Posts Tagged ‘Pennsylvania’
an Allegheny interval
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One had a couple of hours to kill recently, and decided to do a proper photowalk on the north side of downtown Pittsburgh. This area which I was in, I’m told, was an independent municipality in Allegheny County called Allegheny City until 1907, when it was annexed by another municipality. Pictured above is Downtown Pittsburgh, which is the neighboring city that did the annexation.
The waterfront in this area is part of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail, which is a post industrial accommodation open to the public for exercise and recreation. Lots of joggers and bicyclists are moving about, and right behind me while I was shooting these there was some kid trying to figure out to ride his skateboard. This is right about where the Allegheny River feeds into the Ohio River.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking along the Allegheny River, past the Fort Duquesne steel bowstring bridge and towards the “three sisters” suspension bridges. Last week, frequent commenter and wise aleck George the Atheist asked in a comment why there are so many different types of bridges here in Pittsburgh. I don’t have a definitive answer but I’ve got a few theories. First is that these bridges were largely installed over a 75-100 year period and that technologies and materials change over time. The second, and this one fits in with my somewhat conspiratorial point of view, is that Pittsburgh was the home of the American Bridge Company.
My theory is that American Bridge Company, as organized by JP Morgan, used Pittsburgh’s waterfront as a showroom for its national and international customers. Notably, American Bridge Company was one of the principal contractors used for most of NYC’s “lesser” bridges including the Pulaski Bridge spanning my beloved Newtown Creek. They also worked, and still work, on the major bridges too.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One decided to shed the tripod and filter setup, and just shoot shots instead for the remaining time I’d be out. Scouting, that’s what I’m doing. What I want to be doing is shooting long exposure and loving photographs of Pittsburgh and its wonders, but it kind of bogs me down and keeps me from discovering new things and points of view. I still need to wander about and find these points of view before I get fancy… that’s what my inner narrative naggingly reminds.
I packed up the gear, and set my heels a clicking for a proper photowalk, thereby. I followed the Three Rivers Heritage trail, heading off along one of the Ohio River legs of the path.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the West End Bridge, which I showed you from above last week. Pittsburgh has been dealing with an explosion of unhoused folks camping out in tents and makeshift dwellings along the waterfront in recent years. Political outrage about this has caused the City to send in the cops and sanitation crews to clear out the dwellings and to try and convince the unhoused folks to literally come in from the cold and take a bed at a homeless shelter. This went about as well as it does in any American City, as the section of the trails in the Downtown area which the TV News people filmed the Government types “cleaning up” remains depopulated, but the zones which didn’t receive the media attention still host people living in dire circumstance. The Ohio River frontage is one of those zones.
I should mention that use of the word “explosion” in the Pittsburgh context indicates that there were a couple of hundred down on their luck street and or traveling people living rough in tents and make shift huts – at most. This made the TV news, in heavy rotation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I approached the great cathedral and spiritual center of Pittsburgh, and the most important thing in this region of the country. This structure, which occupies the thoughts, prayers, and minds of all Pittsburgh and its surrounding counties is a sports ball arena that is home to the Steelers football team. Formerly called Heinz Field, naming rights for the stadium were recently acquired by an outfit called Acrisure. Across the street from the stadium is the Carnegie Science Center, an interactive museum largely designed for kids. In between the two is a parking lot which costs $6 for all day parking, and it’s where I left the Mobile Oppression Platform while I was out walking around and shooting.
It was starting to get dark, and since I don’t know the “lay of the land” quite yet, I decided that I would be happier and quite a bit safer in the car. It’s not that things are dangerous hereabouts, but I’m ignorant of what a good neighborhood versus a bad one looks like. Additionally, there was a nearby industrial zone I wanted to take a look at which was definitively “car country” rather than being pedestrian friendly.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of those industrial zone spots which I wanted to take a look at involved the Western State Penitentiary, a now shuttered prison found in the former Allegheny City and along the Ohio River. Word has it that opportunity to visit and photograph parts of this facility might materialize during the spring or summer, notably as part of a citywide event called Doors Open Pittsburgh. Doors Open’s operation is reminiscent to me of Open House NY, whom I worked with for several years on walking and boat tours of Newtown Creek.
