Posts Tagged ‘Pennsylvania’
lingered so
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An Amtrak train carried me from NYC to… Philadelphia… for a day trip. I had rolled through here not too long ago, but my visits were only as part of a layover on two trips to and from the pretty city of Pittsburgh on the western side of Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh postings from my first autumnal visit, listed in chronological order – Great Elms, Gnarled Orchards, Ancient Walls, Lower Meadows, Choked Fissure, Human Clothing, Other Constellations, Certain Circumstances, Terrestrial Gravity, Needed Form, Without Dissolution, Calculations Would, Grave Doubt, Luckily Obtainable, Abnormal Toughness, Prodigious Time, Unexampled Flight, Earthward Dreams, and finally Bacterial Agent.
Both times I was in Philadelphia in 2021, my schedule was extremely limited, and a decision was undertaken just after Christmas to return to Phillie in 2022 and do my thing in a planned and intentional fashion.
Here’s what I gathered last time I was passing through the Brotherly Love Capitol in November of last year – “hideous gnawing” “menacing dreams” “every hand” and “passed close.” Again – I had little idea what to expect there, and a very limited time to shoot.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time around, there was a plan, and a rather ambitious shot list. When designing the list, I was fully cognizant of the fact that there was practically zero chance of getting through the entire thing in the roughly 13 hours I’d be spending in the municipality.
On our way into 30th street Station, which is “the Penn Station of Philadelphia” and pictured above and below, I spotted the historic rolling stock of an outfit called “Catalpa Falls” which offers luxury rides on heritage Pennsylvania Rail Road executive cars that have been lovingly restored to their original glory. Neat!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A couple of things to state;
First – I only possess a tourist’s level of knowledge about Philadelphia. Ok, I’m not an ordinary tourist, but if I state something in this or subsequent posts that’s wrong, I’d beg for corrections in the comments. Unlike the sort of “deep dive” stuff you associate with me on the waterways of NYC, I haven’t got a lived experience for these posts that I can lean on to inform the narrative. I ain’t from here.
Second – 30th street station, pictured above, is found along the Schuylkill River. The Schuylkill is 135 miles long, stretching from Pottsville to Philadelphia, and is a tributary of the larger Delaware River. Given that I have to analogize everything to NYC as that’s my frame of reference – the Delaware is like the Hudson, and the Schuylkill is like the East River. I spent most of my day along this path, and the Schuylkill River.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a post industrial series of landings and pedestrian/bike piers set along the Schuylkill’s shoreline, which follows along active freight rail tracks, and form what’s known as “The Schuylkill River Trail.” I’m told that “Schuylkill” is pronounced as “school kill” which is dumb and the reason why Phillie is stupid as compared to New York. Sky Kill would be better, and they should have checked with a New Yorker before working out a pronunciation.
A third thing for these series of posts that I’m going to warn you about – I’m from Brooklyn, and shit talking Philadelphia is a part of my DNA. I like using “America’s Consolation Prize” best for the place, when throwing shade. Saying that, it’s still one of the great American population centers, a significant contributor to our ancient and current culture, and one of the major nodes found in the North American Megalopolis. Philadelphia is actually a very cool and fairly astounding place, but I’ll never let one of those cheesesteak eaters hear me say it out loud.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My fourth caveat in these posts is that I’m not 100% on cardinal directions since I’m largely unfamiliar with Philadelphia, but I’m pretty sure that the initial point that my shot list started at (above) was southeast of 30th street Station. I walked as far as the Schuylkill River Trail allowed me, which was right alongside a power plant and a set of railroad tracks.
The rail trackage seems to be the property of the CSX outfit, and later on in the day, I saw one of their trains using the right of way. You’ll see that too, but sometime next week, so at least now you’ve got something to look forward to.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An energy outfit based in Boston, dubbed Vicinity Energy, operates a gas powered electrical generating mill here, in what I’m told is South Philadelphia. They pump out some 163 megawatts of electrical juice from this “cogen” plant as well as supplying steam to hundreds of buildings. “Cogen” means that they co-generate steam and electric, just like Big Allis on the East River in LIC. The landward sections surrounding this plant are called Gray’s Ferry and Forgotten Bottom.
An attempt at finding out a bit more about this power plant was subsumed and overwhelmed by tales of racial tension and ethnic clashes in the neighborhoods surrounding the plant. Apparently, the residential areas nearby this section of the Schuylkill have been a flashpoint for turmoil and animus along social class and racial lines for decades, if not centuries.
Next week – more from Philadelphia’s Schuylkill waterfront.
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simpering inanities
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A brief stop over in Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg saw Amtrak change out the crew on my Pittsburgh to NYC journey. Pennsylvania’s Capitol, Harrisburg, offered a 15 minute or so “leg stretch” and “smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em” interval, and half the train staggered out into the daylight to do one thing or the other and sometimes both. We had collectively boarded the train at 7:15 in the morning, after all.
