Cycling Toronto's Waterfront (w/ video!)

While in Toronto this past October I tried out the city’s bike share system. Even though I’d used the city’s public transit during previous visits to Toronto, on this trip it took me a while to acclimate in terms of which stations I was able to purchase a metro pass for the subway or streetcar with my debit card (NYC’s new Omny “tap and go” system is much easier and more convenient, so take that Canadian infrastructure snobs!).

Overall I found the cycling infrastructure in Toronto to be quite robust, with the city center and major thoroughfares populated with ample dedicated bike lanes (if that’s your jam…I know bike lanes have their drawbacks and aren’t a panacea, but they’re still where I feel most comfortable riding, particularly among traffic in a strange city).

An iconic Toronto bike post, with the “City Cycling Committee” imprint.

I’m not sure what these bike jump markings are for; practicing bunny hops?

The bike share stations were plentiful. Bike Share Toronto uses the same PBSC app as Pittsburgh and many other cities. I did have connectivity issues with my U.S.-based data plan for some reason.

I went riding on a few of the main commercial drags, and due to my transit difficulties used the bike system as a “last mile” option on a couple of occasions. On Queen Street West I came across a local outlet for Giant, the manufacturer of both of my current bikes.

I did a couple of night rides when I couldn’t figure out bus schedules from my phone.

But the most sustained cycling I did was along the Waterfront, on the Martin Goodman Trail. It was gorgeous Fall weather, perfect for a leisurely ride. Here’s some video I shot of the trail ride; it intercuts between my ride out and the return.

West Coast Reflections

Just as this year’s Fall foliage was flourishing throughout Pittsburgh I slipped off to the west coast to meet my parents who were on their own California vacation. It was a bit of a Southland homecoming for all of us; we hadn’t been together in L.A. since our family lived in the area in the 2000s. I was happy for a quick escape to warmer climes before settling in for the long Pittsburgh winter.

It was a relatively rare rainy day in L.A. when I arrived. On approach to LAX the San Bernardino Valley was filled with fog.

Things were already clearing up over the Los Angeles basin.

I know it’s cliche to be an In N Out acolyte (and the fandom has seemed less special with the franchise’s gradual expansion eastward), but I’ll always be a true believer. It’s a tradition to make the location on South Sepulveda my first stop in the city when arriving at LAX.

When my parochial homerism kicks in I wax nostalgic for an earlier era when the “secret menu” was passed along via oral tradition, before every special order and menu hack was widely available on the internet.

The drive up the coast along PCH triggered major sense memory. My parents and I exchanged observations about how the route had changed during our absence: new development, businesses being replaced, more houses on the hillside, etc. But beyond just noting particular details or comparing how the specifics of the scene matched my memories of it, the experience of once again charting a course that I had traveled so many times before evoked a visceral and encompassing sense of “being back in it”; a sort of enveloping phenomenological familiarity where experience and recollection were merged.

At dusk we stopped at Malibu Bluffs park. Despite having lived essentially across the street for more than a decade, my personal experience with the park is scant (my enduring association with the Bluffs is as my local polling place where I voted in my first election as an idealistic 18-year-old).

Driving Malibu Canyon evoked even stronger sense associations than PCH. Familiar routes of transit provide potent affective anchors for personal memory; I suppose because they gradually accrete over long periods of daily routine. Even when we’re accustomed to “zoning out” (or “tuning in” to the car radio) during regular or habitual travel, passing through those liminal spaces between where we came from and where we’re going. Experiences typically relegated to the categories of boredom or banality in our consciousness. Although the twists and turns of Malibu Canyon require active attention, and the spectacularity of the surrounding landscape lends an air of sightseeing to every passage.

My mental mapping or affective cartography of Southern California extends even to the iconography of the local road markers. For instance, the freeway signs for particular exits that I would take to get to a friend’s house bear special emotional resonance. But certain major routes also carry an iconic presence. My late friend Blair kept his bedroom walls decorated with all sorts of ephemera and accoutrements he collected in the course of his carousing, and I was always envious of the 101 freeway entrance sign he had acquired when a neighborhood on-ramp was under construction.

Two weeks prior to this L.A. trip I attended a fundraising event at the home of some recent acquaintances in Pittsburgh. I found myself in an archetypal introvert’s hell: alone at a social engagement surrounded by strangers. I loitered around the backyard, drink in hand, making my best effort to force introductions and sustain small talk.

Naturally that untiring icebreaker “Where are you from?” was a common conversational query. I met people who were from the Pittsburgh area or elsewhere in Appalachia, as well as more distant points of origin such as Ireland, Kenya, and South Africa. But when it was my turn to chime in, I could only manage an overly complicated and exasperating explanation that confounded the good intentions of my interlocutors.

I’ve always found it difficult to explain myself. It’s a quirk of character that I could attribute to a number of possible factors: a natural interiority (or “rich inner life” as Ignatius J. Reilly might say) that tends toward an immobilizing overthinking; a personal predilection for (and greater comfort with) the written word over speech; and an innate and insidious arrogance borne out of the implicit belief that one is too uniquely complicated to easily convey in words (the very real fact that the fullness of our selves and our experience far surpasses the limits of our language is no excuse for narcissism in the negotiation of social niceties).

Lately it’s been even more difficult than usual to account for myself. It really feels like I’ve lost the plot. Any previous sense of self, or purpose, or cohesive guiding narrative has had to be discarded. In the last few years I have seen significant personal endeavors that were supposed to shape the future direction of my life either end abruptly or gradually fade away to reveal their immaterial and ultimately illusory nature. I have felt simultaneously stuck in place and adrift, while always subject to the vagaries of forces beyond my control or comprehension. Discovering the completion of my doctorate to be a proverbial dead end has not helped matters. Now I find myself feeling more untethered and out of place than ever: split between a precarious part-time position of endlessly ambiguous standing, and an in-the-weeds research appointment working on a solitary project that I struggle to articulate even to myself.

I’ve written before about the particular difficulty I have in answering that question, “where are you from?” having moved so often and not experiencing a prolonged duration or strong connection with a single place. Malibu would be a reasonable response to that question, since I lived there from middle school through college, a formative time for me personally and for the development of many enduring relationships. In fact, for a time Malibu was my readymade response to the “hometown” question. But I nearly always self-consciously qualified this claim with almost apologetic assurances that my family were not millionaires or movie stars. And Malibu may be in L.A. county, but claiming Los Angeles as my home city was always out of the question due to fastidious geographic exactitude (which is really a certain snobbishness about zip codes that considers it untruthful when someone claims to be from Chicago when they’re actually from Naperville).

