Posts Tagged ‘Pittsburgh’
Low to high
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, one was executing a constitutional walk around Pittsburgh recently, stretching my legs and maintaining a steady level of activity which kept my heart beating in an elevated but therapeutic manner. After riding the streetcar ‘T’ line to the center of Pittsburgh, and then crossing a bridge over the mouth of the Ohio at the joining of the city’s three rivers, one proceeded along the south shore of the Monongahela River.
Luckily, a Norfolk Southern train was rolling past on an elevated set of tracks found along a secondary arterial roadway called Saw Mill Run Blvd. This Saw Mill Run section is a fairly scary pathway, pedestrian wise, but I was heading for one of the inclines so…
Having paid my fare on the T, I got a free transfer to the incline/funiculars. That’s how I got from low to high (1,000 feet up) without having to climb a mountain.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After being deposited atop Mount Washington, which the funicular is set into, my path led me to the P.J. McArdle Roadway which carries vehicular traffic from down on the waterfront flats all the way up to the ridge line of the landform. The views are fairly spectacular up here, and I quite enjoy them. There’s also a shared pedestrian and bike path which leads back down to the flatlands below.
One has been using an app on the phone to measure things of late, and apparently I walk at 2.6 mph. The phone also advises on the length of my stride (26.4 inches), approximates the number of steps taken in any given outing, and describes asymmetries in how I’m moving my feet about. No big revelation is encountered there, especially after the various issues and injuries experienced in my left foot in recent years,
I’m about 3% off in terms of that limb’s efficiency according to the phone. It seems that about a third of the time I’m out scuttling, I have both feet contacting the ground at the same time, which must mean that the phone wants me to hop like a bunny or something.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fencing along this pathway is terrifyingly fragile, riddled with rust and the weathered corruption of old age. In several places it’s non existent and you’re looking at 1,000 foot drop along what has to be a 60 or 70 degree angle through woods. Brr.
This particular stretch of the cantilevered roadway sports concrete separation between the ped/bike lane and vehicular traffic but this is only for certain sections. There’s a long stretch of this P.J. McArdle roadway where all there is between you and the traffic that’s zipping past you at 40-50mph is just a regular three inch curb. Brrr.
Back tomorrow.
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A gray day
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was exercise day again, so the now familiar ritual of walking to and riding the T streetcar, from HQ to the metropolitan center of Pittsburgh, was enacted. I’ve been using my headphones again on these walks, after a quite long interval of not doing so, and one was listening to an audiobook.
This time around one was listening to a ‘various hands’ reading of the text of Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’ with different narrators reading the various chapters, a file I had long ago downloaded from the LibriVox outfit. It’s a series of awful readings actually, of a book written by an awful man and the audiobook uses a not so great translation as its source. The audiobook has a series of what sounds like 19 year old American college students do the readings. Seriously, if you want to produce something like this, find somebody who sounds like Werner Herzog or Brother Theodore to do the narration. It’s Nietzsche, after all.
Thus spake Waxathustra, while watching as a village fool, walking on a tightrope of aspirant desire, took that first step in order to delight the sheep below.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I switched over to a different audiobook, and proceeded to scuttle towards Pittsburgh’s West End Bridge, spanning the Ohio River. The T had dropped me on the North Shore of the Allegheny River, nearby the sports ball stadium utilized by the Pittsburgh Steelers to thrill the community, and at the streetcar service’s terminal stop not too far from the aforementioned West End Bridge.
The new audiobook I had keyed in was Nellie Bly’s ‘Ten Days in a Mad-House.’ The text triggered a vast set of reminiscences for me, about Roosevelt Island and the Queensboro Bridge. This narration was read by a woman who sounded quite young, and quite apropo for the voice of Nellie, who was the inspiration for Lois Lane.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After crossing the Ohio River, one encountered the outfall canal of its tributary ‘Chartiers Creek,’ a waterway which was mentioned in a post about a recent visit to the community of Carnegie for a short walk, not so long ago. This day’s endeavor, however, was one of my ‘long walks’ and there were a few things which I planned on getting a look at along the way, which included the outfall pictured above.
Ten Days in a Mad-House, if you’re not familiar, revolves around a 19th century Reporter Nellie Bly getting herself committed to New York’s Welfare Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) asylum, as part of an undercover assignment for the New York World newspaper. If you want to check out the free audiobook – here you go.
