Posts Tagged ‘PJ Acardle Roadway’
Rolling, rolling, scuttling
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in prior posts, one was engaged in a constitutional walk with an ulterior purpose of capturing a few photos along the way. I was scuttling along Pittsburgh’s P.J. McArdle roadway, which that suspension bridge pictured above is a part of. The bridge overflies a set of Norfolk Southern RR tracks.
There was some kind of track maintenance operation underway that was kicking up a good amount of dust, just around the bend.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The characteristic rumble of a locomotive engine from the direction of that bend signaled that a train was about to appear. The shot above is significantly cropped out of a full frame shot, in order to provide detail, I should mention. But… a train was coming.
Hooray for me, I can be happy again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happily photographed, the train continued along its way and so did I. This was a relatively short walk, and I had other things to do back at HQ. I looped around the waterfront and headed back to the T light rail station, where I caught my ride back to Dormont some five or so miles distant.
Back tomorrow with something different.
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Peripheral scuttling
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The walking route which occupied this particular Tuesday afternoon has become kind of familiar to me, and it’s a path which mirrors the Monongahela River’s southern shoreline. One was scuttling along the elevated P.J. McArdle roadway. The roadway has a nice pedestrian and bike lane which is separated from vehicle traffic by a line of concrete ‘Jersey barriers.’
The roadway structure juts out from a slope and is supported by a cantilever, which sticks out from the steep side of Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington. Above me, and to the right in the POV above, I’m told that the neighborhood is called the ‘South Side Slopes,’ and down below and to the left in the shot above – it’s the ‘South Side Flats.’
This is a great Pittsburgh walk, as it’s all downhill, but you get to walk on a comfortable and graded angle. I’ve also walked up this path, and that’s a real and sweaty workout as it’s a steady ‘push’ against the elevation.
I was walking downhill, as I’m lazy – just ask anyone.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Railroad tracks are set into a berm on the landform’s base, which is one of the lines which carry the Norfolk Southern RR outfit’s rolling stock through the city. Traffic along these tracks is pretty frequent, but it’s become one of my missions to find unoccluded points of view on the line – which is somewhat easier said than done.
The leather reclining chair spotted alongside the tracks made me wonder, and more than wonder. Admittedly, there’s a few homeless camps in the area, but – wow – it must have been quite an expenditure of effort to get that heavy leather chair to this spot. Odd.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a small bridge which is part of the roadway, one which overflies the aforementioned rail tracks. It’s a neat spot to get rail shots from, and it’s one of several spots where I’ve ‘gotten lucky’ in the past.
Again – to be clear – not railfanning. I just like taking photos of trains.
Saying that – back tomorrow with some Choo-Choo.
“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.
Descent
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Today’s post is populated by a few ‘odds and ends’ images left over from the longish Pittsburgh walk which I was describing to y’all last week. I’m a bit out of touch with those posts, as I’ve been ‘on the road’ for the last week and administering Newtown Pentacle remotely.
As those posts were going live (WordPress allows me to schedule publishing details), a humble narrator was actually back in NYC for a few days to handle some business, so it’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’ve got a lot on my mind about all that I saw and experienced there.
Initially, let’s just say that as this ‘little froggy’ has escaped that proverbial pot of boiling water which gets subtly hotter minute by minute more than a year ago – the same pot which all New Yorkers live in – and it was startling to experience how much of a roiling boil the City is in right now. Apparently, I got out just in time.
More on that in a couple of weeks after I’ve gathered my thoughts, but I was frankly staggered by how much rapid decline I was witnessing, and exactly what has occurred to ‘Home Sweet Hell’ in just the last 14 months. Wow.
Pictured above are Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tunnels, which allow vehicle traffic to punch through Mount Washington and enter the South Hills region of the Pittsburgh metroplex. This is what ‘rush hour’ looks like here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things that really hit me, as is usually the case when you haven’t been dwelling within NYC for a while, is the constant hum and standing wave of 35-50 decibel background noise. I’ve become acclimatized to a quieter environment in the last fourteen months, and that din of noise splashed over me as soon as I opened the MOP’s window after having crossed the GW Bridge on my way back to Queens.
In the shot above, that’s the off ramp for the Liberty Bridge that I’m walking under, a span which guides vehicle traffic into the Liberty Tunnels from the peninsular Downtown section of Pittsburgh.
One of the other things which just blew me away was that there was visible smog. Haven’t seen visible smog in NY for a good thirty years, but that’s the consequence of ‘traffic calming’ for you. Maybe slowing traffic down to a crawl, sequencing traffic lights to cause maximum idling time for trucks and other heavy vehicles at intersections… all that jazz… maybe that was a bad idea from an air quality point of view. I’ve got photos of the murky pall hanging over the place, of course.
Wow. There’s several reasons I left NYC in the first place, but I hadn’t reckoned on the reemergence of Smog as an environmental problem in the 5 Boroughs. I guess that since Tammany Hall is back in power, so too are other historical features of the big city.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I drove back to NYC from Pittsburgh, which is a back and forth trip of about 800 miles. Over the course of that entire back and forth journey, the Mobile Oppression Platform (a Toyota RAV4 hybrid) used about two tanks worth of gas, which equates to about 28 gallons of fuel. It’s a 14 gallon gas tank that’s hidden deep within the MOP, one which offers a MPG number of 39.5 mpg during the summer and about 37 or so mpg during the cold months. A full tank gives me a range of better than 400 miles after a fill up.