If it’s not evident enough from these self-indulgent ramblings, I’ve been dealing with a lot and have been blessed with an overabundance of time and solitude. So this trip back West not only provided a nice relief from my “rich inner life” but also welcome reassurance about a bedrock of place in my past. The comfort and familiarity found in my old haunting grounds, even after an extended absence, afforded me time and space to process where I’ve been and where I might be going. Naturally the presence of my parents flavored this reflective posture (I’ve sometimes mused that the geographical influences of my upbringing have contributed to my personal constitution via an alchemy of Southern faux folksiness, plain Midwestern earnestness, and a slow-paced California spaciness).

It wasn’t all blasts from the past: there were first-time experiences, too! We had lunch at Paradise Cove which I had never been to before. My Mom found that hard to believe considering how many often she had dined there, so I had to remind her that she had never seen fit to bring me along.

This year I’ve dipped my toes in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I consider that an accomplishment.

The Dodgers were eliminated from the playoffs while we were in Los Angeles. My Dad pouted a bit but didn’t let it dampen his spirits for the rest of the visit. As someone whose (admittedly short-lived) sports fandom has been entirely limited to the Pittsburgh Pirates, I struggle to sympathize. The trip was tinged with more loss: Just a few days after I returned home the news broke that Mike Davis had died. I had learned of his ill health through some excellent interviews and retrospectives published this summer. Coincidentally, at the beginning of this year I started reading City of Quartz for the third time. It’s one of my favorite books – not just academic books but overall – that I have ever read. I was preparing for the start of my research scholarship and so I returned to that text to be reminded of the sort of scholarship that really moves me, and of the kind of book – multidisciplinary, politically committed, engaging and accessible to broad audiences – that I would hope to write. If not something to aspire to, then an ongoing source of inspiration.

City Scenes: New Orleans, New York, Newark, November

This Fall ended up being travel-heavy for me, with multiple research and work-related trips following in quick succession after a personal excursion to spend time with my parents. As November draws to a close I am recuperating from what feels like a whirlwind of interchangeable liminal spaces and solitary wanderings in strange cities. The physical toll has mostly been limited to fatigue and fouled-up feet, though the final injury was leaving my favorite sunglasses in the Uber that brought me home on the last leg of the journey.

My visit to New Orleans was occasioned by the annual national convention of my ostensible academic discipline. It was the first trip to New Orleans of my adult life, and as with past conferences I was determined to make time to explore the city proper and not have my experience limited to hotel lobbies and ballrooms. But frankly I was still feeling burned out from my solo travel in Toronto two weeks earlier, and colder-than-expected New Orleans weather further dampened my exploratory ambitions (though it was still warmer than Pittsburgh, which was freshly dusted with snow when I departed).

I had planned to at least try out the city’s bike share program and get some cycling in around the French Quarter. But even on that front my ambitions were stymied. The Blue Bikes Nola system uses a proprietary app, and the ride pricing seemed steeper than I’ve seen in other cities. The locking mechanism was also unique: each bike has an affixed cable that users must manually secure to the docking port (or any other desired fixture, I suppose). The first two docking stations I came across were completely empty, and by the time I found an available fleet I wasn’t in the mood to go riding in the rain. It was good to catch up with friends and colleagues (some of whom I hadn’t seen in several years, having not attended an in-person convention since the pre-COVID days), but I ultimately failed in my mission to take advantage of my time in New Orleans beyond the confines of the conference.

I was back home for a single day before embarking for New York. This was a research-related trip that I had been trying to plan for several months. Due to a crowded schedule and emergent personal circumstances I had to book this travel for the week of Thanksgiving, which was less than ideal for a number of reasons. But at least the weather worked out in my favor and it was mostly beautiful late Fall conditions in New York.

I think it was my first time back in the city in five years. After my recent experiences navigating unfamiliar terrain and figuring out public transit in various cities there was something comforting about returning to the subway system. Even though I’ve never been a New Yorker, I’ve often felt a reflexive defensiveness about the outdated infrastructure that gets unfavorably compared to newer transit systems in other cities. “Sure the subway stations are dingy, and the Metrocard reader at the turnstile doesn’t work half of the time, but that’s New York City charm!” Since the last time I was in the city the MTA has upgraded the entry turnstiles to the Omny system whereby you just tap your phone or credit card to enter. I’ve long held on to my Metrocards as souvenirs (and bookmarks) so there’s a nostalgic pang in seeing them be phased out.

I’m pretty sure the CitiBike program had already been implemented when I was last in New York, but the bike share system has a much greater presence now. The bikes and their stations were ubiquitous in each of the boroughs I visited. The increased number of bike lanes was also apparent.

The “Oculus” World Trade Center transit hub had recently opened at the time of my previous visit but this was my first time being inside. The PATH train to New Jersey still requires a physical Metrocard so I was able to scratch my memento itch.

The PATH train was another first-time experience and increased my envy of the affordable and reliable transit in the greater metropolitan area. I disembarked at Newark Penn Station for my first foray on the Jersey side of the Hudson.

I’ll have more to say about my Newark experience in the future, but in the meantime here are some stray street scenes from this first trip.

City Scenes: Jerry's Records in Squirrel Hill

Jerry’s Records has been on my Pittsburgh to-do list ever since I first arrived in the city many years ago. My personal preferences in urban media spaces tend toward film venues, bookstores, and art galleries. Record stores typically don’t make it on my itinerary. When I was still buying CDs I would make it a point to peruse music shop shelves, but that seems like a previous life now and I never got into collecting vinyl. But Jerry’s is a local institution: a longtime independent shop and neighborhood fixture that was renowned for its enormous collection.

As is so often the case with the people and places that are so near-at-hand that they become taken for granted, I kept putting off a visit to Jerry’s until some indeterminate point in the future. Even when I moved to Squirrel Hill, and was living just down the street from Jerry’s, my appointment with the shop was relegated to “someday.” Proximity and familiarity tend to produce indifference, as that which is right in front of us is so easily overlooked. So when my musically-inclined sister and brother-in-law visited this summer it provided a perfect opportunity for finally ascending to record heaven.

The shop is an expansive space that nearly overwhelms with its sprawling assortment and towering stacks. Musical genres and themed sections are helpfully and whimsically designated with colorful decor.

