Posts Tagged ‘Pittsburgh’
needed formula
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Before another word gets mentioned, a humble narrator must confess that he is an absolutely goof for funicular railways. A cable car arrangement, which uses haul ropes and a system of sheaves to exchange the positions of the two cable cars from top to bottom, this is a pretty early example of “people movers.” I got to ride on one or two of these in Europe a few years back, and so was one of my nerd obsessions born. Pittsburgh has two working funiculars, but they call them “inclines” there. Both are found on Mt. Washington and are operated and maintained by the Port Authority of Allegheny County. The Monongahela Incline, pictured above, is the oldest operating funicular in the United States, having operated continuously since 1870, and later in the week you’ll come for a ride on it (and the other one too) with me.
Amazingly, one of the features of these “inclines” is the presence of a large terrace or “overlook” platform open to the public, to take in and appreciate the views from high up on the prominence of Mt. Washington. Before I got busy with “nerding out,” the camera and tripod were deployed and I got busy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pittsburgh is famously sited at the conjunction of three rivers – Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela. The latter is on the south side of the city and pictured above. This was day two of the Pittsburgh leg of my September travels on Amtrak, and all in all I was in the city for about 72 hours. A late afternoon boat tour ticket was in my pocket, but for now I was in the cat seat high above the Golden Triangle of Downtown.
I kept on thinking to myself that about a hundred years ago you wouldn’t be able to even see the city for all of the smoke stacks belching coal smoke into the air. Steel mills, power plants, railroads – that’s what Pittsburgh used to be before the deindustrialization of the 1960’s and corporate reorganizations of the 1970’s and 80’s which reduced Pittsburgh’s population by half and annihilated its tax base.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The bridge at the center bottom of the shot above is small but spectacular, and as I learned later in the day, kind of special and noteworthy from a Civil Engineering point of view. Especially so if you happen to live in NYC’s Queens. More on that in a later post.
It was about 65 degrees, overcast, and the forecast called for passing showers. I never got rained on, but from up here on Mt Washington, you could see that it was raining just a few miles away in different sections. Again, the weird topology of Pittsburgh and its riverine continental climate just fascinated me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured is a pretty major bridge for the City, the Fort Pitt bridge, which connects to the Fort Pitt Tunnel which carries southbound traffic out of Downtown and towards their airport and suburbs. Behind it is Point Park, with its fountain, and the convergent intersection of the three rivers. Again – more on all that in future posts.
This city has 446 bridges, and I could spend months talking about the “who, why, where, and significance of” each one.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the south side of the Monongahela River, the bridges cross over still quite active freight tracks. The bridge closest to the camera is a rail bridge, whereas the other three are vehicular crossings.
We’ll talk about – again – the granular details about them when the posts from the boat tour reach you in the near future. At this stage of the morning, a humble narrator was deep in photo mode.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What a spectacular place this is. I’ve been to Pittsburgh before, but that was back in the early 1990’s when I was in town hawking a comic I had drawn which was just published. One used to spend his weekend’s traveling from place to place, usually by car, doing “shows.” Shows were Comic Conventions. You’ve got your “big shows” like San Diego Comicon, or the New York and Atlanta ones, but there’s a comic convention happening in a hotel ballroom in some analogue of Wayne, New Jersey each and every weekend in the United States. For the Pittsburgh one I attended – during the Presidential administration of George Bush Senior – I was actually the featured guest and the promoter flew me out and paid for my hotel room. A friend from college is from Pittsburgh and she gave me the nickel tour when I was here, but even at that time I had made a mental note to return here someday and explore.
More tomorrow.
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terrestrial gravity
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Day two in Pittsburgh began before the sun came up, and I was showered/dressed/ and charging the camera batteries up for another bridges heavy shot list. The day’s weather forecast was perfect for me – middle 60’s, breezy, and a bit overcast but no rain.
At the center of that shot above is the tallest building in Pittsburgh. It’s the 58th tallest building in the United States, and used to be known as the USX tower. Today, it’s the called the U.S. Steel building, and it’s the HQ for that company as well as UPMC – the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – whose illuminated logo adorns the summit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, the shot above was total serendipity. I was throwing out a bit of garbage I had generated over the last two nights in the AirBNB at the Clark Building, and this is the view from the garbage room, which looks towards the Alcoa building on the Allegheny River’s north shore and the 10th and 9th street (Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson) bridges. I walked out onto Liberty Avenue at about 7 in the morning.
