Posts Tagged ‘Pittsburgh’
choked fissure
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in previous posts, a humble narrator used an Amtrak Rail Pass during the month of September to carry the camera to various locales in the North Eastern United States. First up was a short day trip interval in Washington, D.C., followed by a long train ride on Amtrak’s “Capitol” line to Pittsburgh. In last week’s posts, I brought you along with me on the north shore of the Allegheny River all the way to the 31st street Bridge, where I crossed back on to the river delta known as the “Golden” or “Iron” Triangle, and we entered a rapidly developing post industrial area referred to as “the Strip.”
The Strip is my kind of jam, by the way. Surviving industrial buildings repurposed rather than demolished, and when you encounter new construction it acknowledges the neighborhood it’s in rather than trying to destroy/replace/obfuscate it. I’m looking at you, Long Island City, right in the eye.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m trying to not get super granular in these postings about Pittsburgh, given that I was only physically present in the City for 72 hours and of that interval – awake and shooting for about fifty hours. Saying that, the Phoenix Brewing Company building caught my eye. A bit of quick looking revealed that the folks at both “pittsburghbrewers.com” and the “The Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh” have paid some attention to this structure well before I wandered past it.
It was pretty warm, weather wise. Again, the weather in Pittsburgh is super dynamic. When I had woken up and left the AirBNB, it had just finished raining and was overcast and in the 60’s. Here I was just a few hours later, and it was sunny and middle 80’s. I had a bit of an atmospheric deadline to oblige, as a line of strong thunderstorms was meant to arrive and rip through the City between 4:30 and 6:00 p.m. My plan was to keep shooting until 4, then head back to the rented room to offload the photos from my camera onto the laptop while sheltering from the weather.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above is new construction, residential in nature, as encountered in the post industrial Strip district. Given that this is the “hip” section, and where several of the “new economy” companies like Facebook and Google have thrown down stakes, if this was NYC the real estate people would have to be saved from drowning on their salivations. The powers that be in NYC would be screaming about density and affordable housing and describe critics of their greedy intentions as racist or classist “NIMBY’s” who wanted to deny mostly wealthy people a home. They’d build a Tower of Babel sized glassine spire here, not caring about the effect it had on municipal infrastructure like the number of hospital beds or school desks. It seems they’re following a different plan in Pittsburgh, and trying to keep things fairly human scale.
“Post industrial” is a term I use a lot, and it bears a bit of explanation. A Post Industrial area is a plot of land which once housed a manufacturing or warehousing operation. It’s usually quite polluted, and more often than not the property ended up in the hands of the local municipality due to the original owner – a company, say – leaving the area or going bankrupt. Municipal entities all over the world struggle with what to do with this category of land, which often requires expensive remediation procedures to occur before it’s safe for other uses like housing. There’s a serious difference between what’s considered safe for “occupational exposure” eight hours a day versus “residential exposure” which is twenty four hours a day. More often than not, these post industrial parcels adjoin waterways or railroad tracks. A regional decline in heavy industrial and manufacturing economic activity following the creation of the Interstate Highway system in the late 1950’s had particular impact on the Northeastern United States, as industry fled to the American south and southwest in the 1960’s where land and labor are a lot cheaper. These areas allowed them to diminish the power of Organized Labor in “Right to Work” states, and fairly undeveloped land in the American South in particular allowed them to erect enormous horizontal campuses that complimented the new truck based – or intermodal – form of transporting their goods to market. This process got our of control, from a national economy pov, when corporations continued this process internationally and exported their operations first to Mexico and Central America and then overseas to East Asia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What got left behind when the businesses left, however, were the workers, and the buildings. NYC (along with all of the other 19th century NE industrial superpowers like Buffalo, Rochester, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh) experienced record unemployment and economic devastation along its waterfronts during the 1970’s and 80’s.
Pittsburgh, alternatively, saw it’s population cut in half at the same time that it lost most of its corporate tax base. What do you do as an individual when you lose your job? Belt tightening and you eat peanut butter sandwiches or spaghetti with ketchup sauce until you find a new one, right? The Strip area here in Pittsburgh was largely abandoned. From what I’ve read about Pittsburgh’s recovery over the last 50 or so years, post industrial has meant a lot of grief, debt, and lateral thought.
That’s the St. Stanislaus Kostka Church pictured above, an 1891 Polish Roman Catholic Church, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Again, the topology of Pittsburgh kept on surprising me. Check out that change in elevation from where I was standing on Smallman Street nearby a series of repurposed agricultural and rail warehouses, as compared to that large house up on the hill. The riverine valley nature of this area lends itself to high humidity in the flatlands along the rivers, and even if you’ve got the bucks to afford living up on the ridges overlooking the City, you’ve still got humidity issues to deal with, but you’re able to say that “you’re above it all.”