Oh, and did I mention the milk crates? As I’ve reported previously, these polyethylene receptacles have recently become somewhat of a personal obsession. The portable, versatile, and stackable storage containers are put to good use throughout the record shop.

My developing milk crate connoisseurship has inculcated an appreciation for varieties of color and form, but I’m also keen on the different legal warnings against misuse that adorn the objects. The nooks and crannies of Jerry’s offered a veritable milk crate menagerie.

Milk Crates of Canada

Last month I was in Toronto for the first time in six years. For whatever reasons of circumstance, my trips to Canada have always fallen in late October, right around Halloween. Memories of my first visit include the CN Tower being lit in orange and green to resemble a pumpkin, and the red poppy pins of Remembrance Day. My second visit came just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I found myself in a residential living room sharing beers with international students from the University of Toronto and having to dutifully downplay the imminent calamity posed by Donald Trump’s candidacy. So once again I was in the Canadian metropolis just ahead of the Halloween holiday, a synchronicity that has taken on greater personal resonance with Toronto becoming one of the most haunted places in my life history.

My previous travels to our neighbor in the north involved driving up from Pittsburgh, so rather than an international excursion those trips felt like visits to upstate New York. And in general my experiences in the commonwealth correlated with the stereotype of Canada as essentially America+: a familiar look and feel but with an elevated element of amity and a sense of superiority supported by performative cultural sensitivity. Like Chicago but with the rough edges replaced by enlightened sensibilities and a much more apparent Global City status.

In my absence I had forgotten about the myriad cultural differences that distinguish Toronto from cities in the states: the bus ads and billboards advertising Canadian media products that you’ve never heard of; the absence of “toilets” or even “WCs” in favor of “washrooms”; the fact that an order for a “regular” at Tim Horton’s won’t result in a black coffee but rather a cup of joe with cream and sugar. But on this most recent trip I was cognizant of a new difference. Over the past few months my brain has been totally rewired to read the urban environment with an eye toward milk crates. I have been obsessively scanning Pittsburgh streetscapes to locate the presence of crates, particularly the distinctive orange crates of the ubiquitous local Turner Dairy Farms. This selective attention was still active in Toronto, where I unconsciously zeroed-in on a milk crate in an alley that was colored a distinctive green rather than the orange to which I have become acclimated.

During the rest of my wanderings I was predisposed to zero in on examples of Toronto’s milk crate ecosystem. Many (but not all) did indeed conform to the characteristics of idiosyncratic Canadian colorization, such as this teal crate on the back of a bike:

Or this handsome blue cycling accessory:

As time went on the sightings seemed to increase exponentially. When I found my way to a Balkans-themed restaurant on my last night in the city, the in-house musicians had their PA speakers resting on towers of overturned milk crates:

And on my walk along Queen St West afterward I passed stacks of milk crates behind bars and restaurants:

I plan to share my extensive visual-survey of Pittsburgh milk crates starting in the new year, but in the meantime I’ll continue chronicling and documenting these essential pieces of urban ephemera wherever I encounter them.

City Scenes: Pitt Homecoming fireworks redux

One of my favorite features of my South Side apartment is the view of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning across the river in Oakland. When the time came for Pitt’s annual Homecoming fireworks display last Fall I was excited to check out the proceedings from the comfort of my living room. This time around I wanted to see how I would fare photographing the pyrotechnics with a proper camera instead of my phone. So I set a tripod up at the window and waited for the show to start.

This year’s show was a little different because in addition to the usual fireworks going off from the Cathedral and nearby Schenley Park, there were also fireworks going off toward downtown (I’m not sure what vantage point these would be visible from.).

Anyway, these weren’t the photographic marvels I had hoped for, but it was something a little different for another time around the block.

Goat Fest 2022

For the past five years an annual Pittsburgh event has celebrated a cutting-edge technology of ecological restoration: goats. Since 2017 an organization called Allegheny GoatScape has utilized goats – “nature’s lawn mowers” – to reduce invasive vegetation and clear away difficult brush in the city’s parks, vacant lots, and other public spaces. This work is honored each summer at Goat Fest, a community event organized by the volunteer group Friends of South Side Park.

This was not only my first Goat Fest but also my first time visiting South Side Park. The park is located just a ways up the hill from me in the neighborhood of Arlington. Arlington is above South Side Flats and at the edge of South Side Slopes.

When I arrived mid-afternoon on Saturday the area was buzzing with activity, with visitors and vendors crowded across Arlington Baseball Field.

I was totally blown away by South Side Park itself. I had no idea that there was such a large and lush park so close to where I live.

Goat Fest was held on the same day as this summer’s final Open Streets event, and the park offered a perspective where I could look out over the East End neighborhoods that I had rode through earlier that morning.

It was also possible to catch glimpses of iconic downtown skyscrapers through the trees.

The goat’s efforts are concentrated in an area of the park called Jurassic Valley. Placards placed along the footpaths provided information on the goat’s work and the park itself.

Of course the stars of the show for most visitors were the goats themselves. A penned area near the park entrance allowed guests to view and pet the animals.

Further into the park visitors could encounter the working goats engaged in their labor of consuming unwanted vegetation.

OpenStreetsPGH July: East End Loop (w/ Video!)

This past weekend featured the final OpenStreets Pittsburgh event of the year. The last route of the summer was a 4.4 mile loop through the East End neighborhoods of East Liberty, Larimer, Homewood, North Point Breeze, and Shadyside.

As with the events in May and June, it was another hot and sunny summer day for cycling. I think this was the hilliest route so far and it offered a lot of variety in the topography and built features of the different neighborhoods.

My favorite part of this route was the Homewood sections, which is the neighborhood that I’ve spent the least time in out of those on the Loop.

I took the opportunity to stray away from the route and explore some of the public art and architecture in the area.

In a bit of serendipitous synchronicity I came across the Holy Rosary Church. I had just learned about the existence of this church last week while doing some research and was already planning an expedition to seek it out.

This is one of three churches that architect Ralph Adams Cram designed in Pittsburgh (there is a fourth nearby in Greensburg), along with East Liberty Presbyterian aka the Cathedral of Hope in East Liberty. So this East End Loop route ended up being a bit of a Cram Jam.

Cram supposedly considered the East Liberty cathedral (pictured below, also along the OpenStreets route) his masterpiece and “most profound spiritual experience” of his life.

To commemorate this final OpenStreets of the season (as well as my completion of the hat trick with this summer’s events) I also made my first foray into cycling videography. I felt inspired by all the Terry Barensten riding content I’ve been binging lately, but rather than splurging on a GoPro I decided to experiment with just my phone and a handlebar-mounted holder.