After the bells rang and we all filed back onboard, an announcement that the cafe car was reopened occurred, and a humble narrator purchased a range of comestibles for luncheon and settled back into the seat I had been assigned. After quaffing some coffee and eating an Amtrak Hot Dog, I got back to pondering my fate and staring out the window while watching America roll past. The camera was gathered out of its sack, and I got back to looking for interesting sights.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The landscape in Pennsylvania fascinates me. The Appalachian Mountain range and plateau is incredibly ancient, is a geologic feature which Pennsylvania is situated on the northern reaches of, and it dates back some 480 million years to the Ordovician Period – which is when ocean critters first started exploring dry land. Formed by the action of tectonic plate compression when the super continent Pangaea begin to split up, the Appalachia once rose as high as the Alps or Rockies do today. They’re referred to as “folded mountains” and the reason that all that coal is buried in them is due to their presence during the highly forested Carboniferous era (that’s when the giant dragonflies were around, and you had centipedes the size of school buses sliding around in the swamps). An absolutely staggering amount of effort and expenditure in the 19th and 20th century saw Americans burrowing and mining into, blasting rights of way through, and building upon and around the Appalachia Range.
Fascinating. Really. Mountains older than the dinosaurs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At 30th street Station in Philadelphia the now familiar dance of changing out the locomotive engine from the diesel powered model to the electrified “coGen” unit used for the Northeast Corridor was enacted by the Amtrak people. They did their thing, and waved lanterns at each other, and then it was time to get back onboard again and head back to “home sweet hell.” This was another “stretch your legs” break and a good number of people onboard took advantage of it.
A humble narrator settled back into the assigned seat, and picked up the camera. I affixed the foam collar to my lens and began passing the time by shooting through the windows again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Philadelphia, America’s consolation prize, pictured above.
After spending an entire day on the train, and eating two Amtrak meals along the way, I was quite ready to return to the grinding existential nightmare of a dystopian shithole which I call “home.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Upon my return to Penn Station, I ducked outside onto 8th avenue to breathe a bit of what passes for fresh air in Midtown before heading back to Astoria on the subway. It was rush hour, and despite Covid, the subways were quite busy. Unlike the last time I exited from that door pictured above, this time I didn’t see anyone masturbating into a street grate. There was a guy who offered to sell me something, but I’m not sure what he was offering. Could have been a gold chain, or crack, or sex. Wasn’t interested, me.
A quick ride on the E line got me out of Dodge, and soon I was at Queens Plaza. As is usually the case with me, as soon as the train entered Queens, I felt a rush of energy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The final leg of my long journey arrived at Queens Plaza just as I did, a local R line which would carry me to Astoria.
Our Lady of the Pentacle had arrived home the night before, and had graciously obtained food stuffs which were waiting for me back at HQ. I tore into a bagel like it had done something to my mom, and began downloading all of the photos you’ve been looking at for the last two weeks onto the computer for processing.
I felt a need, and a desire, to listen to this song while setting myself up for the labor of developing them.
“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.
debased idiom
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Riding Amtrak gives you not just a series of interesting if brief windows into other people’s lives and communities, it also gives you a bit of time to let your mind wander. Pondering minutiae and considering the unconsidered, as it were. I spent part of my time planning for future arguments.
I polished the current logical fallacy which is offered to several of the unvaccinated people that I’m friends with. Said argument revolves around their usage of illegal street drugs, and how they’d never ask the guy they’re buying weed or coke from what the circumstances of the stuff’s origin were. I can tell you with some authority that Marijuana in particular is absolutely doused with pesticide by most growers, in order to maximize yield and to make the risk of discovery by law enforcement one worth taking. Cocaine is manufactured, literally, using gasoline. It’s “stepped on” and diluted with other powdery substances several times before that dude with the braids shows up at the bar to deliver the end product gram to you. Beyond illegal or illicit substances, do you actually know what’s in that shot of whiskey that nice fellow behind the bar just poured for you? How about the contents of a bottle of soda, or a fast food burger? You do know it was Dr. Fauci who recommended that condoms be used to avoid getting AIDS, right?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Man, oh man, do I ever want to do a multi day car trip around central Pennsylvania just for the pursuit of some pure landscape photography. These woods seem endless, but they’re punctuated regularly by bridges and other 19th and 20th century infrastructure. So many rivers… waterfalls… mountains…
Who was the first cave guy that found a puddle of melt water, with hops and grain rotting and fermenting within, and decided to drink it, and then soon got drunk? More importantly, who’s the friend he had that decided to try it too, after the first guy described his experience with that proto beer? I know it was a group of guys. Had to be. Wine is something I’ll hand discovery of over to the cave ladies, but beer? Definitely cave guys.