Seriously though, everywhere I went, one of the odd things I observed was that there were always dehumidifier units laboring away. On large buildings, these units had outfall pipes feeding a steady stream of water directly into street drains. I imagine mold must be a serious issue for homeowners here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wandering mendicants can opine about post industrial economic development and land use endlessly, but that isn’t what my mission for the day was. What drew me to Pittsburgh, in fact, was it’s waterfront and in particular its amazing collection of bridges.
Pictured above is the 16th Street Bridge, aka the David McCullough bridge. David McCullough wrote what I consider to be one of the best NYC history books of all time – 1972’s “The Great Bridge,” which detailed the story of the Roeblings, Tammany Hall, and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. If you want to get a feel for what NYC was like in the middle to late 19th century – get this book. There’s also a fantastic audio book version of it available at audible. David McCullough was a native Pittsburgher.
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.
lower meadow
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking northwards from the 31st street Bridge, high over Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River back towards Herr’s Island. My chosen route along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail commanded that I go no further than this bridge on the Allegheny. Being able to calculate what’s possible for you to photographically capture in a certain amount of time is paramount on excursions like the one I embarked on when boarding an Amtrak back in NYC. You’ve got to be realistic, and not wander too afar of field.
The section of Pittsburgh I was heading towards is called “the Strip.” a bit of reading reveals that this was an industrial outpost by the early 19th century and that by the 1920’s – US Steel, Westinghouse, Alcoa, and Heinz were all running operations here and feeding their manufactured products to distant customers via a combination of rail and maritime shipping. There were also hundreds of smaller mills and factories, and it was a beehive of economic activity. A significant number of produce wholesalers were apparently based here as well, but that makes sense given the train tracks. There was also an important manufacturer of military equipment hereabouts, cannons in particular, called the Fort Pitt Foundry.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Strip began to decline in the 1960’s, and industry began to pick up stakes and look for greener pastures that were not yet despoiled. This is a regional issue that occurred all over the northeastern United States. When the Interstate Highway system was created, and industry no longer had to crowd along the rail and or port infrastructure of the north eastern cities, the CEO’s and bean counters began to relocate their operations first to the American South (which was and still is politically hostile to Organized Labor), and then to other countries like Mexico, and in modernity – East Asia.
Somehow, many of the industrial mill buildings and factories in the Strip have survived “the future” and have been repurposed as part of a historic district. Driverless car technologies are being developed in this area by several huge technology firms, and the Strip has become a sort of hip place to live – if you believe what the real estate people tell you.
Don’t know. Literally didn’t talk to a single person when I was moving through here. As you can see in the shot above, a long distance walk stood between me and photographing any more bridges.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A couple of days ago, I mentioned the peculiar topology of Pittsburgh. The center of the City, which has had some absolute whopper flooding events in the past (notably during the St. Patrick’s Day flood of 1936 which saw the water level rise some 46 feet which devastated Pittsburgh) is on a water level triangular delta formed by the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers. The delta is surrounded by riverine valleys and ridges, many of which are quite steep. Walking from one corner to the next on a block in Pittsburgh might involve walking a hundred feet up or down.
That ornate religious building on the hill is the landmark Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church, or so I believe. The landform it’s nestled in is called Polish Hill, so named for the immigrant population who settled here. I’m told that a significant part of Pittsburgh’s population are descendants of Slavic immigrants, with notable numbers of Poles and Croats.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One such as myself wishes that it would’ve been possible – time wise – to scuttle around those local streets down there and explore, but as mentioned in prior posts, a line of thunderstorms were scheduled to blast through Pittsburgh in just a few hours and I needed to keep moving if my “Day One” shot list was to be accomplished.
Remember what I said about the volatility of Pittsburgh weather? The day started off wet and overcast and about 60 degrees. By the time I was walking off the 31st street bridge, it was 87 degrees and super humid with clearing skies. The skies were clearing and despite that thunderstorms were coming. It’s a mad house, I tell you, a mad house.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I noticed this old school building on my way, which is dubbed as being the Springfield Public School. It was erected in 1870, operated as a school house until 1934, then was used as a warehouse until a recent residential conversion turned it into housing. It’s on the National list of Historic Places, so there you go.