I had wanted to shoot the whole thing in a properly cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio but the possible configurations of phone and holder didn’t work out (except for some footage looking down over the front wheel and street which I used to bookend the video). So I opted for a Kubrickian or Errol Morris-inspired 3:3 frame. Anyway, I edited together a compilation of raw footage from the ride and slapped on some explanatory place-marking titles in iMovie. The onboard audio caught a lot of my huffing and puffing up the hills, but I don’t think there’s too much of my swearing or muttering about saddle sores in these clips.

Shots from the Block: Stray South Side Scenes

For a belated update this week I’ve assembled some random snapshots that I’ve taken around South Side so far this summer, mostly from June. The start of summer brought some of my favorite Pittsburgh weather.

The spring thaw also brought a gaggle of baby geese for our resident waterfowl, and they’ve been a regular fixture of my morning runs.

They’re cute, but they (and their leavings) can be real menaces on the trail.

Speaking of the trail, a stretch of road between Birmingham bridge and the 18th street railway crossing was recently reconfigured into a new lane-sharing pattern.

I’ve heard about this type of traffic scheme causing confusion elsewhere so I’m curious to see how it works out here.

Throughout June the neighborhood was also peppered with flyers and signs relating to the surge in gun violence the South Side has seen. There were similar issues last summer and residents have been debating how things have worsened and what can be done about it.

Local businesses have reduced their hours or even closed entirely due to violence that has become a regular weekend occurrence. Mayor Gainey even conducted a Saturday midnight walk along East Carson Street to see conditions firsthand.

The Dirty Poet posted their latest prose. They seem understandably distraught about global current events.

A suspicious early morning fire was being investigated as possible arson.

My roommate left Pittsburgh in the latter half of June. Before he moved I decided to upgrade my ride by buying his bike (he had already purchased a new model). I took my old cycle to Thick Bikes. While we waited for them to appraise the bike we stumbled across a Cornhole tournament.

I accepted the offer for my bike, figuring that I had gotten my money’s worth over the previous two years. The bike had taken me from suburban Nashville to the streets of Pittsburgh and I was happy to see it get a second life. I assumed that this photo would be the last time I saw the bike.

However, two weeks ago I came across the bike at its apparent new home just one block away from my apartment.

On my roommate’s last night in Pittsburgh we were treated to a spectacular meteorological display in the form of a rare mammatus cloud formation.

WYEP Summer Music Festival & OpenStreetsPGH June 2022

The last weekend of June was also the first official weekend of Summer, and it was a busy one in Pittsburgh. On Saturday I headed into Oakland for the WYEP Summer Music Festival.

The concert was held in Schenley Plaza. It was nearly 90 degrees fahrenheit with lots of sun. When I arrived most of the shaded areas on the edges of the plaza were occupied, so I situated myself in a sunny spot in the grass.

The infrastructure and trailers behind the stage occupied Schenley Drive.

One of the event sponsors was Pittsburgh Regional Transit, the newly-rebranded name for Pittsburgh Port Authority. Their booth with free PRT hats was very popular.

They also had one of the newly-rebranded buses on site for viewing.

The streets of Oakland had responses to the recent Supreme Court ruling.

Sunday featured the second OpenStreets event of the summer. This course ran from Market Square down through the Strip District and Lawrenceville. I rode across the Hot Metal Bridge to the northern side of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and took it to Downtown, riding surface streets to the Square.

The crossing from Market Square to Penn Ave was regulated by event volunteers, just as last month.

From Downtown the course continued up through the Strip District.

People were still doing their Sunday morning shopping, frequently having to traverse the gauntlet of OpenStreets riders to cross the street.

Even with the Sunday shoppers the Strip District never felt as congested as South Side did last month.

One of the dismount zones was demarcated by a pair of giant purple hands.

As with previous events there was also live music throughout the course.

Helpful chalk writing alerted riders to road hazards as well as dismount zones.

The course went past Allegheny Cemetery.

The Lawrenceville Doughboy looked over the proceedings.

My ride along Butler St was invigorating not only for building the speed that I did but also for gauging what had changed and what had stayed the same.

City Scenes: Allentown ride & Black Forge Coffee House

Recently Black Forge Coffee announced they would be closing their Allentown location at the end of this month. To commemorate the closing I’m sharing a throwback to a cycle trip I took to the coffee shop this past Fall.

Back in October my roommate and I decided to christen the Fall with an impromptu weekday afternoon bike from the South Side to the Black Forge Coffee House up in Allentown. We rode on 18th St out of South Side Flats before switching over to Brosville St for the ascent up the hill. It was very steep and hard going, but the route also yielded some dynamite views of South Side and Downtown Pittsburgh.

We ended up walking our bikes for the second stretch because it was such an arduous climb. Once we reached the top and the ground leveled out we were practically at our destination.

Black Forge Coffee House has a dark, heavy metal-influenced, occult-ish aesthetic (their logo features the “BF” initials rendered in style of witchy sigil that evokes both pagan symbols and Chaos Magick sensibilities).

Though the shop evidently always sports a grim and ghoulish look, they seemed extra-bedecked with dreadful decorations in anticipation of the approaching Halloween holiday.

We set up at a table next to a large front window overlooking the intersection of Arlington and Warrington. It was a great vantage spot to watch the streetscape, and we also had a clear view of the Cathedral of Learning looming in the distance.

After some cursory historical research we realized that this intersection was the former location of the Knoxville Incline, one of Pittsburgh’s historic inclined railways. This one previously connected Allentown and the South Side. The image below combines a photo I took on the day of our visit with an archival photo of the Knoxville Incline.

When we left the coffee shop we traveled back down Brosville St, this time riding instead of walking. It was one of the most harrowing experiences I’ve yet had cycling, as the steep grade had me traveling at greater speeds than I’ve previously achieved on my bike. It was exhilarating, and we paused for more photos before traveling down 12 St back into South Side Flats.

Pirates Drone Show June 2022

Following their evening game on Friday June 3rd the Pirates held their first-ever drone show. This inaugural promotion had been touted by the local press as “something different” for Pittsburgh crowds who are accustomed to traditional fireworks shows which the Pirates typically put on several times each season. (Years before moving to Pittsburgh I had heard that the inclusion of “sky flowers” to mesmerize zombies in George Romero’s Land of the Dead was a sly yinzer allusion to Pittsburghers’ predilection for fireworks displays, though I remain unconvinced.)

