WEEK 14 OF 2019 ||| PITTSBURGH, PENNA.
[Monongahela Way, which is built atop the culverted Nine Mile Run. Storm water pipes from every neighborhood between Frick Park and the East Hills flow from gutter-side catchment basins down into larger and larger pipes, until they merge into the ever-flowing stream beneath this alleyway, just east of Braddock Avenue.]
I've been walking all around the East End from my little nest in Regent Square, and I've been trying to trace the water-scape. If you walk into Frick Park and down past the ball-fields, you can turn left and head up Nine Mile Run. The trail takes you up to Braddock Avenue. You emerge from the forest at the bottom of the trolley-track-lined parking lot of the CLASS building. If you cross Braddock avenue on foot, and head down into Edgewood, you will find all sorts of pedestrian infrastructure, from stairs to secret pathways.
On one such walk, I noticed the steel plates which reinforce the concrete walls of this alleyway, and asked one of the neighbors, who told me that the stream was underneath it, and that they built the whole thing to be very strong. Later that day, I asked some Wilkinsburg municipal workers about the culvert/alleyway, and they explained that all the different storm-water pipes from the East End consolidate and merge into that culvert, which daylights down at the bottom of the CLASS building parking lot, and then goes on into Frick Park and out to the Mon.
[The "headwaters" of Nine Mile Run, as it emerges from its culvert. Apologies for the odd image-capture in the center of the photo- the tunnel emits a strange and slightly earthy-smelling mist which doesn't photograph well.]
All over the East End, streets and houses replaced streambeds, and surface water was channeled into man-made pipes and culverts. These lost streams can still be found as subtle signs in the land - access hatches for mucking out larger tunnels, oddly overbuilt roadways, obtuse property lines, and other hints of early 20th century infrastructure hiding under the modern street grid.
I'd like to engage in a big public ritual art activity before I move elsewhere from the East End (so some time in April or May 2019), which recognizes these lost streams, and helps us restore the land a little bit.
If you live in the Nine Mile Run Watershed- Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, Regent Square, Greenfield, Wilkinsburg, Homewood East, East Hills, Edgewood, Swissvale, etc, and a combination parade and trash-pickup-day is of interest to you and your family, please reply. I'd like to get together a captain from each neighborhood, and propose to you-all a processional vision.