First thing on my list was breakfast, and since throughout these travels the heavy pancake/bacon/egg deal had served me well, I was looking for a diner or coffee shop to purchase a meal of that type. A bit of quick googling revealed a spot just a few blocks away, but it didn’t open until 8 a.m. so I had a little time to kill. After a cup of steaming black coffee was obtained at a convenience store, I was on my way.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pittsburgh seems to have a lot of alleys. They also haven’t turned all of their downtown parking lots into condominiums with the proviso that you should ride a bike or you’re an asshole, or intone that you hate minorities if you oppose more luxury housing, the way they do in NYC. It’s almost like Pittsburgh has other industries whose opinion matters, beyond the one offered by big real estate, when the Electeds are making decisions here.
Naturally attracted to shunned places, I had to walk through a few of them. I spotted this hilarious sign in one of those alleys.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While “photowalking” to breakfast, I spotted lots of intriguing and fairly old municipal buildings like the Firehouse pictured above. I also observed that the infamous Midwestern “Opioid Epidemic” has taken over a lot of lives hereabouts. Drug and addiction treatment centers abounded, and I saw hundreds of people waiting on line for their little plastic cups of orange liquid (methadone) who all wore the tell tale mask of heroin use on their faces. That sucks. I don’t wish that life on anyone, even if they did it to themselves. Heroin breaks people into little evil pieces, and turns them into shadows. You can call it OxyContin if you like, but it’s heroin. This drug epidemic is the actual consequence of going to war in Afghanistan, by the way.
Poor bastards.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An old downtown department store was receiving a lot of attention from construction crews when I passed by, and luckily this amazing public timepiece wasn’t being demolished by them. Just look at that thing. Jeez. Talk about gilded age, huh.
Most of the historic building stock encountered was reminiscent of the early 20th century examples you encounter in Manhattan’s financial district. Ornate Neo classical facades, street level grand entrances, lots of massive stone structure punctuated with enormous plate glass windows. Cathedrals of Capitalism. Unlike NYC, setbacks for upper floors didn’t seem to be a thing here, and you have all of these dark and shadowed alleys between and behind which expose the “works” of the buildings – the HVAC piping, electrical hookups, and so on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After breakfast, I summoned a LYFT ride share to carry me to my first destination of the day on the south side of Pittsburgh on Mount Washington. Formerly called Coal Hill, the prominence was dubbed Mt. Washington in 1876. It hosts the two inclines – or Funicular Railways – and is on the south side of the Monongahela River. Mt. Washington offers an elevated point of view from which any visiting photographer is obliged to actuate the shutter. Ultimately, most of my second day in Pittsburgh was spent in close association with Mt. Washington and the Monongahela River. The boat tour I had purchased advance tickets for would leave its dock from this side of the city later in the day.
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.
certain circumstances
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After eating dinner at one of Pittsburgh’s iconic Primanti Brothers restaurants, one got busy on his evening plans. The camera was rigged up for low light/night shooting, and a humble narrator got to work. Pictured above and below are sections of PPG Place, a 1984 vintage six building commercial real estate complex built and primarily occupied by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass outfit. The main 40 story building, whose ground floor entrances sit behind that fountain, is the corporate headquarter for PPG. The entire deal is clothed in plate glass, some 19,750 panels (over one million square feet of glass) of it, which is why it looks like an early 1990’s CGI background. Wet glass, LED lighting, weird look and feel. PPG has operated out of Pittsburgh since 1895.
The PPG complex sits on six square blocks or one square acre, replaced a department store called Guskey’s, and it’s construction revealed a cornucopia of archaeological finds ranging from Native American to early Colonial and pre industrial uses of the site. The main tower is the third tallest building in Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned several times in the last few weeks, on this particular interval of travel, one felt compelled to record the scene whenever and wherever a fountain was discovered. This wasn’t much of a fountain, in comparison to what I saw in Washington D.C., but there you are. Apparently, during the holiday season and winter months, this plaza is converted over to be an ice skating rink. It’s a fave for Pittsburghers, apparently, with high occupancy rates and several newspaper polls listing it as the voted on choice for “best building” in the City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fourth tallest building in the City of Pittsburgh is nearby, which is called “Fifth Avenue Place” officially, but is colloquially called Highmark Place. 31 floors, and completed in 1988, it’s the HQ for a Highmark subsidiary called Jenkins Empire Associates. Highmark is a non profit health insurance organization which also owns several for profit medical insurance and reinsurance companies. Basically – Highmark is the corporate entity that Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield have reorganized themselves into.