More tomorrow, from the Paris of Appalachia, at your Newtown Pentacle.
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Monongahela, men will call thee
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One thing I’ve learned about living in Pittsburgh in these first weeks of doing so is that you need to pick your battles, as far as the weather goes. Blue skies and bright sun have been a fairly rare commodity so far, so when the forecast called for those conditions on the 9th of January, I hopped behind the wheel of the Mobile Oppression Platform and set off for several points of interest which had caught my attention along the Monongahela River.
First stop was Clairton, found about 13 miles (as the crow flies) from Downtown Pittsburgh. There’s a “rail to trail” opportunity to be found there which is part of the Montour Trail. What drew me here was U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, pictured above. I ran into a cop who seemed to be “cribbing” in the parking lot of the Montour Trail, and started a conversation with him about me being a photographer who is new to the area and who wanted to get the skinny on what’s considered ok or not as far as local law enforcement’s point of view is concerned. Best to ask, let the cop know you’re not some freak who’s going to cause trouble, as I always opine.
After telling me to take my hands out of my pockets, the officer informed me that were I to trespass onto the Clairton property he’d have an interest in me due to Patriot Act related security concerns, but his department would otherwise have zero interest in my pursuits and then he even mentioned my First Amendment right to self expression and a lack of desire to interfere with such things. I thanked the officer, cracked out the shot above, and hopped back into the Mobile Oppression Platform and continued with the exploring.
As mentioned in the past, it’s January and the light sucks this time of the year, so I’m largely scouting at the moment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I drove through a quite lovely semi-rural area, heading southwards, and crossed the river. There are a series of public boat launches and parklets which are set up in a fairly welcoming fashion on this stretch which had caught my eye while I was scrutinizing Google maps’ satellite views during one of the several rain soaked intervals recently experienced. The shot above and the one below were captured at one of these bits of aforementioned public waterfront access infrastructure found in the community of Speers Borough.
The colossal rail bridge, which was staggering to observe in person, is the Speers Railroad Bridge, whereas the blue colored vehicular crossing with the arch is called the Belle Vernon Bridge.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The boat launch in Speers Borough allowed me to securely park the Mobile Oppression Platform and head down to the water with my tripod setup to get a bit “artsy fartsy.” The Belle Vernon Bridge is a 1951 vintage span over the Monongahela which once carried trolley service in addition to automotive traffic.
While shooting, some dude was noticed walking towards me while carrying a bucket. “Here we go” thought this long time New Yorker, but as it turned out he was a lovely chap who used to work on the tugs that navigate the Monongahela delivering mineral feedstocks to the the steel mills. The bucket? He didn’t pay his water bill and needed to flush his toilet, hence the visit to a river with a bucket in hand.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My next stop was Monessan, PA., which is the hometown of cinematic makeup artist Tom Savini. Savini has a program named after him at a business school in Monessan. The Arcelor Mittal Monessen coke plant is pictured above, as seen from a supermarket parking lot bordering the mill. It wasn’t this plant, or Tom Savini (whom I’m a huge fan of, and even have an autographed plaster casting of a human skull he created sitting on my desk), instead it was another boat launch which would offer unimpeded water views which drew me here.
One negotiated the local street grid, as it were, and found his way down to the riverfront and the small park and boat launch ramp hosted there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the distance, that’s the Donora-Monessen Bridge, aka the Stan Musial Bridge, a 1972 addition to the Monongahela River. By this point, I had throughly gotten myself lost. My goals for the day started out with trying to find a few points of view to photograph the Clairton Works from, which ended up being a lot more difficult than you’d think. If there’s a bit of waterfront property anywhere near it, that land is super valuable for commercial exploitation. Get a few miles away from the plant where the valuation of the river facing properties drops and it becomes a liability to the town rather than an asset, and you might as well use the waterfront as a park instead.
