If you’re local to the Pittsburgh area and need a place to shoot, read on!

This place is on Kentzel Rd. behind (ish) the post office on McKnight near the Ross Park Mall. If you have a low car, do NOT access it via Siebert. I’m stock height and scraped my diffuser at that intersection. There is also a very large (like half the road) pot hole that you will have to navigate around, so be careful and don’t go in hot.
Nobody parks here… like ever. There is no ‘busy time’ that you have to worry about. The sun rises on the McKnight side and sets on the trees/wall side, so in the evening, you can get flare pretty easy and soft light once the sun goes down past the trees.

This is a great place for texture, as the pavement is not maintained in any way. However, it is surprisingly free of broken glass and shit that could fuck up your tires. Wouldn’t want to go here in the summer though, probably bugs everywhere from the overgrowth.
If you go further up the hill to the right of the wall, there are some nice surprises. Up there, you’ll find two large abandoned lots and a wall with graffiti (that you’re likely to also find on the walls of a junior high school boys restroom).

This was a great find and offers plenty of space to get creative. You could easily get multiple cars here for a shoot. It would be nice if the graffiti was more skilled, but hey, it’s only teenage wasteland.
Data Sheet: Teenage Wasteland
- Best time to shoot: evening
- Best season to shoot: not summer
- Multiple cars: yes
- Traffic: no
- Space to move around and compose (1-10, 10 is the most space): 9
- Bonus appeal: potential lens flare from tree-line in evening, crude graffiti
Thanks for reading!