The building was originally meant to be a bit taller, but city zoning officials squashed that. The 13 story tall spire atop the building was an attempt to lay claim to the original height that the architect planned for, and with all the hub bub over the zoning deal it was never transmitted to the City that the spire/mast was designed to sway up to three feet when high winds hit the top. It seems that the first time this sway was observed, Pittsburgh’s First Responders shut the downtown area down fearing that something catastrophic was about to occur.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Developed by the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in 1964, this “caught my eye” structure – with its fascinating load bearing external diagrid and framed tube steel exoskeleton – was built on the footprint of an old Wabash Terminal Train Shed. When it opened as the IBM Building, its principal tenants were the IBM corporation on floors 1-4 and U.S. Steel on floors 5-13. It was bought by the United Steelworkers Union in 1973, and the labor organization’s offices are still housed therein.
A bit of skyscraper trivia is offered here. The same people who designed the external structure of the building also did the World Trade Center in NYC. Just like the WTC, the structure of the building is outside the walls, and within the only structural supports are at the center of the thing surrounding the elevator and plumbing/electrical cores. Neat!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My next stop was yet another fountain, this time being Pittsburgh’s “big kahuna” at Point State Park. It’s found at the “tip of the spear” on the river delta formed by the three rivers – Ohio, Allegheny, Monongahela. 36 acres in size, this Pennsylvania State Park was opened in 1974. Its fountain is the iconic center of the larger metropolitan region, and Pittsburgh’s reclamation of its post industrial waterfront really started with the opening of this park. The fountain sits where the on and off ramp of two bridges used to be found, the Manchester and Point Bridges.
The park incorporates the remains of Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne, which were important fortresses during the French and Indian War (1755-1764) and although I’m largely ignorant about the details of the conflict here at the ‘forks of the Ohio,” there’s a nearby spot referred to as “Washington’s landing” so… George Washington.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The one Allegheny River Bridge between Point Park and the 31st street Bridge I didn’t show you yet is pictured above, the so called “Bridge to Nowhere” or Fort Duquesne Bridge. It carries Interstate 279 (North Shore Expressway) and Interstate 376 into and out of Downtown Pittsburgh and also has a pedestrian walkway in the lower deck. It’s got a steel bowstring type span of 426 feet, and provides a water clearance of 46 feet. It opened to traffic in October of 1969.
Whew. All of this Pittsburgh stuff that you’ve seen here at Newtown Pentacle for the last two weeks was literally captured in one day between 7 a.m. and about midnight. It started raining again while I was capturing the bridge shot above, so I double timed it back to the street and caught a cab back to the AirBNB. Starting tomorrow – Day two. I was just getting started on day one, and had to contend with the weather, and I also had tickets for a boat tour of the rivers nested in my pocket for day two. The things I saw…
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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.
other constellations
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned in prior posts, a humble narrator took his camera on vacation in September. The camera wasn’t bored, but it’s been trapped here in NYC since arriving from Japan at the end of 2020 due to COVID restrictions and all that, so I wanted to show it what other parts of the USA look like. Amtrak takes you places, and one of the places we went together was the pretty city of Pittsburgh.
One left the rented room in Pittsburgh early in the morning, after having received weather forecast warnings about a powerful line of storms meant to arrive in the area where their three rivers converge about 4:30 p.m. Accordingly, one’s activities for the day had been built around this. After exploring both sides of the Allegheny River frontages, a humble narrator began scuttling back towards the AirBNB I was staying at in downtown Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the PPG tower. Pittsburgh Plate Glass, that is, and if there’s an “Empire State Building” in this city, I guess that’s the one. Proper photographs of the thing will be offered tomorrow, the shot above is a bit more of a “snapshot” than it is a photograph.
On the way back to my room, I picked up some coffee and a couple of bananas at a 711. Also as mentioned, the temperature when I left in the morning was about 60 and over the course of the day it had risen to about 85 and it was quite humid. One had been out wandering and walking all day and I was perspiring.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The AirBNB was in a former office building which had been converted over to residential usage called “The Clark Building.” Apparently, it used to be the regional HQ for Warner Brothers, was built in 1928, and I was staying on its 23rd floor. The elevation provided a front row seat to the oncoming storm, and after a quick shower and change of clothes, the window was first rolled up and then the tripod was deployed so that the camera could watch the show.
I really was hoping for lightning, but c’est la vie, huh?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For about 90 minutes, rain and wind pummeled Pittsburgh, and according to the local news I was watching on my phone, a tornado had set up nearby the Allegheny county line that caused no small amount of damage. Me? I was sitting pretty, drinking coffee and enjoying a banana.
I also took this opportunity to offload the day’s photo effort from the onboard memory cards of the camera to the laptop which I had carried with me all the way from Queens in NYC. I recharged the batteries and wiped down the equipment.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After the front had passed, the temperatures dropped back into the low 60’s, and there was still a bit of occasional drizzly rain coming and going. Around the corner from the Clark Building, an ornate movie theater was observed with a lit up marquis advertising a showing of the “Wizard of Oz.”