Also, there were cave bears, cave lions, and cave men. All were bigger and stronger than their modern descendants. Recently, I learned that there were cave ducks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in prior posts, one was shooting out of the window of a sometimes speeding Amtrak train while enjoying an eight hour long trip from Pittsburgh back to NYC.
I always say that the most valuable thing about a railroad’s right of way isn’t the train or the tracks. It’s the real estate directly surrounding it. I’ve asked several rail people and a Congressman or two about the land surrounding these rights of way. Federally administered but mostly privately owned, there’s a mandated amount of clear space surrounding the actual tracks. This clear space’s purpose is obvious – you don’t want trees or other vegetation to grow too close to the travel path. My big idea, however, is to attach a mechanism to the back of the train which spews seed balls of native pollinator plants, as the train travels, and at predesignated spots. It wouldn’t be anything other than an engineering problem to make sure the seed balls land outside of the designated clear area, and even if only 10% of the seed balls “take,” you’d be creating thousands of miles of pollinator plant strips all over the country. All in all, another brick in the environmental wall.
Gordian Knot, lords and ladies, Gordian Knot.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of the humans on the train were sleeping, which is something that one such as myself cannot do in public unless I’m absolutely exhausted. I fell asleep on my last trip to Pittsburgh back in the fall, but I’d more or less been awake and very active for nearly 28 hours by then.
I’m legendarily paranoid and cautious. Drives people around me crazy, actually. Before I go to bed at night, every door lock is tested to ensure it’s locked tight. That AirBNB I was staying in back in Pittsburgh had a chair sitting in front of the door when I went to sleep. When I’m out walking around, my habit – at least once every block – is to stop and turn to see if some malign jackhole might be following me. I look three times when crossing a street, not twice. Having grown up in NYC in the 1970’s and 80’s – this sort of behavior is something that became a part of my DNA early on. People walk around like they’re safe or something. You’re not. Sleeping in public? When you don’t absolutely have to? Are you nuts? I was tempted to steal some guys shoes just to teach him a lesson.
I’m similarly tempted towards grand larceny when I see some idiot pull their car over into a bus stop, so as to pick something up at a bodega, while going inside and leaving their car running. It’s really all I can do not to jump in the thing and drive away. Brooklyn!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Amtrak trip from Pittsburgh to NYC is governed by two “layover” stops wherein the cafe car closes and you’ll see different crew members take over the various duty assignments. Saying that, you’ve got about 4 hours to wait after leaving Pittsburgh before you arrive at the first of those stops in Pennsylvania’s Capitol – Harrisburg. The second long stop is in Philadelphia, about two hours later.
I began building a mental list of Anglo Saxon versus Norman French food names. Mutton and Lamb are the exemplars on this list. Same meat, coming from the same critter. One is what the conquered called the stuff, and the other is what the conquerors called it. To this day, mutton is cheaper than lamb. There’s a lot of hidden history buried in the English Language, which is usually a leave behind from some long ago war. Is it Fowl or Poultry for lunch, or is it boar or pork for dinner? When you go to sleep will you be wearing pajamas? Going on vacation to the country, will you stay in a bungalow or a cabin, an inn or a hotel?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In accordance with my newly adopted ideology of sociopathy, I made it a point of not initiating conversation with any of my fellow travelers. They might have said something that caused me to care about something, so I avoided the possibility entirely. This “nothing matters, nobody cares” thing is great. You’re never disappointed by your fellow man this way, since you start the day by acknowledging that everything is shit. It’s quite European, this. I’m nearly a Frenchman at this stage.
I did spend a short interval poking at my phone, and I looked into a cottage industry which allows you to enact mean spirited but not illegal vengeance on those you dislike. You can anonymously send somebody a bag of gummy dicks, for instance. There’s also a service which sends a glitter bomb anonymously. A spring board mechanism within, holding a substantial amount of glitter upon it, is actuated by opening the shipping carton’s lid. This causes a cloud of glitter to explode into your interior space, and that’s awesome. There’s another one – a personal favorite – which uses a similar mechanism to distribute 5,000 live crickets about your crib when the box is opened. Good times.
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.
absurdly slight
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One awoke at the appointed time, bathed, drank a coffee and headed over in the pre dawn hours to Pittsburgh’s Amtrak Station. The train was scheduled to depart at 7:30 a.m. and as is my habit – I was there an hour early. About 7:15, boarding began and the Amtrak conductor indicated which car they wanted me in.
