Posts Tagged ‘The Strip’
Hammer time
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Railroad Street pictured above, with some of the newly constructed housing units and concurrent parking lots which Pittsburgh’s Strip District now houses. Observationally, many of the people who live in these new buildings are students, or young professionals employed in the nearby downtown section. Personally, I’m not at all interested in living here in what look to me like a great deal like barracks, despite their colorful and shiny facades. I said the same thing about LIC, as a note.
I’m also determined never to share walls with anybody else other than Our Lady of the Pentacle and Moe the Dog by choice again. The nearly three years which we’ve been living in a private house is the longest period in my life I’ve gone without seeing a roach or a mouse appear inside my home.
Astoria was freaking infested. I knew a guy there whose back yard became infested with cats. Cats! What do you do, bring in dogs? It’s like that old Porky Pig and Daffy Duck cartoon. The mind boggles.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not for me, as I often say. If I wanted apartment living, I’d have stayed in NYC. My song will probably be different when I’m in my late sixties rather than fifties.
The development projects here have been a great success, apparently, and brought a 24/7 population into an area that used to empty out at night and on weekends. Tax rolls are up, but the lousy architecture contagion is spreading. Hey, people are voting with their feet to live here, who cares what I think. It would have been smart for the city to demand green roofs on all those parking lots though, to offset the storm water situation, but that’s me. Maybe they like building sewers and treatment plants at City Hall, I don’t know.
Things started getting a little boring, as they do in these sorts of areas, so I hung a right and headed towards the Allegheny River waterfront in pursuance of acquiring the trail which follows it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s really the same old story here. ‘Used to be, once, long ago,’ replaced by new and shiny quick construction designed to minimize development and maintenance costs by using common wet walls and utility conduits. Very ‘YIMBY.’ Have they built schools, fire houses, police capability to serve the new populations? Sewerage? Anything? I really don’t know.
At any rate, the ankle was really starting to sing its song at this point in the walk. I had just passed through my former threshold point of five miles in terms of what I could reasonably expect myself to be capable of.
The current ‘uncomfortable’ thing that happens in the ankle and foot is a sensation that I have two shoelaces wrapped tightly against the heel of my foot and then something ‘clicks’ during heel strikes. The Docs tell me these symptoms are tendon related and will ameliorate with time and exercise. Stretch and strengthen, they tell me.
Push on, weakling, push.
Back tomorrow.
“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.
Transitional zone
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As you may recall from last week’s folderol, thy humble narrator was busy scuttling along the Allegheny River side of Pittsburgh, towards its ‘Golden Triangle,’ on a constitutional and exploratory walk. The effort began in Lawrenceville, to the east, and the goal was to get to the ‘Downtown’ section where a T light rail station would provide me with transport back to HQ about five miles away in the Boro of Dormont.
Pictured above is the massive 31st street bridge.
Beyond a bit of exploring on foot, and snapping a bunch of photos, the purpose behind this walk – specifically – was to take advantage of one of the very few places in Pittsburgh that is ‘flood plain flat’ to give the still recovering broken ankle some much needed exercise. Flat walks of this type are one of the legs of a three legged stool for me at the moment, along with walking down steep slopes and negotiating ‘natural’ surfaces. By ‘natural’ I mean walking through grass and soil in semi woodland environments. Still having trouble with sloped surfaces.
If my ankle, hips, and legs ain’t sore at the end of a walk, I didn’t walk far enough. Rebuilding muscle is not very much fun. Nevertheless, push on, push, push, push. I’ve had enough sitting down for a lifetime.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Appalachian soil which underlies the Pittsburgh metro is famous for producing potholes during the winter, as well as promulgating the formation of sinkholes. Seriously, this happened here in 2019. Saying all that, this is precisely the sort of obstacle course which I’d normally dance my way through and barely even notice, but which – at the moment – I need to stop and scry a path through before stepping forward.
My walking speed has suffered tremendously from the inactivity, and I’m currently scuttling along at a speed which most would describe as ‘normal’ or ‘understandable’ but which I call pathetic. I’ve often mentioned here how toxic my inner dialogue is, and this circumstance im in has found me mentally berating myself for breaking the ankle in the first place, like an asshole would. My Jewish mother may be dead, but part of her lives on rent free in my head.
Push on, weakling. Push. Do better. Do more.
This inner voice of mine is quite profane and mean spirited, and it speaks in a dialectical manner that would have been judged as politically incorrect even back in 1980’s Brooklyn, let alone these days. None of this self abuse is ‘machismo’ based, by the way, nor is it sympathy speaking. I just know that I can and will do better if I overlook the pain and atrophied weakness. It’s temporary. Everything is temporary, the tyranny of the ‘now.’
Push, push, push.
One of my literary heroes, and the originator of an oft repeated motto, is Boxer the Horse from Animal Farm, with ‘I will work harder.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Anyway, back to Pittsburgh.
Having just wandered about in the shrinking sclerosis of an industrial zone in Lawrenceville, and having crossed under the 31st street Bridge, I was now officially in a ‘transition zone’ – or as I used to call such areas back in NYC – the angle – between Lawrenceville and The Strip District.
The cognomen ‘Strip District’ refers to an area in Pittsburgh which used to serve the larger city as a food warehousing and distribution center, with rail and boats bringing fresh produce in for wholesale distribution to urban markets and shops.
As I understand it; 19th and 20th century pre-supermarket era, that’s when the Strip’s glory days were. There’s a section of it which is a sort of historic district, with businesses that predate the modern era and seem to be a big part of the multi-generational cultural heritage around here. People drive to this zone, over multiple hours, to then wait on line for a certain cheese to ‘bring’ on Thanksgiving or Christmas or just ‘for the holidays,’ that sort of thing.
I’ve been here a few times since coming to Pittsburgh, but my experiences in the area are fairly limited. There was lots and lots of intriguing stuff on this walk which hasn’t been featured because I have got to know more about it before mentioning it.
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.
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.
The Newtown Pentacle 