The Pennsylvania road trip

Concrete City

This makes no sense.

This predates the post-war balls-to-the-wall need for reconstruction of devastated europe and the need for accomodation of the baby boom that gave us the Brutalist movement, and does so by 40 years.

It happened even before the massive slum clearing operations of the mid-30's, yet here it is. A wide open square offering tennis courts, a pool, other recreational areas, guaranteed breathing space and cleanliness, phenomenally durable construction, modern design, all the trappings of 60's benevolent government social housing.

This was the build during the heyday of the Progressive Era, the 1910's and 1920's, which immediately followed the wild inequality of the Gilded Age. It was built by a railway, for the cream of the crop of their workforce. It was, like a lot of the Government Social Housing Brutalism of the 60's, a complete failure. Easy to see, even feel why while walking in those buildings: the first thing that might happen is hitting your head on the ceiling of the staircase. It's in the middle of absolutely nowhere, it threw the normal wooden house building pattern book and vernacular right out the window, and those appartments were cold and damp that shirts would freeze during the winter and wall covering would rot during the summer.

Every unit has 6 rooms plus kitchen plus living room, no bathroom, no indoor plumbing. Impossible to subdivide those massive units into something smaller, absolutely no way to re-route that central staircase to lead directly outside like in a bungalow with a leased second floor. Ride or die. Stick with your (possibly immense) family. And if the boss offers you the spot, you say yes, because you always say yes to the boss.

The slums that the company wanted to replace with modern, unbreakable luxury housing, they actually replaced with slums made of concrete, and they never managed to demolish it. They could take a whole load-bearing wall out with dynamite, and the next floor would stay hanging there, cantilevered. Nothing to do. Complete failure. Left there to rot, became a playground for ATV riders and graffiti artists.

Philadelphia

I did not know about the Reading Viaduct park before I came to Philadelphia. It is awesome

Story could have happened anywhere. The year is 1888, rich and powerful men start building a critical commerce line right into the core of the city, using an intricate criss-crossing of steel trestles held together by hot riveting. Hot riveting is cool; nuts and bolts only became affordable later on when metal forming tech got up to speed. No, rivets look like bolts in shape, minus the twisty ridge, which is what makes bolts expensive. There's a furnace onsite to keep the rivets hot and soft. A worker takes the rivet out with tongs, puts it in the hole. Another worker puts a bucking bar on the head of the rivet to keep it in place, and another worker uses a pneumatic hammer on the other side of the rivet to flatten it over the metal surface that needs to be held in place. See, there's something about fighting a red-hot piece of steel with an air hammer that I find profoundly hardcore

Anyways, the railway becomes the backbone of the local industry and commerce, the owners make a killing, the 60's happen, industry moves to the suburb, government-funded highways undercut rail freight, service enters a circle of death, and before long the whole thing is left standing, nobody does anything, structures don't decay one bit because steel is just hardcore. During the 90's, the Internet and Urbex are created, and local hipster train nerds fall in love with the trestle, and within a decade a NIMBY-tinged political movement opposing the perfectly rational dismantling of the rail bridge and sell-off of the land to real estate developer is born, and everybody agrees that demolishing the viaduct would be Difficult.

(also most of the slightly older buildings have those platforms on them and I can't figure out what they're for)

And bam, a couple million dollars later your Rust Belt city has an urban renewal movement and a downtown park in an abandonned industrial site.

Bethlehem Steel

This is the purest embodiment of the military-industrial complex:

They won't really put it that way. They do mention the huge number of Liberty Ships (which were used to supply war-torn Britain from 1941 onwards) that Bethlehem Steel produced: one per day. The plaque for the quenching shop shows a gigantic battleship gun, still red hot, being dipped in mineral oil. The steel processing shop is in charge of the the turret. Yet another part responsible for the hull plating. Business as usual for a factory created to help rebuild the US Navy after the civil war. Sure, they do mention some famous buildings that were made with Bethlehem-sourced steel, such as the Golden Gate bridge and the Rockefeller Center, but it seems like for civilian steel Bethlehem never quite managed to compete with Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan's US Steel colossus. Apocryphal story: the plant's upper management is on a golf course when a news boy comes to announce the breaking out of the Great War. One of the men responds: "gentlemen, we're going to be rich".