Finally back on land, I began heading back towards the Golden Triangle’s pointy bit. The water was kept in sight, and I followed still active freight rail tracks through the strip. Old breweries and warehouses sat next door to new construction. Obvious thought about height, massing, and density had guided the newer construction. Older buildings were converted to new uses. There were no soulless glass rhombuses or rectangular towers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Every now and then, you’d spot scenes like the one above, with historic homes built for laborers. Small and efficient houses, the bosses used to have to make sure their employees had dignified homes to live in. That helped keep a revolution from breaking out, which was a lot more likely back in the pre New Deal era than you’d think it was. Pittsburgh was a Union town, back in the day. A working man will only take it for so long before he pops. The lesson of the 1877 strike in the link above, for the Bosses and the bullies they employed, was not to screw around with a labor union in a city where there’s a gun factory.
Back next week with more from Steel City, 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.
ancient walls
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Described in yesterday’s post, the Herr’s Island Railroad Bridge section of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail in Western Pennsylvania’s City of Pittsburgh is pictured above. It spans the north side of, and the “back channel” of, the Allegheny River.
It’s where a humble narrator decided that it was time to deploy the tripod and attach the ND filter to the lens. It had to be about 11 in the morning by now, and warnings about a weather situation blowing in from the west indicated that the 4:30-6:00 p.m. part of the day was not going to be conducive to photography due to a string of thunderstorms heading east. Best to get busy, despite it not being the best time of day – light wise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Maritime industrial action on the Allegheny? Heck, yeah there is. Spotted this adorable little push boat towing an equipment barge towards the junction of the 3 rivers.
One did find a chance to interact with a sailor or two during my stay, and they were positively fixated on the fact that Pittsburgh is reachable by water from everyplace on Earth via its three rivers and their eventual connections to either the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the back channel of the Allegheny which the Herr’s Island Bridge spans. In the distance are a couple more of the 446 bridges in this city. If you’re the sort of nerd that I am, and you’re reading this right now so… yeah, you are… Pittsburgh is an open air museum of Civil Engineering. I chalk this up to JP Morgan’s American Bridge Company being based here historically, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Coraopolis.
There was so much private capital flying around the Steel City prior to WW2, it staggers the mind. American Bridge Company was a minor subsidiary of the larger Morgan project “US Steel,” which consolidated 28 steel manufacturers – including Andrew Carnegie’s “Carnegie Steel,” Elbery Gary’s “Federal Steel” and Judge Moore’s “National Steel” into the largest and wealthiest corporation of its time.
For those of you youngins – Steve Jobs and Apple. Google and Facebook. Monopolies immune to the Sherman Anti Trust Act by design.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Officially, that’s the “Thirty-First Street Bridge, Number Six Allegheny River” pictured above. Colloquially, it’s the 31st street bridge. Politically, it’s the “William Raymond Prom Memorial Bridge,” named for a local son who died while serving his country in Viet Nam. It’s a monster arch bridge spanning the Allegheny River, and I had decided that it would be my turn around point long before this shot was clicked off the list.
It’s a pretty high bridge, altitude wise. 72.6 feet from MLW (mean low water) where it meets the piers, and 180 feet up at the arch, 31st street Bridge is 2,681 feet long from on ramp to off ramp. Also, like each and every bridge I encountered here in Pittsburgh, 31st street bridge had pedestrian and bike accommodations. A walkable city where sidewalks don’t suddenly turn into highway off ramps. Imagine that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Really, I could spend a month in Pittsburgh and not run out of bridges to shoot photos of. Wow.
Also, notice that there aren’t high chain link fences with barbed wire on top? That the sidewalks have grooves in them to aid walkers and bicyclists in icy weather? The near total lack of street litter, graffiti, garbage floating in the water, and all the other reminders that we receive daily in NYC telling us that our tax money is being spent badly and on the wrong things? Just saying.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 31st street bridge connects the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Troy Hill on the north side of the Allegheny with the Strip district on the Iron Triangle river delta. I walked through the strip district, but that’s something we’ll be taking a look at later on in this series of posts from my just under 72 waking hours here in Pittsburgh. I’ve got so much to show you all in the next couple of weeks.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to Newtown Pentacle, please consider doing so using the “sign me up” button and field at the top right.
Also, I’d greatly appreciate it if any of you could share these posts out to your social media accounts if you like them. I’m about to start doing tours of Newtown Creek again, I think, and would like to increase the “reach” and readership of this continuing effort.
Back tomorrow with more.