It seems that the way they handle things on Amtrak is that they group passengers together according to where they’re going. Given that I was heading all the way to Moynihan/Penn Station in NYC, that meant I was in the last car on the train. One settled into a seat and got comfortable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wasn’t terribly well prepared – creature comforts wise – for the 8 hour trip, which meant that I was going to be getting my sustenance from Amtrak’s cafe car. They have pretty decent coffee, and a variety of high fat and sugar content offerings. Cakes and candies, juice and soda, even booze. Truth be told, the offerings reminded me a lot of the crap that I’d jam into my face hole back when I used to work overnight shifts in midtown Manhattan. I stuck with the coffee, mostly, but this time around instead of the Amtrak hamburger, I had the Amtrak hot dog. My advice? Go for the burger. It’s gross, but less so than the hot dog.
I spent my journey staring out the window again. This time, however, I used a piece of my homemade camera gear – a foam collar for my lens – to shoot random images out the window as the train ran along the tracks.
All of the shots gathered using this method have been given a different crop ratio than I normally use. It’s to distinguish them from properly composed photos, as these are basically “run and guns.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I sat in a weird posture with my torso twisted towards the window, the camera supported by the left arm while the right one worked the shutter. My head was turned in opposition to the torso, looking ahead in the direction the train was traveling. The camera had the foam collar on the lens, and the collar was pressed directly against the glass while avoiding having the actual lens make contact. When it looked like something interesting was coming up, I’d just start shooting. The exposures were something like 1/5,000th of a second, so as to freeze the scene at a fairly high ISO. Amtrak’s windows are generally pretty dirty, and colored with a reddish brown tint. This makes for a challenging environment when you’re developing them, back in the photoshop application at home.
Saying all that, I really enjoy the randomness, and getting the sort of views that you normally can’t reach.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wish I could tell you about that power plant in the second shot, the canalized waterway in the third, or the bridge pictured above. Doing so would negate the point of the exercise, however, and add a meaningless layer of trivia into the effort.
These are shots, by the way, not photographs. The latter definition – at least by my way of thinking – indicates “photographs” as being something consciously composed and offered in a manner that makes a statement of some kind, whereas shots are entirely random and are more of a technical exercise than anything else.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Somewhere down the road, this particular technique will come in handy when I’m in a position where I have to get the shot or the photograph despite the situational challenges – which is why I engage in the exercise. All of my low light/night time shooting over the last few years has allowed me to develop a set of skills which allow me to leave the flash gun at home, even when I’m shooting indoors. Rail shots like these have taught me how to capture detail while shooting through a dirty rust brown colored window from a vehicle moving at 50 mph. That’ll come in handy, someday, somehow.
That’s the Altoona Horseshoe curve pictured above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We rolled through several rail yards on our course eastwards. Pictured above are Norfolk and Southern locomotives. I saw lots of rail, lots of dams and bridges, and lots of people who have festooned their homes with Trump flags. I saw one building, which seemed to be the offices of a trailer park, which had affixed a two story tall banner with Trump’s face silk screened on it facing the railway with the screed “miss me yet?”.
Nothing matters, nobody cares.
More next week, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
“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.
bulky leather
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Boy oh boy, did a humble narrator suffer in pursuance of getting the shots in today’s post. Standing on the edge of Pittsburgh’s Mt. Washington after the atmospheric temperature tumbled thirty degrees in two hours and despite a sustained thirty mile an hour wind began painting my back, one nevertheless stuck it out through sunset.
For an idea of how high up over the Golden Triangle of Downtown Pittsburgh and the three rivers I was, that line between the orange sunset light and the foreground is the sun shadow of Mt. Washington.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had been planning for this spate of shooting all weekend. That plan got thrown out the window due to the high wind speed, which forced me set up the tripod quite low to the ground due to the force of air shaking the rig. My original intent was to use a filter to “slow down” the sunset shot and render the waters as a mirror.
One managed to pull that off in one or two of these, but it soon became apparent that this was an entirely futile pursuit and I changed gears.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, I wasn’t prepared – garment wise – for this sort of cold and wind. My fingers and toes were numb, and I was having trouble operating the discreet control buttons on the camera.
I was also fairly terrified that a blast of wind would carry the camera and tripod away and over the side of Mt. Washington.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As soon as the light show offered by the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself ended, one decided to just head back to the shelter of the rented AirBnb room and settle in for an early night. I was hoping to stick it out in the location of these shots until the City lights came on, but the wind and cold really was becoming horrific at this point.
I broke down the rig, changed lenses, and set the camera back up for handheld shooting mode.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was about a mile and a half back to the room, but I decided to be lazy and call for a cab on one of my rideshare accounts. While waiting to get picked up, I kept an eye on the scene. I felt thwarted.
Naturally, just as the car arrived…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s when the city lights snapped on. I just cannot win, I tell you.
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 