I did spot a few locations which I’m going to have to return to on foot, after I figure out someplace convenient to leave the car, and during a season which is a bit less harsh as far as temperature. There’s a number of things which I need to work out, actually. Things are chaotic at the moment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wish I could tell you the name of the rail bridge above, which is about equidistant between Clairton Works and another steel mill called the Irvin Works which I haven’t laid eyes on yet. My understanding is that the teal colored pipeline moving through the shot carries gas generated by the Clairton Works coking operation that will be pumped over to and used to fire the Mon Valley Works over in Braddock.
More exploratory wanderings in tomorrow’s Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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“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.
steep, man, steep
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator decided it was time to visit a few of the local establishments in my new neighborhood of Pennsylvania’s Dormont that serve adult beverages, and explore the “scene” as it were. Most of the commercial activity in my new zone is car based, but as you’d hope, there’s a few drinking parlors found in direct proximity of the T light rail station – pictured above – which is, coincidentally, about a 15 minute walk from HQ.
That’s the “Potomac” station for the Red Line T in Dormont. The street it runs on is called “Broadway Avenue.” Apparently, when they established Dormont, the idea that guided the naming of the roads here including the offering of “a town without streets,” so every street is an ‘Avenue’ instead.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Broadway Avenue is more or less the high point hereabouts. I don’t know if it qualifies as a “ridge” or not, but all of the streets which cross it fall off in altitude and drop down into valleys. It’s not uncommon for the roads here to be set at a 15-20 degree angle. The steepest street in North America is nearby, in the Beechview section, dubbed Canton Avenue.
Having grown up in a subsection of a part of Brooklyn called “Flatlands,” that’s next door to “Flatbush,” this sort of terrain continually blows my mind. When you’re driving and you come to an intersection, you’ll notice gouges in the asphalt left behind by people who tried to conquer this terrain at too high a rate of speed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s two ways for me to get to and from the T, with one being quite a bit easier to surmount than the other. The most direct connection to the transit line would involve usage of the street above, dubbed “Lasalle Avenue.” Quite a few of the roads here use pavers rather than asphalt for the surfacing. When a vehicle is negotiating down Lasalle, you hear a grinding vibration from its tires and the pavers clanking against each other.
This particular evening was quite cold and icy, and there were a couple of spots where I was literally standing still and still slipping down the road due to gravity and the abrogation of friction.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While absorbing a few pints of beer, I also absorbed some local knowledge and lore from a couple of the different bartenders who were pouring the libations. Some of it was horrific, an unsolved and truly macabre murder from the 1980’s which occurred near that T station pictured above, and the Bookshop Killer was also mentioned (said Bookshop Killer has apparently gotten got.) I also got advice on restaurants, other bars, and an admonition to visit some wilderness in somewhat nearby Western Maryland for white water rafting. Y’know I’d like to take pictures of white water rafting, but…
After making my way back to HQ, and with a few belts in me, I decided to try and figure out what color the street lights are.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You can adjust the “color temperature” of your shot during the developing process in Photoshop, but as I’ve discovered over the years – it kind of matters what you had the camera set to when you’re capturing the photo. Particularly so in low light situations. It’s the “nitty gritty” side of digital photography, and it’s nuanced by knowing how digital images work when you “look under the hood.” The street lights in NYC create a luminance that’s best captured at about 3400 kelvin, which conquers the cool blue LED street lights. Pittsburgh still uses old school sodium maps, which produce an orange yellow light.
The camera will thereby attempt to build the image primarily on the red plate since that’s where most of the light’s coloration is found, which creates all sorts of problems as far as generating sensor noise. A bit of experimentation has revealed that my new “night setting” for captures in Pittsburgh should be 2800 Kelvin, which forces the pixel depth to build up on the green and blue plates, along with the red. This reduces the grainy noise issue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In daylight settings, I capture at 5200 Kelvin, if you’re curious. If it’s cloudy out, I’ll use 5800 Kelvin to make sure that the sky has something in it beyond just “blue gray.” I’ll adjust the actual color in Photoshop, which pushes the histogram into looking “normal.”
Digital images, of course are generally in RGB mode. If you’ve got Photoshop on your device, you can actually look at the three plates individually. It’s worth analyzing how the image is actually formed up, and why something you did in the field failed or succeeded during the developing process. Shoot for the edit, I always say.