Just moving around in the heavy and slow moving traffic of Queens and Brooklyn (LIC, Astoria, all around the fabulous Newtown Creek) last week burned about 3/4 of a tank of gas, which was largely consumed in idling time at lights and sitting in traffic. Again – the car is a hybrid – so my engine jumps over to electric when it’s stop and go, but it still burned down the equivalent of about 350 miles worth of gas in the ‘Vision Zero’ zones of NYC.
Coupling that with the basic unavailability of a place to just pull the car off the road for a minute, let alone park at a meter, meant that the engine was working harder and far more than it does here amongst the steep hills of Pittsburgh, where I go to a gas station about once every two weeks to fill up the tank (and that’s usually just a quarter to a half tank ‘top off’).
Observationally – the ‘two wheels good four wheels bad’ crowd have actually caused air quality in the City to drop, which is kind of hilarious when you think about it. Childhood asthma rates must be rising and having soot rain from the sky is always fun. Desirable outcome for the policy of any advocacy group which cloaks itself in environmentalist rhetoric should include improving things, not making them worse.
Back tomorrow with something unrelated, but this whole experience is a subject which I’ll be talking about again fairly soon, once I’ve got some of the photos developed. I guess you really can’t go home again.
“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.
Down
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator, after walking across the Fort Pitt bridge – as descirbed yesterday – used a free transfer from the T light rail to one of the inclines and soon found himself standing atop Mount Washington and looking down. This is one heck of a prominence, I would mention.
Also as mentioned, I was just letting this particular walk play itself out and went in whatever direction whimsy indicated as correct. As always, camera in hand and the filthy black raincoat flapping noisily in the wind.
A schmuck with a camera, that’s me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mount Washington is pretty steep, even when you’re just navigating the sidewalks. As has become my habit here in Pittsburgh, I was heading downhill. The homes on the left side of the shot all seem to have terraces and huge picture windows on the cliff side of their buildings. Lucky stiffs, the people who live here have the best views in the entire city – front row, as it were.
Also as mentioned, we’ve been experiencing serious symptoms of winter here in recent weeks. This was the first day with a modicum of sunlight in several weeks, and it was warm enough out that the snow and ice had melted away.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The bridge I had walked over the river on, Fort Pitt, is the one on the left side of the shot above, and the one in the background is Fort Duquesne Bridge (overflying the Allegheny River). This shot was gathered as I began my descent back to the level I normally dwell in.
I was walking ‘double time’ here, since it was downhill and the scuttling thereby became less ‘muscular’ than previously.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One navigated to the P.J. McArdle roadway, which is diagonally trussed across the face of Mount Washington. It carries two lanes of vehicle traffic that head up and down the landform, and offers a somewhat ‘in need of repairs’ combine of bike and pedestrian path as well – pictured above.
At least you’re separated from vehicle traffic by waist high concrete barriers for most of it…
The civil engineering side of Pittsburgh is absolutely incredible. There seems to be no geologic obstacle that the people who built this place didn’t figure out a novel way to go through, under, or above. Wow.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You just have to marvel at it sometimes. After that tree stump, you’ve got a drop off of about 800 or so feet which is set along a 70-80 degree cliff face, that is also heavily wooded. If you fell from here, you’d splatter like a ripe melon. As my Sicilian neighbors, back in the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, would say: “Marone.”
That’s just about when I spotted it… the horror.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Can it be? Has the Queens Cobbler followed me to Pittsburgh, continuing their horrific pursuits? The mind shakes, the soul quivers, the body… well, nothing really happened on that front, but… can it be?
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.
Inclined towards
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As previously described, one was executing one of my ‘long walks,’ which play out over several miles, one recent afternoon. Along the path I scuttled upon, you find yourself passing under the cantilevered trackway of one of the funicular inclines, specifically the Duquesne Incline (which I refer to as the ‘yellow one’). I got lucky, as the coincidental timing of when I was passing by included a close up of one the cars of the incline passing by virtually at arm’s length.
The T streetcars, the buses, and these inclines, are operated by the Pennsylvania’s Port Authority here in Pittsburgh. I still haven’t taken a bus, although I’m anxious to observe the various busways which snake through the city.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s one of those T streetcars from above, exiting the Panhandle Bridge and heading away from the city’s center, to the Station Square stop on the south side of the Monongahela River. The properties surrounding the bridge in the photo above used to be rail yards, operated by the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie RR – back in the day. There’s supposedly a whole lot of real estate development going on in this area, as part of the post steel industry revitalization effort.
The sky was beginning to look ominous, but as is my habit – I had checked the weather report and was carrying an umbrella with me.
The zoom lenses had been left at HQ, and I was carrying my kit of ‘bright’ prime lenses only. One on the camera, three in the bag – 16mm, 35mm, 50mm, and an 85mm.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Midway along the roadway I was scuttling down is found the 1924 vintage Liberty Tunnel, a high volume roadway dug through Mount Washington. Just over a mile in length, this tunnel is motor vehicle only, and it provides quick automotive access to the South Hills region of Pittsburgh from the ‘downtown’ center. HQ is at the bottom of one of those southern hills, and I drive through this tunnel frequently.
By the way, New Yorkers – this was shot at rush hour on weekday… they call this heavy traffic here. Wow.
It was starting to rain, but I was nowhere close to done with my day’s activities. My umbrella was deployed, and fixed into position between my camera bag’s strap and the left shoulder joint. This allows hands free usage of the thing, more or less.
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.
The Newtown Pentacle 