“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.
gnarled orchards
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The first thing I wanted to do in Pittsburgh was eat Breakfast, but I didn’t have a plan for that. My plan for the day involved the Allegheny River side of the Iron (or Golden) Triangle. “Iron Triangle” is the colloquial name I’ve inherited for the delta shaped landform shaped by the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers but I’ve seen and heard Pittsburgh people say “Golden Triangle.” Pittsburgh has just over 302,000 residents within the actual city limits, but the Pittsburgh metropolitan area (Pittsburgh is the seat of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County) on the other hand boasts some 2.37 million citizens. The lay of the land here is fascinating, with the river delta providing a low point in relation to several very, very steep valleys and prominences. Individual neighborhoods in Pittsburgh can often be separated from each other by deep ravines and wooded valleys, even though they’re the equivalent of what New Yorkers would call “a couple blocks away”
That’s the Roberto Clemente Bridge above, which I crossed over to the northern shore of the Allegheny via. The bridge leads to the PNC Stadium, where the Pirates play baseball. All along the bridge, you’ll observe padlocks inscribed with names. Some of these are memorial in nature, whereas others indicate loving bonds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of my targets for the Pittsburgh trip was exploring the Three Rivers Heritage trails adjoining the post industrial waterfront. When you’re talking Pittsburgh, United States Steel and the American Bridge Company need to be mentioned. My first thought after hearing “Pittsburgh” is “Andrew Carnegie” but in the case of those two companies it was NYC’s own JP Morgan who created them. Frick and the other robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century were at least partially based here, and their industrial setups persisted well into the 1950’s, even though they were diminished and impoverished due to the meddling of the Rockefeller and Morgan people back in NYC. By 1962, when Pittsburgher Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published, it had become obvious that some other use for the abandoned industrial waterfront had to be imagined. Pittsburgh was abandoned by its largest employers, the air and water were highly polluted, and a plan was hatched to change things. It took a while, but today Pittsburgh is consistently ranked as one of the best cities to live in not just the United States but the entire world.
What we did in NYC, with faced the same situation, was simply this – nothing. We allowed our abandoned industrial waterfront to blight into areas for junkies and scalliwags to inhabit, and then we declared these areas off limits and designated them “brownfield opportunity areas” to ease the transfer of the property from well greased public to greasy private hands, while dealing out a bunch of tax breaks to smooth out the creation of luxury condominiums for the wealthy to inhabit. Like the Romans, we created a holocaust and declared peace here in NYC, and “forgot” to clean up the environmental stuff until the rich people were living on top of it. Pittsburgh followed a different path, although they have condos too, but they’re not the dystopian glass boxes that serve as dormitories for corporate staffers and european tourists which loom over Long Island City and North Brooklyn.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and hand jobs here in Pittsburgh. They have plenty of problems, with decaying building stock left over from their glory days as the “Steel City,” when the population was nearly double what it is now. Entire industrial sectors which once employed thousands are simply vanished, leaving pensionless workers behind. There’s environmental gunk in the ground and water, huge industrial campuses that need to be dismantled and environmentally remediated – all that. This section of the country isn’t called the “Rust Belt” for shits and giggles.
It was right across the street from this old church that I found a fantastic off the maps diner, seemingly frequented by the locals, which served me a fantastic breakfast. I don’t normally eat a heavy breakfast, but given what my plans for the day were – I figured that I’d earn the eggs, bacon, orange juice, and blueberry pancakes by the next time I’d be taking a break. After getting fed, and having drank a yard arm of coffee, the camera was fully deployed and a humble narrator got busy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Heinz factory complex was on my shot list for the day, and just happened to be a couple of blocks from that humble diner. The weather and atmospherics in Pittsburgh are exceptionally changeable. Literally every hour of the day while I was in town, the sky was dramatically different than it been an hour before or would be an hour after. As is my habit, I had watched the weather report on TV local news for a forecast, and warnings about a powerful system of thunderstorms heading for the City abounded, so an interval spanning the 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. time period seemed like an excellent time to be back in the AirBNB and sheltered. Good, a deadline.
It was a warm day, and Pittsburgh is characteristically humid to start with given its riverine valleys topography. Luckily, I had carried warm weather clothing with me as well as cold weather garments. I would end up needing both on this visit, and was particularly glad that I had an umbrella tied onto my camera bag as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This Heinz factory was converted over to residential uses a few years ago, offering rental apartments and lofts. Considered to be sky high prices in the Pittsburgh rental market when it opened in 2005, the original price at opening for a 1 bedroom was $825 a month, and a 3 bedroom with a fireplace, terrace, and river views would have run you $2,725 a month. That’s turned into $1,655-$2,280 for a one bedroom in 2021, and a two bedroom will run you anywhere between $1,769 and $3,308 today. Their website doesn’t list any available 3 bedrooms. My understanding of the Pittsburgh Real Estate situation is that it’s actually a lot smarter to own than rent in this area, and that the “market” mainly involves free standing or semi attached homes rather than apartments or condos. A McMansion in a desirable suburb might cost you between $500,000 and $750,000, but the average price of a home is just under $200,000. What that means is that there aren’t that many rental units available.