Anyway, that was my big night out in Dormont, Pennsylvania. Something different tomorrow, 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.
thereafter amidst
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The day before we were scheduled to head back to NYC from Pittsburgh, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself had decided to leave the car parked at the AirBNB we were staying in and we headed out on foot for a bit of a celebratory bar crawl on one of the “main streets” in Dormont, where we had just signed a lease. I’m pretty serious about not operating a vehicle while impaired by alcohol, at least at this stage of my life.
We visited a drinking establishment that specialized in mead and cider, where I enjoyed the hell out of a sour cherry juice infused glass of mead. I felt like a Viking.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our revelry continued into the evening hours, and since it was a full moon I couldn’t resist cracking out a few shots. We headed back to the AirBNB and packed our stuff up for the trip back to “Home Sweet Hell.”
As mentioned in the past, the drive between Pittsburgh and NYC encompasses roughly 400 miles. The highways post speed limits that are largely 70 mph, but in practice traffic is moving quite a bit faster than that. It’s an all day drive, when you factor in bathroom breaks and meals. You don’t find yourself in any sort of traffic nightmare until you’re about 40-50 miles from the Hudson River in New Jersey as it’s mostly a rural route. This is one of those drives where the highway exits are spaced out 30-50 miles from each other.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At one of the “rest” stops we took, I spotted this construction vehicle and instantly regretted the choice I made in buying a Toyota instead of a TerraMac. Look at that thing! Gah. Zombie deterrent of the highest order, Bro.
At any rate, we arrived back in NYC safe and sound, and began to really tear into the remaining work and packing up we needed to do to escape New York. I ended up throwing out about half of the material goods I’ve accumulated over the decades spent here in NYC, judging everything against a rubric of “do I really want to pay a mover to drive this thing 400 miles west.” A lot of personal archaeological finds occurred during this process. I found the letter that my high school girlfriend sent me to announce our break up, several yarmulkes which came into my possession at family weddings and Bar Mitzvah‘s, and all the other minutiae of life which I had been holding onto for decades.
November would end up being a very busy month, in terms of “have to’s.” Multiple runs to the scrap yard to dispose of electronics and metallic items we weren’t going to take with us, then there was a bunch of paper which went to a different scrap yard, all that sort of stuff. The camera was with me for all of this, but seldom did I hit the shutter.
So much to do…
“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.
steep mysterious
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
November 3rd and 4th found Our Lady of the Pentacle and a humble narrator wandering about in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh, and viewing a series of available rentals. There were a couple of real gems – buildings with great bones – as they say – which would seriously benefit from an investment in the modernization of the house’s physical plant but which didn’t fit our aims. We saw places with old fixtures, creaky stairs, and windows which seemed like they were about to fall away from the walls. We also saw a few “modern” places which also weren’t quite what we were looking for, neighborhood wise.
Luckily, Our Lady had expertly used the Zillow service to find the ideal landing pad for us in Pittsburgh, and we then secured the new address with a lease. This particular post is actually being written in that space, in the finished basement which is going to be my new office space. We now live in the Borough of Dormont, in the City of Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Saying all that, I actually need to come back to NYC next weekend to manage the movers and tie down a few loose ends. Truly am I looking forward to driving the 400 miles back and forth, a humble narrator sarcastically offers. As of next week’s Wednesday, I’m no longer going to be a New Yorker. Well… I’ll always be an “I’M WALKIN HERE” New Yorker, but there you go.
We signed the lease for the new digs and then all of a sudden our calendars were clear. It was decided to go exploring a bit so we hopped into the car and set about that purpose.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Carnegie is another one of the many communities that are part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan setup. I had noticed an interesting series of Church towers while driving past the community on a highway, which I wanted to take a closer look at, and we headed over there for a bit of an “explore.”
Funnily enough, that building in the shot above houses the Carnegie Historical Society, and that white car in front of it is my own. We randomly parked in front of the place, and when I got out of the car, the showrunner of the Carnegie Historical Society was standing in the doorway, and broadly smiling at me like he had been expecting us to show up.
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 