Later in her career, Bly would ‘go around the world in 72 days,’ write a novel, and then married a 73 year old millionaire when she was 31. After her husband’s death in 1904, Bly became an industrialist running his steel can and container manufacturing business. Nellie Bly was a pen name, she was actually named Elizabeth Cochran.
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.
Chartiers Creek in Carnegie
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Preparing for an upcoming day trip of some personal interest, one nevertheless needed to get some exercise and felt a psychological need to wave the camera around a bit. On the ‘other side of the hill’ from HQ’s location, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Dormont, is found the town of Carnegie. There’s a waterway which runs through here called Chartiers Creek, pictured above. I had done a bit of advance scouting for this area, using Google maps, and figured out a few spots of interest to bring the camera to.
This area is what you’d call ‘Downtown Carnegie.’ There’s a few historic buildings, which have been beaten with the gentrification hammer in modernity, to be found here. The coda used for such projects hereabouts is ‘revitalization.’ Shops on Main Street have been converted to breweries, fancy pizza joints, taco shops, and in the case of the tall building on the right side of the shot – a home for the Carnegie Historical Society. There’s also art gallery, and craft shops, along this Main Street. Hey, you gotta do something if you don’t want to ‘rust belt.’
Me? I was there for the canal infrastructure which Chartiers Creek flows through.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a set of rail tracks on the left side of the water pictured above. Said tracks are rusty with just the tiniest amount of ‘shiny,’ thus they’re barely being used by RR trains. This observation was confirmed when a passing local started up a conversation with me. It was the ‘I’ve got my dad’s old camera, think it’s worth anything’ followed by the ‘my kid had a drone’ random person chat. Nice enough guy, who told me he’s lived in Carnegie for 30 years and had only seen a train moving on those tracks about 4 times in that interval.
‘I still got it’ thought a humble narrator, after confirmation of his observation about the mundanity of the railroad tracks.
Based on olfactory evidence, Chartiers Creek receives a bit of the town’s residential sewerage and runoff. It had been raining for about an entire week prior to my visit, as a note. Yeah, I’ve still ‘got it.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve also got a few nearby spots in Carnegie which I’ve been wanting to check out, notably one spot where a smallish locomotive switching yard is found at the edge of the town. There’s “T” light rail tracks running through Carnegie, but they’re on a different line than the ‘Red Line’ service which services HQ in neighboring Dormont. Another winter project will involve riding these mysterious Blue and Silver lines, to see where they go. As of this post, I still haven’t taken a ride on a City Bus, nor personally observed the famous Pittsburgh Busways. Yeah, Infrastructure Nerd, I’ll admit it.
That bridge pictured above carries an arterial roadway called Mansfield Boulevard towards an interstate, called I-376, which carries vehicular traffic through and onto the Fort Pitt Tunnel and Bridge and into Downtown Pittsburgh or to points north of the city.
Chartiers Creek ultimately joins the Ohio River nearby the West End Bridge, something which I’ll be showing you a picture of sometime in the next few weeks. Sitting on the edge of your seat for that one, huh?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In Carnegie, and it should be mentioned that this section of the country has a long – and terrible – history with flooding, Chartiers Creek and its tributaries are largely contained and controlled by a series of spillways and high walled canals. Saying that, when it rains enough or there’s an unusually large snowpack in the spring… this must become a torrent.
One wandered about for a bit, and then found my way over to one of those spillways.
I also found a village of homeless people, who are dwelling in tents and shanty dwellings, along Chartiers’s banks. As is my practice, I didn’t photograph any of that, (or at least they’re not the ‘subject’) as that’s kind of a dick move unless you’ve got a good reason to do so. You can just make out some of these shanties in the shot above, under the far side of the bridge carrying Mansfield Blvd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The particular section of the water, pictured above, wasn’t the main course of Chartiers Creek – instead it was a stream that was pouring down off of a steep hill that seemed to be residential in character. The crazy verticality of the terrain around Pittsburgh allows flowing water to really speed up, and during spring thaws I’m sure this flow becomes massive, or you wouldn’t see a build out like this otherwise. When I was there just a few weeks ago, the water was maybe a foot or two in depth, but was still shooting along at a good clip.