Saying all that, I’m not from here and was just visiting for a couple of days. What do I know? I’m just a wandering mendicant, with a camera.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Herr’s Island Railroad Bridge pictured above, which is part of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail. The Western Pennsylvania Rail Road Company built the thing in 1890, which allowed them to cross over rail yards and properties owned by the B&O Rail Road to Herr’s Island – which I understand to have once been where you’d find animal stockyards and cold storage warehouses. The Pennsylvania Rail Road absorbed West Penn in 1903. By 1970, parts of the bridge had already started to be removed, and by post industrial 1990 it was a relic of an earlier era. In 1999, as part of the creation of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and the development of Herr’s Island as a mixed use residential and business district, the Herr’s Island Railroad Bridge was pedestrianized and connected to the north side of the Allegheny River.
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.
great elms
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The AirBNB listing described the accommodation as having the “best views” of downtown Pittsburgh. Have to admit, they were pretty awesome. My Amtrak chariot arrived at Pittsburgh’s Union Station right on time at 11:44 p.m. I had ridden on Amtrak’s Capitol line here from Washington D.C., and the train continued on without me to its eventual terminus in Chicago.
I staggered out onto the mean streets of Pittsburgh with my 25-30 pounds of luggage, camera gear, and a whole lot of stress. Luckily, the accommodation I’d be staying at was only a few blocks away from the train station and after a couple of hurdles I was some 23 stories up and chilling out in a pretty nice set of rooms. Before you ask – the AirBNB was roughly one third of the cost of several of the local hotels.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After calling home and letting Our Lady of the Pentacle know I had arrived safely, one began reordering “the carry.” Now that I had a secure home base, about 18 pounds of crap could be stowed there while I did my thing out of doors. I’ve been wanting to take the camera to Pittsburgh – with its 446 bridges and multiple active freight train tracks and it’s funicular railways – for a while. I had a plan, one which would start the next day at around 7 in the morning and play out over the next 72 hours.
For now, though, I set up the tripod (after offloading the Washington photos to the laptop) and got busy. The location of the AirBNB was at the Allegheny River side of the hypotenuse formed by the “Iron Triangle” of Pittsburgh’s three rivers. It was across the street from a local train station, which I did not use at all. Like I said – I had a plan, and it mainly involved walking rather than riding although I did use the occasional LYFT ride share car to get from A to B.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are several corporate “powers that be” housed in this area, including Mellon Bank, UPMC, Huntington, and others. There was also a Federal courthouse a few blocks away. Everywhere I looked, there was something interesting which caught my eye.
Despite the dreamless sleep on the Amtrak ride, I was exhausted. Capturing photos drained away any remaining energy or motivation, and I was passed out cold shortly after shooting them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The arrival in Pittsburgh was rather anticipated, but anticlimactic. Their grandiose Pennsylvania Railroad station has been converted over to a luxury apartment building, and Amtrak’s modern day station is somewhat reminiscent of late in the game Soviet municipal transit architecture – minus the chandeliers.
Nearby the Amtrak station is a Greyhound Bus terminal, as is the Pittsburgh Convention Center.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All of the shots looked peculiar to me when I checked my exposure on the camera screen. What’s with all that yellow/orange light, thought I. Suddenly, it occurred to me that since the NYC DOT has nearly completed its decade long conversion of NYC’S street lighting over to the bluish white LED luminaires, old school sodium based lighting now looks weird to me. Son of a gun, it’s true what they say about a frog in a slowly heating pot of water not realizing that its environment is coming to a deadly boiling point, since it happened gradually.
It’s like how lousy a Mayor De Blasio has been makes Eric Adams look good in comparison. He isn’t though, he’s worse. Mayor Adams is going to turn the heat up and boil you alive. Don’t believe me? Go price out a home in Downtown Brooklyn, he’s been Borough President there for the last 8 years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you can see from the clock pictured above, it was now 1:20 in the morning when I made the conscious decision to go to sleep. All told, I had been on the move for nearly 23 hours. Thing is, I was just getting started, and adventure in the Rust Belt awaited.
More tomorrow, from the pretty city of Pittsburgh, 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.
The Newtown Pentacle 