Posts Tagged ‘Point State Park’
Buzz buzz buzz, just b’cuz
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, a misty day in Pittsburgh saw rising clouds of fog beginning to congeal into rain up in the vault, and your humble narrator negotiated an alteration to his walking path which would offer some cover should the sky ‘open up.’ Saying that, I’m fairly waterproofed.
Today’s title? Glad you asked.
I was wearing the filthy black raincoat, with the camera secreted beneath it. The camera bag on my back is fairly water repellent, and if things went sour there’s an umbrella attached to it. The biggest weather related issue I actually had involved my glasses steaming up whenever the camera got pushed against the repellent sensory stalk I call a face.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The bridge people were testing out a lighting kit, recently installed on the Three Sisters Bridges, and several water facing buildings were also lit up. Pittsburgh does an event called ‘Light Up Night’ wherein the municipal Christmas Tree is lit up, which was meant to happen a day or two later than this walk. There’s fireworks too. Tradition.
I didn’t go, Light Up Night is a real crowd scene – not unlike New Year’s Eve in Time Square – and I really, really don’t like crowds these days.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fountain at Point State Park has been subject a rebuild/maintenance project for a while now, and it was a surprise to see it on.
The NFL Draft is coming to Pittsburgh next year, and a bunch of tax money is being spent to accomodate the event and give Pittsburgh a ‘glow up’ while the whole country is paying attention to it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One continued down the Monongahela River shoreline trail, and luckily for me, just as I stepped under the ramps leading to Fort Pitt Bridge the sky opened up and the precipitation turned from a mist into a proper bout of rain.
The path I was on followed along under a series of highway and bridge on and off ramps, so there was cover to be found in the rain shadows. Didn’t need to deploy the umbrella, at least at this interval.
It’s nice, as an aside, to not have to worry overly about atmospheric conditions again. The busted ankle is stable enough now for normal and all-weather duty, which it hasn’t been all year. That’s part of the reason that for the last six months or so all of the photos presented here were captured on fairly nice days with lots of sun and a distinct lack of ‘weather.’ Going out shooting at night is in the cards again as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An abundance of light wasn’t an issue on this section of the scuttle. This shot was from about 4-5 in the afternoon.
The rain began to intensify, and it wasn’t long before I opened the umbrella and hid beneath it. My mind was already focused on getting to the First Avenue T light rail station, as this was plainly not going to be one of those happy evenings where I drink beers while waiting for CSX trains to pass me by, at the Sly Fox Brewery found on the opposing shore.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There was still an interval of scuttling ahead of me, though, so it was leaned into. This ‘corridor’ used to host some rather large encampments established by the ‘unhoused,’ but a recent Mayoral plebiscite saw an unpopular incumbent trying to buoy up the opinions of the electorate in an attempt to win a second term.
He booted the street people and their belongings away and out of public view, using the usual methodology of ‘outreach, policing, and sanitation dept.’ but that incumbent lost the election anyway.
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.
Objectively, a fountainhead
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The mental construct I’ve been building, in pursuance of understanding the Pittsburgh region, uses the fountain pictured above as the titular center of the metro region. This is ‘sorta kinda’ true, given the Point State Park’s proximity to the corporate and governmental sections of ‘Downtown.’ The Steelers stadium is across the river, which is where the actual beating heart of the City of Pittsburgh is found. Most of the transit in the region has its first or last stop somewhere within a half mile of this fountain, so…
A friend who’s a multi decade resident of Pittsburgh once described the macro layout of the region to me as ‘spokes and wheels,’ an analogy which I’ve found fairly accurate. It seems that the part of Pittsburgh surrounding this fountain is the ‘master cylinder’ for those other geographically distributed wheels.
I recently read an interesting history of this area which describes the spot where that fountain is found as once having been the site of an exposition hall which hosted what would now be called a ‘World’s Fair.’ The rest of the site’s history was what you’d expect hereabouts – rail yards and steel mills, essentially.
Developing an geospatial awareness is still something I’m still working on. I’ll often stand in a spot, pointing my fingers in various directions while saying “East, North, etc.” and then when I check my phone for verification of my ideations, discover that I’m hopelessly and wildly wrong. I’ll get there, I suppose.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fountain was my ‘turn around point’ on this particular walk, wherein the journey back to HQ starts. Downtown Pittsburgh is weird. It reminds one of Batman’s Gotham City, but that could just be me transposing, as they actually did shoot parts of the Christian Bale Dark Knight movies here. Most of the buildings in the larger metro region spread out horizontally, on enormous plots and sport campuses that are fenced in by parking lots. Downtown is a bit more of a skyscraper situation, with lots of corporate and government buildings crowded into the triangular river delta, forcing the density up vertically rather than spreading it horizontally.
Pittsburgh doesn’t use a grid system for its streets, mainly due to terrain and the industrial past. Having grown up in a grid based city, this means I’m often confused by its long arcing roads and dead ending ‘No Outlet’ cul-de-sacs. To be fair, though, it doesn’t take much to confuse me these days. I’m old, and scared of teenagers. I think a wolf might have been following me, too, or at least a large Pomeranian.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The scene above amused the heck out of me. One thing I’ve been trying to do, here in a more genteel section of these United States, is to curb my Brooklyn potty mouth. My natural speech pattern is South Eastern Brooklyn based, meaning I use ‘effin’ as an adjectival modifier intuitively. If I was writing assembly instructions for a piece of furniture in my native idiom it would go something like “get that a-hole into place, then use that d-bag wrench over there and ‘effin turn the c-sucker until it stops. Don’t be a D and force it, ya s-bagging s-head dumb-a.”
I’ve consciously moved over to using ‘heck’ and ‘darn’ as a crutch, and have been washing my mouth out with soap when needed.
“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 