I went to check out the drone show, my first time back to the stadium since opening day. The Friday game was well-attended but did not seem as crowded as the home opener. For instance, I was finally able to grab a spot at the Bullpen Bar this time around. I still think it’s a great place to watch the game, with the added bonus of being able to look directly down into the bullpens (as well as listen to young fans queued up at the fencing constantly call out to the relief pitchers for souvenir baseballs). The view got even better after the sun set behind the grandstand.

I also got to check out some of the new ballpark features that I had missed on opening day. These oversized bobblehead statues hadn’t yet been installed back in April.

The heads really do bobble, by the way.

I also really liked this Warhol-esque Pops art behind centerfield.

After the game concluded fans concentrated in the grandstand for better views of the drone show. (You can also spot the sliver of the moon in the top of the frame.)

The drone display began with the unmanned aerial vehicles slowly rising in uniform rows from the riverwalk. The backdrop of the downtown skyline was particularly colorful this evening due to many of the skyscrapers featuring rainbow colors to commemorate Pride Month.

The show proper started with the sounds of a classic Greg Brown walkoff call from some previous game broadcast, with his trademark victory announcement of “Raise the Jolly Roger!” The drones assumed the form of a waving Jolly Roger flag, and from my location almost seemed lined up with the stadium flagpoles.

From there the soundtrack transitioned to a sort of ragtime version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and the drones formed a revolving baseball emblazoned with the Pirates logo.

One of the novel features of the drone display was the ability to depict shapes that had movement or seemed to interact with each other, like a ball sent flying by a swinging bat.

The next section of the show featured imagery from Pirates franchise history, such as the iconic image of Steve Blass’ leap and Manny Sanguillen’s raised arms from the Pirates 1971 World Series victory.

A representation of Roberto Clemente tipped his cap to the crowd.

From more recent Pirates history, the fan-favorite Cueto moment from the 2013 Wildcard game was a particularly funny inclusion (and yes, the ball did fall from the hand).

The final section of the show spotlighted local Pittsburgh iconography, starting with one of the famous incline cars.

The iconic Kennywood arrows above a rollercoaster.

And finally some straight-out Pittsburgh love.

OpenStreetsPGH May 2022

Following several years of always being out-of-town or otherwise unable to attend an OpenStreets Pittsburgh session, last summer I returned to the city just in time for the sole event of 2021. I wrote about my experience cycling across the Mon to Hazelwood for that event around Mill 19 last summer. This year the organization is back to a full summer schedule with dates scheduled for May, June, and July. The inaugural route this summer ran from Downtown to the South Side, with the South Side terminus located nearby to where the Birmingham Bridge intersects Carson Street, which is practically at my front door. So on the last Saturday of May my roommate and I pedaled out onto Carson to join the crowds gathering to enjoy a day of (mostly) car-free streets.

After a week that was frequently overcast and occasionally rainy, it was a gorgeous Saturday. The day also provided a reminder of the importance of applying sunscreen: had I known I was going to be out and about for nearly five hours in vigorous sunshine, I might’ve prepared better. The route officially opened at 10 AM and, as with the Hazelwood event last summer, the streets steadily grew more populated over the course of the day. Below is a snapshot of the scene along Carson Street in the afternoon.

Among the various venders and activity stations scattered along Carson Street, stalwart South Side cycle shop Thick Bikes had a dedicated event area where visitors could ride a unicycle, drink a beer, and listen to live music.

We stopped a while to listen to the music, but did not take our chances on a unicycle.

Further down Carson we reached one of the great crossings of the route: the 10th Street Bridge. Unfortunately none of my photos can do justice to the experience of the actual crossing, which I can only crudely convey as both “cinematic” and “immersive.”

On the downtown-side of the expanse we approached the ostensible highlight of the entire course: what the OpenStreets web site described as “a magically car-free Armstrong Tunnel.”

The passage through the tunnel did indeed seem magical, in the sense of feeling out-of-the-ordinary to the point of nearly being otherworldly. During our initial transit the traffic was light enough to offer plenty of breathing room. On subsequent traversals the navigation around other moving bodies was a bit more harrowing, especially during the darkened portions of the tunnel where visibility was very low (an effect compounded by my sunglasses). While I was somewhat exacerbated by having to maneuver around perambulators and pram-pushers during these latter runs, I was also tempted to dismount and join these pedestrians who were savoring their time in the tunnel, walking through and examining the details of the wall tiles, inspecting the graffiti, etc.

The tunnel opened up on Forbes Avenue, emptying us out onto the streets of Downtown.

There were a couple of traffic crossings facilitated by event volunteers and city workers on the way to the Downtown-end of the course. Even during our first transit in the morning the streets on the Downtown side seemed more populated.

The Downtown terminus of the route was at Market Square, at the base of PPG Place and in the shadow of the Highmark building and Gateway Center. We surveyed the various booths and picked up some OpenStreets merch.

On our return trip from Downtown back to South Side my roommate and I both noticed a fountain in a courtyard that we hadn’t seen before. The fountain is in the courtyard of the Allegheny County Courthouse, and even though I have been in that complex multiple times (for various purposes of varying pleasantness) I had never noticed the fountain. Evidently many other riders were making a similar discovery on this Saturday afternoon, as several cyclists joined us in deviating from the route for a photo-op.

Back in the South Side we found Carson Street significantly more crowded than we had left it. Close to home we stopped and watched a stilt-wearing street performer’s show. He had amped-up energy and was doing great crowd work, but we decided to leave after he kept deferring his promised knife juggling routine.

We made the trip back Downtown. After arriving in Market Square we decided to continue on to the Point. This involved leaving the closed-streets car-free course and entering actual downtown traffic, which was a first for me. But it was a quick trip along the bike lane past the Gateway T Station and over to Point State Park. Once arrived at the central fountain we found that many other cyclists had decided to travel the extra distance.

From this point we decided to ride back to South Side along the river trail, cycling up to the Hot Metal Bridge to cross back over the Mon. We then made the round trip from South Side to Downtown and back a third time. All told we rode for nearly 20 miles and 5 hours. As I said before, it was a good reminder of the importance of sunscreen.

Maine Relations

For the first time in many years I took a proper trip during the annual academic spring break this past March. Obviously the past two years were disrupted by the pandemic, but even before that I had become accustomed to spending that week recuperating at home (or working my way through student papers). But this year I wasn’t just looking to shake off the covid blues, rather I was determined to make good on a promise to visit two of my dearest friends.