When in Rome, as the saying goes, and since I required a meal at this point – as I had long ago digested the pancake breakfast quaffed nearby the Heinz Factory on the north side of the Allegheny – I headed for a nearby outpost of Pittsburgh’s iconic “Primanti Brothers” sandwich shops.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Primanti Brothers sandwich is a “cholestival festival.” I ordered the menu item they called “The New Yorker.” How could I not, after all? Pastrami, Corned Beef, french fries embedded in the sandwich… delicious, but it’s a cardiologist’s nightmare made manifest on a plate. I washed it all down with a couple of pints of Yuengling, which is apparently a locally manufactured beer. After eating, I gathered my crap together and decided to remain busy.
Tomorrow – night shooting in Pittsburgh.
“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.
human clothing
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Allegheny River in Pittsburgh is adjoined on both banks by the “Three Rivers Heritage Trail” which offers pedestrians and bicyclists a series of stunning views. That’s the 16th street or David McCullough bridge, which is of the “steel trussed through arch” type. It was erected in 1922, replacing the earlier 1838 Mechanics Street Bridge. It’s some 1,900 feet long, on ramp to off ramp, and 40 feet wide. In 2013, it was renamed for historian and native son David McCullough.
As you may notice, I had retooled the camera back into its tripod mode at this point. Mid afternoon sunlight isn’t exactly kind to photographic pursuit, and I had to handle the situation. A ten stop ND filter allowed me to “slow the exposure” down, and all the shots in today’s post were accomplished using this particular technique.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This shot looks towards the direction of the junction of the three rivers – Ohio, Allegheny, Monongahela – from the pedestrian pathway of the 16th street Bridge. One of the things that I really enjoyed in Pittsburgh was the near complete lack of chain link security fences occluding the views. It’s one of the truly frustrating things about NYC, these fences and occlusions. Actually, almost everything in NYC is annoying and frustrating.
A humble narrator was in a full sweat at this stage of the day as the atmospheric pressure began to build up ahead of that front of storms moving in. I got moving, looking for shade, and started heading towards the “point” of the delta.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A “steel and welded girder” type truss bridge, the fairly uninspiring Veterans Bridge opened in 1988. It carries the 7 lane interstate 579 into and out of the center city on a north/south axis, and one of those lanes is a reversible high occupancy vehicle lane meant for buses and other transit related usage. On ramp to off ramp, it’s 1,050 feet long, but the section spanning the Allegheny River is 410 feet which sits some 51 feet over the waters.
While shooting this image, I had to contend with a territorial gaggle of Canada Geese, who – as a specie – are dicks. Everywhere I go, gooses abound.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Next up is the American Bridge Company built “Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge” which continues the deal here in Pittsburgh of bridges having more than one name. According to the National Register of Historic Places, this is alternatively the Pennsylvania Railroad Bridge. It’s also known as “Bridge No. 1, Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway.”
It’s of the “double deck steel truss” type, and it’s 5 spans cross some 985 feet. The longest span is some 319 feet long. It’s 40.9 feet over the water, and replaced an 1868 forebear that sat just outside of this one’s footprint. It was opened for rail traffic in 1904, and was raised in 1918 to its current height to increase navigability. This is something that they managed to pull off without interrupting rail traffic.
I actually got pretty lucky with my timing right here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lower deck is inactive, and as you can see in the shot above (and not for the last time during my 72 hours in Pittsburgh), the upper deck carries freight and passenger traffic. Freight rail operator Norfolk Southern’s Fort Wayne Line, and Amtrak, cross the Allegheny on this bridge.
Score! Freight rail in the steel city. Little did I know… but that’s another post for another day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Ninth Street Bridge, aka the Rachel Carson Bridge, is one of three relatively small bridges which all seem to be very similar in design if not identical. Suspension Bridges with eye bar catenary cables, it sits in close association with the Andy Warhol Seventh Street Bridge and the Sixth Street Roberto Clemente Bridge. Unveiled in 1926, Ninth Street Bridge is on ramp to off ramp 995 feet long, and 840 feet of it spanning the Allegheny River is just over 40 feet from the water.
This was my “head back to the room” shot, incidentally, as that approaching line of thunderstorms was now only a half hour away and people’s phones were going off warning of possible tornado formation.
I’m not clear on what water level indicates in Pittsburgh, by the way. I keep on seeing references to an Emsworth Dam and it’s normal pool level as being 710 feet above sea level and that seems to be the effective level of the water locally. Any of you engineer types or Pittsburgh experts who might be reading this and who can elucidate – leave a comment on this post. I live by the sea, on an archipelago. It’s called NYC. I don’t know your mountain ways.
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 