After I was done, with these shots of Chartiers Creek here in Carnegie, one jumped behind the steering wheel of the Mobile Oppression Platform and drove around the vicinity for a bit, to see where else I mind find a way down to the shoreline. Scouting, essentially.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rest of the day’s outing wasn’t terribly exciting, or very productive, but I did visit a few spots ‘right around the corner’ from HQ which I hadn’t seen up close yet, and prospected a couple of interesting points of view for future inspection. I managed to walk about four miles in total for the afternoon, an extremely short walk on a nice day.
One last shot of Chartiers Creek, and back tomorrow with something different at this – your 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.
Getting around
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Ok, this is the last post which will be focused on discussing the experimentation with that new wide angle lens (16mm) I’ve recently acquired, which I walked around with in Pittsburgh on a recent autumn afternoon and evening. Pictured above and below is the T light rail, which was utilized to get ‘to and fro’ on this particular day.
The point of these shots were about testing the thing’s capability, seeing where it sings and where it fails. I learned quite a bit about the lens, and have continued its usage rather than returning it for refund.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The next few days, after these shots were captured, were quite rainy. That was fine with me, as I had quite a bit of research to complete for an upcoming day trip, one I’ve been anxious to experience since arriving here in Pittsburgh. It has been just about one year now since I closed the cover on Newtown Creek, but there’s a connection to that malign ribbon of urban neglect snaking along the undefended border of Brooklyn and Queens back in NYC, which I’ve long wished to witness. Those posts, exploring the day trip dealie, start up at the end this week, and I hope you’ll come with…
Overall, I’m intrigued by the new lens and what it’s going to let me do. It performed pretty well in low light, I’ll offer. It’s also a weird new tool which I haven’t shot with enough for it to be called ‘predictable.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time last year, one was moving at a thousand miles an hour preparing to leave NYC, and execute the move to Pittsburgh. A humble narrator was also trying to do everything, see everyone, and always be conscious of the fact that ‘everytime was the last time.’ There’s a lot of people whom I just said ‘goodbye’ to, as it’s unlikely I’ll ever see or hear from them again. That’s the New York way, when somebody leaves.
This year, I’ve been in a very very different place, figuratively and literally. I’ve also got that snazzy new 16 mm lens, so there’s that, too.
Back 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.
Scuttling wide
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Testing out a couple of newly acquired lenses, a humble narrator debarked Pittsburgh’s ‘T’ light rail service at its terminal stop, which is dubbed as ‘Allegheny.’ Allegheny is across the street from the sports ball stadium on Pittsburgh’s North Side, where the Pittsburgh Steelers do their thing. I had walked and described this path in detail last week – here, and here. A pretty decent scuttle this is, I would mention, one which is about 5 miles long and involves negotiating several flights of stairs, while offering interesting scenery that’s quite ’photogenic.’
At the start of the endeavor, I had outfitted the camera with an extremely wide angle prime lens of 16mm which offers something like 140 degrees of view. There’s a decent amount of distortion inherent to this kind of ‘fish eye’ dealie, although a true fisheye would be more like 8mm. I was trying to ‘get to know’ the thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things I learned on this walk is that the focal point for the lens needs to be in the dead bang center of the frame, or you’re going to get a significant amount of optical fisheye distortion. Look at the way that the truck in lower right leans into the shot above, for instance. This is after the photoshop lens profile is applied, which somewhat ameliorates these distortions, I would add. There’s a way around this sort of thing, with a different kind of wide angle lens that’s called a ‘tilt shift,’ but there you are.
A humble narrator was heading towards the West End Bridge pictured at the center of the shot, which is described in one of the posts linked to above. It was overcast and cool out, but I was sweating a bit as I was really leaning into the walk and moving somewhat rapidly. According to my phone’s health app, this part of the walk was 12,162 steps long, which translates down to about six miles. The trick to it being ‘good cardio,’ according to my team of Doctors, revolves around getting the pulse rate up to a certain level, and then steadily maintaining that pace over an extended interval of time.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had two new lenses which I was trying out on this walk, the 16mm and a 50mm. I kept on beating down the urge to swap the 50mm onto the camera until I reached the southern shore of the Ohio River which is spanned by the West End Bridge. Along the way, I narrowed and then opened the aperture, shot from the waist and from above my head. I overexposed and under exposed, pointing the thing ‘up, down, all around.’ As mentioned – getting to know it, trying to find what the thing couldn’t do, and how and why it would fail.
More 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.
The Newtown Pentacle 