These friends are two of my closest relationships from grad school and from Pittsburgh in general, and in addition to having shared a lot of great times they were also a vital source of support when I was struggling through both professional and personal hardships. In March 2020, just days before our school’s spring break for that year, the Covid-19 threat materialized as a true public health crisis. Campuses around the country began canceling in-person classes for the remainder of the semester and our university soon followed suit. We gathered at my friends’ apartment (I was living just down the hill in their same neighborhood at the time) to toast our newly extended spring recess, playing a round of the Pandemic board game which was intermittently interrupted by breaking news reports: Tom Hanks had contracted coronavirus; the NBA season was canceled; President Trump was announcing travel restrictions. For the next couple of weeks I would periodically trek up the hill to visit my friends, my face covered with a makeshift bandana as I surveyed eerily empty streets. As we processed this unfolding new reality and discussed quarantine plans my friends assured me that I would be welcome in their home during the crisis, that I was officially part of their pandemic social bubble. This was tremendously important to me as I would otherwise be braving the lockdown alone in my basement studio apartment.

I ultimately decided to leave Pittsburgh to stay with my family for what I thought would be a fortnight at most. On the day I left I visited one half of this friend pair in the bakery he worked down the street. He gave me some pastries for my drive and I gifted him all the toilet paper I had in my apartment (these were the days of the great toilet paper run, when bath tissue was a highly valued commodity). Before I left the bakery there was a pregnant pause in place of a parting embrace, but there was a new strong sense of maintaining physical distance. My friend said something like, “What if this is the last time we see each other?” I replied something along the lines of, “Don’t worry, it won’t be.”

My stay in Nashville was gradually extended until it became indefinite. I kept in touch with my friends to see how they were faring, and after a few weeks got news that one of them had received a post-doc appointment and they would be moving to Maine. We continued to keep tabs long distance with occasional Zoom calls to catch up. Nearly 18 months later I was moving back to Pittsburgh, and in addition to other reasons this return took on a melancholic poignance in part because my friends would not be there.

In the past year my friends have continued to have major changes in their lives: finishing their PhDs, welcoming a new baby, and most recently the news that would be leaving Maine for jobs in Virginia. With their move coming up this summer I took the opportunity during spring break to see their new family addition and also where they’ve been living for the last two years. After assuring me that I should not feel obligated to visit and that their current parenting duties did not offer much in the way of excitement, I told them I was committed and they were evidently and heartwarmingly excited.

I had already made my Maine travel arrangements when my grandmother died in April. So I would now be going to Tennessee for the funeral and then immediately embarking on my Maine trip. I didn’t sleep the night following the funeral due to my extremely early departure time out of Nashville the next morning, so I was exhausted on multiple levels when beginning the next leg of my journey. I took off from a pre-dawn Nashville and landed in La Guardia on a gray and rainy New York morning. Then it was on to Pittsburgh where I would cool my heels in the airport for several hours.

I was feeling fatigued and nigh delirious as I tried to find ways to pass the time at the PIT airport (I even ate some Primantis). There was a prevailing sense of liminality, being in between journeys, and having arrived back at my point of departure but not going home, remaining in the liminal space of the airport. I started exploring the airport and at one point took an escalator to an area I had never been in before. It turned out to be the location of PIT’s Interfaith Reflection Room. The room was unoccupied so I spent some time taking in the space. Among other religious objects there was a shelf with a selection of devotional or sacred texts representing a variety of faiths. I picked up the resident copy of the Bhagavad Gita and flipped to a random page for some inspiration before leaving.

When I finally departed from Pittsburgh it was back to La Guardia where I had been only hours earlier. Conditions in New York had cleared up since that morning.

I also got to take in aerial views of the New York nightscape when continuing on to Maine by way of D.C.

Upon arriving in Bangor around 1 AM I was reunited with my friend whom I had last seen in the Pittsburgh bakery during the pandemic outbreak. We stood there in the cold remarking on the unbelievable fact that it had been nearly two years to the day since we’d last seen each other, and we finally shared the embrace that had been deferred that day in the bakery.

In Tennessee it had truly felt like spring, with temperatures getting into the 70s F. But in Maine it was still winter, with cold temperatures and ample snow. It was my first time being in this part of the world (my previous experiences of New England did not extend any further north than Boston) and I had not packed appropriately since I had to pack warm weather and funeral clothing in the same small bag that I was carrying on to Maine with. It was cold but also beautiful: the nights were truly dark in a way that felt like a distant point on the globe, and the days frequently featured layers of fog hovering over the frozen ground. I had been looking forward not only to taking in the general environs but especially to visit some of my friends’ favorite haunts from their time in Maine, and to enjoy some local fare. The first place they took me was the Eagle’s Nest, their favorite local spot for lobster rolls. (In addition to being my inaugural visit it was also the baby’s very first restaurant experience, and he was a trooper.)

The small restaurant features a picture window overlooking the Penobscot river, which was still littered with ice floes this time of year.

Despite the soy face in this photo, I assure you that it is lobster in the roll, and it was delicious.

Our next outing involved a drive out to Bar Harbor, a New England resort town that only existed for me as a vague spatial imaginary in the same vein as Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. In addition to reuniting with my friends and meeting their baby I was also excited to reconnect with their fur baby who sat with (on) me for the drive.

It was decidedly the off-season in Bar Harbor: streets and sidewalks were mostly vacant, and the majority of shops were closed up with signs posted saying "see you in the summer."

A few places were open for business, including Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium. It was far too cold and blustery for ice cream to be appealing but we popped in to get coffees and pick up some fudge for later in the trip.

The Ben & Bill’s workers were wearing t-shirts that advertised “lobster ice cream” which I assumed to be a cheeky joke. Upon inquiring, however, we learned that it was very much a real offering.

They offered us a sample of the lobster ice cream and of course we had to try it. (In this next photo it’s the ice cream tub with the lobster claw on top.) It was good, with more of a buttery flavor and a hint of lobster aftertaste.

Despite the cold and strong winds it was an otherwise beautiful day and easy to imagine the town bustling during the warmer months.

In any place I’m drawn to reading the local culture as expressed in graffiti tags and stickers on street signs. One of the local voices that stood out to me in Bar Harbor was DADBODY who was well represented throughout the main drag. (When I had been in Nashville the previous week my mom gave me updates on VERN, a graffiti name that appears frequently on highway overpasses and road barriers in the area. It’s a name we had noticed during our travels when I was still living there and so mom likes to give me updates on when VERNs have been painted over or when new ones appear.)

