereabouts in 1892, one which wiped out the entire town – the disastrous flood and fire of June 4th and 5th. Click through for this one, I’d advise – burst dam causes a flood, naphtha and oil released into water, a yellowish fog rises, a fire starts, a boom, suddenly everything’s burning including people and animals… Here’s a second link, one with actual photos of the devastation. Here’s a third, from the Federal Agency NOAA. It’s some story, this.
The conflagration’s official tally included killing about 132 people, destroying roughly a million and a half bucks worth of private property, and largely wiping out Oil City’s waterfront. Titusville was hit by this flooding as well, and all of the bridges across Oil Creek leading into Oil City were lost.
That’s 1892 money, btw, in modernity those one and a half million dollars of loss would translate to a modern day sum of $36,627,500.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It had become quite a beautiful day by the time we returned to Oil City, my companion and I thought, after executing our quickly decided upon change of plan in the morning.
I was catching a ‘vibe,’ however, that we didn’t want to hang around here terribly long, lest the attentions of some base element catch upon us. A definite vibe of being watched from afar…
Regarding this hippy dippy ‘vibe’ thing of mine, nothing in particular set the radar off. I was just suddenly ‘aware’ of my surroundings, and something was off.
To be fair: We had zero in the way of negative interaction with others, my companion and I, but my ‘spidey sense’ was tingling. The few residents of Oil City whom we interacted with couldn’t have been nicer, in actuality. Maybe I was just tired, and fatigue was fueling my paranoia.
I think it’s smart to be a little paranoid, but I am from NYC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At any rate, I was beginning to feel some actual physical exhaustion, after waking up so much earlier than I usually do. There were still a couple of things I wanted pics of before heading back to Pittsburgh, however. Regardless, I had about a two and change hour drive from Oil City ahead of me to get back home.
I also knew that the southeasterly drive would place the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself directly in the center of the MOP’s windshield. That’s going to suck, I thought, and Y’know what? I was right, it did – in fact – suck.
The fact that I was going to have to contend with school bus influenced stop and go traffic was also present in the brain. Additionally, just as I would be entering Pittsburgh, the evening rush hour would be getting underway.
This day trip, thereby, was nearly over.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These six images were all ‘tripod shots,’ and the last of that sort of shooting I’d be doing this day.
From this point out, I had rigged the camera for ‘photowalk’ duty, and after stowing the tripod and other gear into my knapsack, we headed over to the historic district, where a specific structure that I wanted to get a few shots of would be found.
More on that tomorrow.
Also, about the title of this post – everytime I say ‘Oil City,’ the Guns and Roses song ‘Paradise City’ pops up in my noggin for some reason. What can I say, other than that I’m all ‘effed up.
“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.
To the world’s ruin
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator had been planning a Pennsylvania day trip for a while, one which would see him piloting the Mobile Oppression Platform (the MOP) on a two hour long, mostly north western journey, from Pittsburgh to Pennsylvania’s Venango County.
As is my habit for ‘away games,’ a fair amount of research back at HQ was undertaken. A Google Map was created with a series of way points and destination markers to follow and order the day. I always build an itinerary which would be fairly impossible to accomplish in one go, but there you are. Weather forecasts for the destination had been observed for the preceding week. A final embarkation date was arrived at in the last 48 hours before the trip, as to which of two or three candidate dates might be atmospherically propitious for the effort. Every day is D-Day for me – gotta get it right or you’re wasting your time, and there’s no greater sin than wasting time.
One left HQ, in Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont, at 4:30 in the morning and it was just 31 degrees Fahrenheit outside when I did. A companion was going to be coming along on this one, whom I’d pick up not too far from the half way point on my journey, at about 5:45 a.m.
The plan was to arrive just as the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself was rising in the vault of the sky. I was counting on fog rising off of the Allegheny River, in its hinterlands, but not quite as much fog as the peas soup we encountered upon arrival.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The night before this trip saw me emptying the camera bag out, and cleaning up all the equipment. Dust was blown off the lenses, an inventory of the bag’s contents accomplished, and everything was packed back up for travel. I would be bringing the full kit.
Clothing for the day was also laid out the night before, so as to not disturb Our Lady of the Pentacle or ‘razz up’ Moe the Dog at 4 in the morning. Also, a sandwich was constructed, the water bottle filled, and travel plan reviewed. I had even put the sandwich and the water bottle in the car so I didn’t forget them. It was colder without than inside my refrigerator, so…
As a note: I’m an absolute moron and klutz in the mornings, prior to having inhaled a few cups of coffee. Anything that I’ve left for myself to do in the early hours – other than ‘blow ballast’ in the lavatory, shower, and dress – has a 50/50 chance of successful completion. Long experience has taught me to handle all the fine details of preparation on the night before an adventure lest something gets left behind.
Leaving little to chance, and advance planning, is my way. It’s also why I’m seldom late for appointments.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a somewhat harrowing drive. One thing about the so called ‘red counties’ surrounding Pittsburgh that I just don’t understand revolves around street lighting. If you’re a Conservative, please explain this one to me in the comments section. Does street lighting, along major highways, somehow impugn your freedom? Do you just not want to pay for it? I really don’t get this one from a public safety POV, but as a prophylactic measure I activated the ‘brights’ on the Mobile Oppression Platform’s (MOP’s) head lamps and drove north cautiously.
One has recently became aware of a statistic affecting this part of the nation, which states that a Pennsylvania driver has a 1 in 59 chance of wrecking their car by hitting a deer, sometime during their driving career.
You know what would help shrink that deer statistic? Proper, and endemic, street lighting… but I digress…
One made it to the halfway point, where I was meant to pick up my traveling companion, in Pennsylvania’s City of Butler. After we tucked his gear into the back of the MOP, the northernly pathway was resumed. We arrived here, at the first destination on my Google Map just as the sky began to lighten up.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That anticipated fog was omnipresent, but was a great deal thicker and more opaque than I had counted on. A temperature inversion had occurred, which saw the atmospheric milieu shift from temperatures in the the high 70’s just a day before, then absolutely collapse into overnight temperatures in the high 20’s and low 30’s. It was definitively freezing out, but the Allegheny River’s water hadn’t received the memo and it was still about 50-60 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit for you euros and canucks). Thick slabs of fog and mist thereby occluded the first destination I had pegged for the day’s effort.
I like to start these photo expeditions at a point of elevation, it should be mentioned. The location we were in was an overlook park set against a steep hill. The river was flowing about 800 or so feet below us, but you could not discern the small city below us for love or money.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is something else I plan for, unexpected circumstance. We took a few photos of the fog, as you’ve probably noticed by now. There were two central locations we were meant to visit on this day, with the first one being where we were – the community of Oil City, Pennsylvania. The second was about twenty miles north of here – up in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Given the atmospheric conditions here in Oil City, we decided to reverse the order of the various waypoints on my map and return here later in the day. We hopped into the MOP and drove a short distance up to Titusville to see ‘it.’
All those years on NYC’s Newtown Creek, where the oil pipelines and rail shipments of crude petroleum ‘product’ were heading to for distillation in the 19th century, had made the names of these two communities quite familiar to me from historical research about the oil business. This is where the petroleum destined for refinement and distillation in Brooklyn and Queens, along the fabulous Newtown Creek, originally came from.
We found our way to ‘it.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
By ‘it,’ I mean the Drake Well. The site of the very first modern, and commercial, oil well, on the planet. Dug in 1859. U.S.A.! More on that one tomorrow in what very well might be the longest post I’ve offered in years.
What you’re looking at is the spot where the end of the world started.
“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 