(this pipe by the way carries air hot enough to soften steel from the heat exchangers to the furnace itself back to the heat exchangers and on to the shops that needed their steel softened ... using air)

This foundry, like the concrete town from ealier, is from that Progressive Era that I don't completely understand. 1901, J.P. Morgan consolidates Carnegie Steel with most of the northeast's steel industry and creates U.S. Steel, blowing the previous record for largest corporation in the known universe to absolute smithereens, the first company with a billion dollar market capitalization. 1911, Standard Oil lost an anti-trust lawsuit, is forced to split up. Same year, U.S. Steel wins its own antitrust lawsuit. J.P. Morgan would keep having fun taking over the banking and railway sectors.

If anything, the federal government's anti-trust efforts pushed american businesses to modernize, which become the life project of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who along with Henry Ford were the creators and figureheads of Scientific Management. Their methods of increasing production put a definitive end on the era of the craftsman, by separating entire production lines into discrete, simple, repetitive steps to be accomplished by minimally qualified, yet specialized line workers on one hand, and more abstract management tasks as the exclusive domain of engineering staff. Line work became boring and demoralizing, not as well paid. Informal unions were created, not recognized by management, brutally repressed. Human beings became plug-compatible gears, to be dismissed and replaced at will by waves of coal miners themselves out of jobs, or immigrants from western europe. Whole thing a fiery hell pit of corruption as the steel plant worked hand in hand with the church which ran its own bank which credited the loans of employee's houses.

Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike

One of the reasons I picked Pennsylvania specifically is the rich tapestry of early 20th century american history everywhere. See, this tunnel was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central railway to compete with John Edgar Thompson's Pennsy, which was for some time at the end of the 19th century, the largest privately owned corporation in the world. In 1885, fellow Robber Baron J.P. Morgan, who was bankrolling the project, pulled the plug, and the unfinished line served as a branch for random other railways until whenever. The project became known as "Vanderbilt's Folly".

In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, president Roosevelt launched a project to turn the abandonned unfinished railway across this brutal Allegheny mountain mudfield landscape into a motorway, as a means to promote interstate road traffic and commerce and also especially to give work, any work, to a population crushed by a historic economic collapse that just wouldn't go away. This highway would be the world's first real superhighway, with enough and wide enough lanes to allow for easy passing of slow traffic, straightaways accomodating 100mph speeds and curves designed for 70mph. Bonds were sold, backed by toll revenue. 19 workers lost their lives.

A fine project and all, but the tunnels, which could only fit one lane each way, rapibly became bottleneck, and as the New Deal era faded into the post-war economic boom, the highway became part of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, number 76, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission dug more tunnels and bypassed 13 miles of the original highway to make the Turnpike fully 4 lanes over its entire length. The original road was used for a while by local traffic, then closed to traffic somewhere during the 70's, deemed too expensive to maintain.

Which brings my tourist ass up there somewhere before 10 AM taking an epic walk on a road that was designed for speeds that cars from that era might not even be able to reach, taking funky pictures in a tunnel that was built during the height of the Gilded Age by a Robber Baron in open war against the largest corporation in the world. Pennsylvania

Carrie Furnace

Tort law in the US being what it is, sometimes you want to do something, and can't. Just enjoy the pictures of the steel bridge, seen from very, very close. I like them.

(yeah turn that thing into a casino while you're at it) (don't forget more fences and CCTV cameras)

Pittsburgh

(left to right, top to bottom)

University of Pittsburgh is actually Hogwarts

There's a lingering questions hovering in Silicon Valley culture commentators, particularly those who accept the comparison between Unicorn startup founders and Robber Barons: the old ultrarich spent lots of cash on philantropic projects.

