Another View From My Window

It was a beautiful house, in its day. My guess is that one of the foremen at the Carnegie Steel Works owned and lived in it.

The building was condemned in 2005. Around Hallowe'en 2006, the local volunteer fire department used it in a drill. It stood with gaping holes in the façade until about Thanksgiving, when a crew of two started hacking at it with sledgehammers and axes. Then, they left.

They returned for a day, in mid-December. The ruin has stood this way, since.

I love the view from my window. It reminds me how lucky I am to live in the product of the Great Society.

May Lyndon Baines Johnson burn in Hell.

12 Mar 2007

I Just Can't Take It Any More

This is the lot next door:

Stay tuned.

21 Apr 2007

Another Trip To Lowe's

So, I'm walking through The Waterfront, an axe in one hand, a machete in the other... I get the obligatory axe-murder joke from a couple people (one of them might have been Charlie Batch; his mother owns the UPS Store on the other side of the shopping plaza); it was a rousing chuckle for all involved.

I got a nice workout in the lot next door, breaking up one of those couches. The axe has a nice feel; 3½lb., about 32" long. I knew I was getting tired when I started letting the head turn. It's been a while since I've swung anything.

I do wonder if I could still crack a 400' line drive, though.

22 Apr 2007

A Strange Sound Outside My Window

Bang.

Crash.

Crunch.

I looked out the window of what once was my bedroom, and saw the hint of a big yellow thing.

I grabbed a camera and literally ran from my apartment.

The demolition crew was mildly amused at my screams of "Thank you! Thank you!"

For the full story, such as it is, take a look over at Finally!

22 May 2007

The Human Backhoe

Diana, Diana, up your ass, a banana; how does your garden grow?
With sticks and stones and bricks and bones and an eight-pound weight loss from all the earth-moving I've been doing.
Are you happy, now that you know?

This past growing season, I tried to make the abandoned lot next door somewhat useful and maybe a little prettier by putting in a small garden. My harvest consisted of four tomatoes, two tiny sweet peppers, and a lot of information. I learned that, even though the earth in the lot supports copius unsightly and allergy-inducing overgrowth, its ability to support the growth of food plants is essentially nil. So, if I make it to next growing season and want some dinner out of it, I need to do a lot of preparatory work now.

So, here it is:

Over the past few days, I have begun to dig the earth and rake out all the rocks, cinders, and construction debris I can manage to remove. I have begun to hack down the overgrowth and drop it into the pit I have created, covering it over with the cleaner fill I have created. The piles in the right-hand image represent most of the earth I have dug up, minus the small square of fill placed in the back of the pit, which might be visible in the left-hand image. To my untrained eye, the pit measures about 3'x8'x1'; I'll probably need to process seven more plots like this one in order to get the size I think I'll be wanting.

One good thing that immediately from this: I have, so far, lost eight pounds to the work involved in moving what might be a ton of earth. I suppose that I can live with that. I just hope that I don't lose too many dress sizes. Clothes are not cheap, and the last thing I need is the necessity of replacing a wardrobe, even as small as mine might be.

The Lay Of The Land

I got back out, today, to do more work on the "south forty". While I was at it, I thought that I'd give you folks at home an idea of what I am dealing with.

To refresh everyone's memories, here is the lot when a habitable house stood there. The picture could be ten to twenty years old, the way Allegheny county ran its property tax assessments.

After many years of decay, many years waiting for demolition, and sixteen months of subsequent neglect, here is the lot in a picture shot today:

The overgrowth is of two types: Toward the foreground, where the foundation of the house likely still is, the overgrowth is scrub about 18" tall. As you go back behind the place where the house once stood, the overgrowth becomes dense grass at a height of about 3½'.

Now, when I say "sixteen months of subsequent neglect", I am not entirely accurate. There is one person who has periodically hacked the overgrowth down when it got to looking too bad. That person is me.

Why would I do something like that? There are a couple of reasons: First, the lot simply looks bad in a wild state, and I find that depressing. Second, when in a wild state, the lot has a tendency to attract interesting objects,

from this,	to this.
(Honestly, I didn't know that ghetto assholes went for Heineken.)	(I don't think that a diabetic tossed that there.)

It was while I was hacking at the overgrowth one day that I decided to make an attempt at getting some food from the lot and making it worth it.

So, on to the boring stuff:

Here, we have the state of the hacking and digging as of today. I actually took a measuring tape to the dug-out area; it measures almost exactly 5'x9'x1'. If I totally and absolutely lose what little mind I have, I'll process eleven more areas like this one. When I start getting really exhausted -- after all, my tools are a scythe, a shovel, and a rake -- I'll settle for seven more.

The whole idea here is that I will turn this from urban wilderness to cropland, food, dinner. Call it libertarian urban renewal, if you will.

06 Sep 2008