We continued along into Acadia National Park which has been one of my friends’ favorite natural refuges during their time in Maine. It did not feel like a beach day to me (my first experience of New England beaches was cold and did not offer much in the way of shelling or sea life), but we had a picnic lunch on the sand anyway.

My friend has a personal code where if he visits the beach, he doesn’t leave until he has had his feet in the ocean. In his mind, he hasn’t properly been at the beach unless he’s been in the water. In this cold weather I thought his creed seemed extreme but I was eventually won over by his logic. When would I next have the opportunity to take a dip in Maine coastal waters? We doffed our footwear and waded into the surf.

It was frigid but invigorating.

Further into the park we visited the iconic Bubbles.

Back in town my friends took me to some of their other favorite local fixtures, including Mason’s brewpub.

It was an opportunity to enjoy some more local grub and pick up additional merch to commemorate my trip (check out the newly acquired Bar Harbor sweater).

We also stopped by some Bangor landmarks such as Stephen King’s house. I had expected it to be a nondescript residence but was pleasantly surprised.

On the final night of my visit we had a night in where we played a game of darts and also got in a round of Pandemic to commemorate one of our last times together two years earlier.

My departure from Maine was another pre-dawn flight. We said our goodbyes and I wished my friends well with this next chapter of their lives. And we traded admonitions to not let another two years go by before we were together again.

Thanatopsis in Paris, TN

In March I traveled to Tennessee for my grandmother’s funeral. This journey involved convening with my immediate family in Nashville before continuing on for the funeral itself in the town of Paris, TN.

I previously wrote gushingly (and verbosely) about Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas after seeing the film for the first time. The film’s evocative imagery and thematic depth profoundly moved me, but it also struck a particular personal resonance due to my own history with Paris, TN. Like the titular Texas town of Wenders’ film Paris, TN also bears nomenclatural relation with a more famous namesake. The Parisian connection is played up by iconographic allusions throughout the Tennessee town.

In the film, the character of Travis is preoccupied with the town of Paris, TX in part because he believes that he was conceived there, that the place represents the point of origin for his entire existence. Travis also remarks upon the significance of his having been named there by his parents, and there is a throughline in the film relating to the power of naming to fix identity and direct destiny. Paris, TN has played a similar role in my own biography as the place my progenitors hailed from as well as the source for my given and family names. The town thus held special fascination for me growing up by representing both geographic and nomenclatural points of origin for my sense of self.

Paris, TN has always existed as a realm of ghosts in my life, a point of convergence between the land of the living and domain of the dead. This stems in part from its status as a quasi-mythic location in my personal history, a place that was unknown to me but featured prominently in family stories in which I heard my relatives give intimate accounts of people I had never met. It was also the location of family burial plots, a place I seemed to only visit for the purposes of attending a funeral or holding vigil at a gravesite. When I was younger I mostly reckoned Paris as the place where I saw my own name engraved on tombstones.

Paris still is this place, of course, as this most recent visit attested. It is still the place of small hillside cemeteries where I contemplate the grave markers of my forebearers amidst a backdrop of industrial pork processing plants. It is a place for reconnecting with the past, both personal and otherwise. I’ve obviously traveled to Paris for funerals on prior occasions but on this visit my family and I lingered a while after to visit other sites in the town. I’d always known that my southern family roots had instilled in me an abiding love for fried catfish, but I didn’t know how prominently catfish were featured in landmarks and other iconography around Paris, or that the town bills itself as home of the world’s largest fish fry. I also learned about Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, and its outsized role in the area’s economic history.

The eulogies at my grandmother’s service reminded me of all the countless threads that make up the tapestry of a person’s life, and provided me with a poignant recollection that I come from a lineage of teachers and preachers, a recognition that broadened my typically myopic perspective on the daily travails of my professional work to a more encompassing sense of purpose and human endeavor. Of course, this lineage is not exclusively constituted by teachers or preachers but includes also farmers, butchers, and mail carriers, amongst other occupations. I’m grateful for a place (and the attendant times) that provides a space for such reflection and introspection, and thankful in particular that in Paris, TN the landmarks of my family history are not found solely in graveyards.

An urban media tour of the South Side

With the weather warming up crowds have returned to the outdoor patios on my block and elsewhere along Carson Street, and I’ve recently returned to the trails and even brought my bike out of its winter hibernation (I’ve continued to be flummoxed by the pervasive road construction and sidewalk closures, however). In honor of the seasonal thaw and with optimistic anticipation for the coming summer I decided to revisit one of my first South Side sojourns. These photos were taken during an afternoon walk I took last July shortly after moving to the neighborhood. A theme soon developed where I was documenting multiple dimensions of the urban mediascape of South Side. Many of these sites have changed in the intervening months so this post is a bit of a throwback (as well as a nostalgic reminiscence of better sidewalk accessibility in the neighborhood).

I’ll start with the billboard in the above photo. I glimpsed the sign while driving in on my move-in weekend, and I assumed it was an advertisement. Revisiting it on foot I found that it was not a straightforward commercial message but some sort of mysterious campaign. Unfortunately the QR code was defunct so I was unable to determine its purpose. Nevertheless it was an intriguing twist on the traditional landscape of urban signage, with the QR code representing the multiple levels of technologically-mediated modalities and ways of interfacing with the built environment in contemporary urban space.

In terms of more traditional urban media, this July walk was the first time I had been to the WYEP Community Broadcast Center, the Bedford Square home of 91.3 WYEP. WYEP is a great local radio station (and overall community asset) and has been a core part of my personal Pittsburgh media experience since I first arrived in the city. Even when I was temporarily relocated to Nashville during the pandemic I still woke up every day to WYEP’s Morning Mix thanks to the ability to stream the station on my smart speaker. I’ve always appreciated that Pittsburgh has a solid homegrown radio station and am glad that we now share a neighborhood.

Prior to the advent of radio broadcasting, performance spaces and venues constituted key fixtures of urban media. As a major nightlife and entertainment district, South Side has traditionally been strong in music venues and concert spots (the neighborhood is comparatively lacking in my personal favorite urban media places, namely movie theaters and bookstores). One of the most prominent music venues in the area during my time in Pittsburgh has been the Rex Theater, an historic vaudeville house that later became a movie theater before finally transforming into a concert hall. The Rex closed permanently in September 2020 amidst hardships wrought by the pandemic. In July 2021 – the same month as the afternoon walk documented herein – it was announced that the space would be reopening as a music venue under new management and a new name. On the day I took these photos, however, the facade still looked shuttered, with the box office windows plastered with posters and flyers.

