Posts Tagged ‘Point State Park’
Pushing out to the point
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A brief interval in the unending torment caused by the cold and snow which encapsulated life here in Pittsburgh – or at least my own – from the last week of January through most of the month of February, arrived.
Bands of snow, some heavy, had been omnipresent for weeks. Temperatures plunged outside, but lasagnas and meats were roasted within HQ. When an afternoon in the high fifty degree range was predicted, one sprang forth once more unto ruin and the world’s end.
One scuttled up the hill from HQ to the T light Rail Station. Soon, your humble narrator found his pre corpse standing on a platform at the T’s Potomac Station, heading for downtown Pittsburgh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This station (Gateway) is where I debarked the T, and it’s within that downtown part of the T service which operates as a subway, utilizing an old freight line’s subterranean tunnel which has been retrofitted to accommodate a modern mission and the needs of the rolling stock.
Luckily, there’s escalators down here. There’s a kind of a brutalist approach to a transit station going on here architecturally speaking, with big slabs of concrete tossing massing shapes about. It’s a pretty steep set of stairs leading down here from street level, which always triggers my weird PTSD step related thing.
I mean… it’s not that weird, I broke my ankle on a set of steps… so… it’s not like I’m irrationally afraid of flying or getting eaten by sharks… at least, not beyond any sort of normal level of concern that one should display about that sort of thing… what can I tell you?
I’m all ‘effed up.
One uses the elevator, thereby, while going down to the platforms here, instead of those triggering stairs. In the context of this post, I was heading ‘up,’ so I rode the escalator.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The plan for this scuttle was born out of frustrations during my prior outing, as described in last Friday’s missive.
Point State Park was the next destination.
Normally, I’d walk over either the Fort Pitt or Fort Duquesne Bridge’s from there, but I had zero trust that the foot paths might be clear of snow and ice due to recent experience. Instead, I’d head ‘up’ the Monongahela River and cross over to the South Side at Smithfield Street.
It’s great to wander about but you really need to have some sort of destination and plan in mind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one looks back at ‘Downtown’ from the path in the prior shot.
Weather conditions and this utter municipal failure to clean up snow and ice, writ large, have reduced me down to walking in a park – damn it. I’m pretty tired of being constantly thwarted by the weather, at this stage of unending winter. Bah! What the hell, Pittsburgh…
Who can I talk to? Who would I call? Fixable… is this fixable?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I could always just stay at home and walk on a treadmill or something, but I’d soon grow so bored with that… I’d pluck out my own eyes just for ‘lulz.’
Honestly, my intrinsic nature is to just sit on my butt reading comic books. Scuttling about is often motivated by an artistic ‘need’ to go shoot photos. Maybe it’s an autistic need… I don’t know… but the point is… bored, boredy, bored and taking a walk punctures boredom nicely. Beyond boredom, I also need to move and exercise in order to keep the plumbing within the pre-corpse chugging along. The meat tuxedo requires regular shake down cruises.
Saying that, this is my annual challenge – getting out and about despite an inclement climate. As mentioned in an earlier post, you’d be hard pressed to find, should you click through the years and years of archived missives here at Newtown Pentacle (links to the right of the page), any series of posts from January or February in which I was not complaining about cold weather in a similar manner, so maybe this set of frustrations is something meta-thematic?
Rise above. Fix the world.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At Point State Park, ramps allow pedestrian and bike egress to both the Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne bridges. I was tempted by the Fort Pitt one, but given that I was in the ‘zone’ where the ramp touches down on the south side just a couple of days previously and it was completely impassable… I decided to go with a more reliable path.
I’d hang a left instead!
Back tomorrow.
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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.
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.
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