Cryptonomicon's Chester is a good pop nerd culture example of that speculation: Chester, the fictional tech fortune, bought the debris of the TWA flight 800 crash after the NTSB's investigation and hung the reconstituted Boeing 747 off the ceiling of his house. Ernest Cline, the real-world author of nerd nostalgia hit piece Ready Player One, famously bought the real-world props that served as a proton pack in the first Ghostbusters movie. Mark Zuckerberg, the world's richest person to ever go to work in a hoodie, drives a Volkswagen GTI. Hell, the Subaru Forrester is slowly becoming a pop-culture trope for the official unassuming millionaire-next-door ride. The Robber Barons liked to put their names on ballet and opera houses, they liked fine art. They liked philanthropy.

J.P. Morgan didn't give a fuck

Carnegie, unlike Frick, never really cared about personal artifacts or splendid houses,” according to the Pittsburgh historian Robert Gangewere. “He was more interested in giving stuff away.” What he gave to Pittsburgh was, pre-eminently, the 10-acre complex of museums, music hall and library at the heart of the Oakland neighborhood east of downtown. “Carnegie firmly believed that those who made the money were the best qualified to give it away,” Mr. Gangewere said. “He was convinced that workers would just drink higher wages away, whereas he would spend it wisely to benefit mankind.

Sure, most of the Silicon Valley tech billionaires are still young and mostly still in the business, and the pattern of their philantropy not yet well defined, but right away their aspirations feel more grandiose, their utopics more eschatological.

Pittsburgh Mills Mall

One of the factors often quoted as a factor in the Retail Apocalypse is basically the refusal of millenials of buying stuff, to spit all their tech bubble money on Exprience Spending. And you see, I made a point of going to a mall, situated just outside the bounds of the Pittsburgh suburbs, not to buy things but to experience first-hand the downfall of the american retail sector. Didn't even purchase a postcard.

So I had to go out of my way to find the most egregious example. I can't say much. As a city dwelling hipster millenial I can't understand how investors thought this creepy, lost place could work, but the thing is, while the Galleria part of the complex is an unmitigated disaster, I hear the other half, the one with the hardware store, the bix box electronics store, and the big box retail store that isn't a Sears is not hemmoraging money that fast.

I came to have a better appreciation of Quebec's Caisse de Dépots et Placements while reading about the Réseau Express Métropolitain project. CDPQ, the Quebec government's arm-length investment bank pension fund, used Vancouver's Canada Line light rail project to demonstrate its expertise in transporation, and is about to use REM to do same, using roughly equivalent technology. Canada Line was completed on budget and on time, and is a smash hit, already operating at capacity during rush hour. The narrative in Montreal is that CDPQ is here to build a public transit line, pocket rider fare, and make money.

But there's something that isn't said as loudly: CDPQ owns real estate company Ivanohé-Cambridge, which owns lots of malls. Their transporation and real estate operations are different branches, but the organization does have a vested interest in that their light rail line will have a station right by their own mall in downtown montreal, just like Canada Line connects downtown Vancouver directly to their own mall in Richmond.

Now as far as I can tell Ivanohé-Cambridge is raking in gorillion dollars (can't really tell since it's a private subsidiary of a crown corporation which makes it a bit harder to find quick and easy numbers than for a regular old publicly traded company), but...

This Pittsburgh Mills abomination was built using a $143 million dollar loan from Wells-Fargo, opened in 2005, was valued at $190M somewhere in 2007, utterly failed, was repossessed then auctionned off in 2017. Wells-Fargo was the only bid, a symbolic $100.

It's obviously got a Sears. Why wouldn't it.

I don't know what kind of godawful braindead architects they hired to design the thing, but it's an absolute crawling horror. Nobody ever says directly what should, or could happen to financially insolvable malls and big-box stores. They can't even be used to help out with most of the nation's big cities' housing problem, since most of the time dead malls are in suburban areas so far off that housing is already cheap, and mostly useless to people working in the city proper. So all too often, they're left there, for the fun of us Urbex types fascinated by dead stuff.

I hope CDPQ/Ivanohé-Cambridge's malls don't end up like that. Hope