Speaking of papered-over windows: on the opposite side of Carson Street the historic Schwartz’s Market featured signs advertising notably anachronistic grocery prices.

The storefront had been made over as a filming location for a League of their Own television show that was shooting that week.

Finally, as I arrived back home, I checked the status of the mural that I had seen progressing since moving to the neighborhood. I didn’t spot the artists this day, but as identified here beside the mural it is a collaboration between Shane Pilster and Max Gonzales, who I would later meet and get to learn more about this specific project.

Shots from the Block: First snow of 2022

My new year started off with some wild weather. I rang in the new year in Nashville where I was visiting my family for the holidays. The weather on New Year’s Day was warm (nearly 80 degrees fahrenheit) and brought the first tornado warnings of the brand new calendar year. Coincidentally this happened to be the first Saturday of the month, which is when tornado sirens are regularly heard in the afternoons for the area’s monthly siren testing. Yet when the sirens sounded on this particular afternoon it was not a test but rather the real deal.

When I first went to ride out the pandemic with my family in March 2020 I arrived just weeks after a tornado outbreak wrought severe damage in Nashville. And just last month the city was skirted by the tornado that devastated communities in Kentucky. So it was a disconcerting start to the year. I helped my mom bring in Christmas decorations and patio furniture that could be turned into projectiles by the high winds. We were watching live weather updates on TV when the tornado sirens sounded, and we sought shelter in a small closet under the stairs. When it felt safe enough I went into the front yard and watched the dark, swirling clouds moving swiftly past.

On the following day the weather turned cold again. I was scheduled to fly back to Pittsburgh that evening and while I was waiting at the gate heavy snow began falling outside the windows. My return flight was eventually scrapped and rescheduled due to staffing shortages, presumably a consequence of the mass weather-and-covid-related flight cancellations that had been wreaking havoc on major airports. I returned to my family’s home to stay the night and enjoy the belated wintery weather. With the new paint job on my mom’s house the nighttime scene looked particularly monochromatic.

The snowstorm that had snarled traffic of all kinds from Atlanta up to D.C. had missed Pittsburgh, so when I finally made it back to the city it was cold but clear. Snow finally began falling this past Thursday evening.

From the alley behind my building I spotted assorted birds of paradise bedecked by the freshly fallen snow.

City Scenes: Xmas lights at Phipps & PPG Place

The past year saw my return to Pittsburgh after an extended absence that was precipitated by the pandemic. This return has involved much revisiting familiar terrain, but also a great many firsts. For instance, last month I visited Phipps Conservatory for the first time, despite the local landmark having been on my Pittsburgh to-do list for as long as I’ve been in the city. Last week I made my second-ever visit to Phipps in order to view the elaborate lights and displays that decorate the conservatory throughout the holiday season.

The newly-installed lights and Christmas trees are the main attraction, but for me a big part of the excitement comes from being inside the conservatory after dark. In winters past I’ve ogled the seasonal nighttime displays through Phipps’ windowed exterior, and now I finally got to see it from the other side of the glass.

The interior takes on a different ambience at night with darkness beyond the window panels. When I visited in November the conservatory was still decked-out with Fall-centric seasonal flourishes and a pair of trolls greeted guests in the entry. Now the trolls were replaced with trees.

Through the windows of the Orchid Room (pictured above) you can see the golden “victory lights” illuminating the top of the Cathedral of Learning. My trip to Phipps came on the day after Pitt’s football team won the ACC championship, and the victory lights were an ever present sight, especially from outside where the Oakland skyline seemed part of a tableaux with the garden light displays.

After completing our circuit of Phipps we were in the mood for more holiday lights so we headed downtown where I accomplished another Pittsburgh first: visiting the city’s Christmas tree in PPG Place.

The European-style Christmas market in the adjacent Market Square had already closed for the evening, but there was still a large number of ice skaters circling the rink around the tree.

City Scenes: Threadbare Cider House

My trip to the Spring Hill cemetery city view last month was preceded by a visit to Threadbare Cider House, located just down the hill in the same neighborhood. The day featured seasonally-appropriate fall weather, and the cider house itself was bedecked with seasonal accoutrements. There is an outdoor seating area that was inactive at the time due to the cold weather and intermittent rain.

Inside the space was modern and clean, with a bar area and various sizes and styles of tables. Brewery tanks and office areas are visible from the dining area through large interior windows.

I’m not much a cider drinker so I started with a flight to sample some of their various offerings and determine which best suited my palate. We also tried several of their pizzas for lunch which provided much-needed fuel for our subsequent trek up the hill.

City Scenes: Spring Hill Cemetery & City View

This weekend I traveled over to Pittsburgh’s Spring Hill neighborhood to take in some of the local fare as well as the killer city views. My roommate had recently biked to this North Side neighborhood to visit the Threadbare ciderhouse, and he returned with rave reviews of the brewery and the panoramas afforded by the nearby hilltop cemetery. Our visit to a graveyard seemed serendipitously timed one week out from the Halloween holiday.

We weren’t cycling this time around so that meant walking up the neighborhood’s steep streets toward the summit. Pittsburgh is of course famous for its vast network of public steps and stairways. We saw some impressive (and intimidating) examples of Pittsburgh steps during our walk, and even got to make use of some.

The undulating topography of Spring Hill results in some unique neighborhood layout, and we passed a few houses with fantastic mosaics and designs laid into their facades.

We had been referring to the graveyard as the Spring Hill cemetery, but it is actually the St. John’s Lutheran Cemetery.

The city views from the hillside were indeed worth the trek. Looking toward downtown we had a panorama stretching roughly from the 16th Street Bridge to the West End Bridge.

One of the things I especially appreciated about the perspective was that it allowed one to view the headstones and memorial monuments as if they were on the same level and scale as the skyscrapers of the downtown skyline. This perceptual shift enabled a rather philosophical vista where the towering buildings seemed like more funereal markers in a vast and sprawling cemetery.

There was evidence of some nocturnal seance or occult ritual having been recently performed among the tombstones: three red x’s scrawled on the backside of a grave marker, along with a candle emblazoned with an image of Santa Muerte.

From the hilltop we also had a great vantage point to watch the Goodyear blimp flying toward downtown ahead of the Pitt football game at Heinz field.

It was an awesome location and great outing overall. I’ll have some additional info from our Spring Hill trip in the near future.