Three Rivers Stadium revisited: 50 years of memories
Talk to someone who’s not from Pittsburgh about Pittsburgh, and the conversation will inevitably veer toward rivers and bridges. Maybe the eye-popping drive into the city from the Fort Pitt Bridge. Or the views from Grandview Avenue high atop Mount Washington, peering down on the muddy Monongahela River. There’s also that majestic walk toward PNC Park across the Roberto Clemente Bridge.
Funny, it wasn’t quite that way with Three Rivers Stadium, the concrete doughnut that lived on the North Shore for three decades, its Iron City-swilling, blue-collar inhabitants perfectly encapsulating the building’s lack of aesthetic charm.
Yeah, Three Rivers Stadium -— which opened 50 years ago this month — was ugly.
While Jimi Hendrix released “Castles Made of Sand” in 1967, ground was broken on our city’s castle made of cement the following year, the massive structure with the multicolored seats eventually opening in the middle of the 1970 baseball season.
If Forbes Field provided warm and fuzzy memories of our childhood and PNC Park and Heinz
Field offered sophisticated forays into more grown-up or current times, Three Rivers Stadium probably best represented the city’s teenage years.
It wasn’t always pretty, but it was fun. It also helped us appreciate what came next while providing wistful memories of how much simpler and more peaceful things used to be. How the stands would sway, the noise would swirl and how a Marlboro sign somehow dwarfed the scoreboard.
Three Rivers is where the Pirates became a Fam-a-lee, Roberto Clemente picked up his 3,000th hit, and Willie Stargell windmilled his bat and mashed. It’s where Franco Harris (immaculately) caught the ball, Terrible Towels waved and Cowher Power (OK, Cahr Pahr) got the job done.
But it wasn’t just sports. Three Rivers saw Elton John and Billy Joel together, the Rolling Stones make their much-anticipated Pittsburgh return when they rolled into town on “Steel Wheels” in 1989, and the Grateful Dead rattle off rain songs when the skies opened up in 1995.
It’s hard to believe it has been five decades since Three Rivers Stadium opened its doors (and miles of pedestrian ramps) and Pittsburgh became one of far too many cities with a multipurpose stadium. As you might expect, the decades of sports and music history that played out inside the venue made for plenty of interesting stories.
The first you’ll read, in today’s Sports section, is a scene-setter — literally. Alvin Church was a Pittsburgh native who learned photography in World War II and turned it into his life’s work to quote a certain Steelers coach who roamed Three Rivers Stadium’s AstroTurf.
Mr. Church specialized in construction photography, and his images from Three Rivers Stadium randomly wound up with Mark Woods, a baseball-obsessed collector of all things Three Rivers and Forbes Field.
From there, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Joe Starkey will weigh in with his thoughts and memories, and Scott Mervis will tell a few music/concert tales as only he can. Brian Batko will have the football and archive end of things covered. We’ll also explore the abrupt transition during the baseball season, where the Pirates left on a 14-game road trip and came back to a new home, one that looked drastically different from their old one.
All of it will be fun. And hopefully it will provide some insight into a stadium that may have lacked in curb appeal but was plenty rich with flavor and substance.