Three Rivers Stadium: A Confluence of Champions

By The Association of Gentleman Pittsburgh Journalist

Erected on the city's Northside in 1970, Three Rivers Stadium was Pittsburgh's home of champions for three decades. It hosted the first-ever World Series game played at night as the Pirates would win their last two titles there. The Pitt-Penn State rivalry in college football was never more heated than under the bright lights of Three Rivers. The Steel Curtain era of the Steelers brought Super Bowl wins and elevated the stadium to become one of the most feared venues in all of professional sports. Locally referred to as the "House that Clemente Built," the stadium was the site of the beloved right fielder's 3,000th hit. Join local sportswriters as they recall the roaring crowds, rocking stands and greatest moments of Three Rivers Stadium.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439669518

The Association of Gentleman Pittsburgh Journalist

The Association of Gentleman Pittsburgh Journalists represent some of the most preeminent authors and sports historians of Western Pennsylvania, including David Finoli, Tom Rooney, Chris Fletcher, Robert Healy III, Josh Taylor, Gary Kinn, Richard Boyer and Douglas Cavanaugh. Samuel W. Black is the director of the African American Program at the Senator John Heinz History Center. He is a former president of the Association of African American Museums (2011-16) and served on the Executive Council and the Advisory Council of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History (ASALH 2003-6), as well as the program committee of the American Alliance of Museums (2010-11).

Book preview

you.

INTRODUCTION

MY THREE RIVERS STADIUM MEMORIES

By Paul Alexander

As a child of the ’70s, like all of my buddies on Barclay Avenue in Forest Hills, we were completely addicted to and obsessed with sports. As a ten-year-old in 1971, the Pirates were larger than life, and so was Three Rivers Stadium. The trips to the ballpark were few and far between, but that’s what made it so revered and surreal. It seemed gigantic, and it was so cool to imagine how the bleachers would swing out of the way and all of a sudden it was the home of the Steelers.

We definitely went to more Pirate games than we did Steeler games, but at that age, every trip was like Christmas Day. Without cellphones and gourmet food selections, we were there for one reason and one reason only: to watch the game. We were also astute enough, and with a sports IQ high enough, to realize that we were witnessing unprecedented greatness.

The Pirates captured two World Series Championships in the ’70s, while the Steelers were busy dominating the NFL by winning four Super Bowls between 1974 and 1979. My penultimate year came in 1979. While doing the morning sports over the PA system at Churchill Area High School, I was able to deliver riveting reports of the coronation of the City of Champions and figure out exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The Pittsburgh Press also captured Morgana, the Kissing Bandit, planting a big one on John Candelaria. There I was, in the picture, plain as day, next to the cutest girl at Churchill High. That was a keeper.

A sketch by Kathy Rooney of the Hope Engine House on the North Side, situated on the spot where the Clark candy bar would be later manufactured. It was the place that Art Rooney’s famed Hope-Harvey football club was named after. Hope-Harvey was a very popular team that at times would draw upward of twelve thousand people to Exposition Park to see it play. Courtesy of Kathy Rooney.

One other extremely memorable moment in that concrete crater was the 1976 Pitt–Penn State football game. I was a huge Panther fan for that contest, and the fans in the Penn State section of our third-tier perch were ready to toss me over the ledge. Tony Dorsett and my Panthers prevailed on their way to the national title, and life was good.

Subsequent trips to Three Rivers over the next decade and a half produced some very fun moments, but there was nothing quite like watching the Pirates and the Steelers as a kid in the ’70s. I did witness Michael Jack Schmidt hit his historic 500th home run after Johnny Ray had given my Pirates a late lead. I would’ve rather had the win than the historical moment.

Starting in the mid-’80s, things really changed. I was then a credentialed media member, and I was there to work. Neither the Pirates nor the Steelers were lighting the world on fire until we ushered in the ’90s. Then things heated up in a hurry. The celebrations in the Pirates Clubhouse after clinching NL East titles were epic. The crowds and the electricity of playoff baseball in Three Rivers was heart-thumping. It was also, as we all know, heartbreaking. I was at Riverfront when the Reds ended the Pirates’ season in 1990 and, yes, at Fulton County Stadium for the most devastating loss in Pirate history in 1992.

Meanwhile, the Emperor, Charles Henry Noll, had moved on with his life’s work, and the Steelers ushered in Cowher Power. Bill Cowher hit the ground running. You haven’t experienced atmosphere until you’ve been on the sideline of a big-time Steeler game. The stands moved so dramatically back and forth, as well as up and down, that you actually thought they were going to come crashing down onto the field. I also witnessed the single most horrific hit I had ever seen or ever heard. Browns fullback Tim Manoa and Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd launched themselves into each other at full speed. Both went airborne, and the collision was so loud and so violent that everything stopped. There wasn’t a sound. No one moved. Amazingly, both players pulled themselves to their feet and miraculously stayed in the game. I will never forget the ferocity of that hit. Three Rivers Stadium was very different from the sideline of a Steeler game.

You certainly had a much greater appreciation for the speed of the game, as well as the size and intensity of the players. It was amazing to be there for the celebrations of Super Bowl anniversaries and interviewing your sports heroes.

It all came full circle for me when I was at KDKA-TV and we were planning our coverage of the implosion of Three Rivers Stadium. I came up with doing a feature on former Pirate and current broadcaster John Wehner. The kid from Crafton had become an overnight sensation when he debuted with Pittsburgh in 1991. We dug up family photos of him adorned in his Pirate PJs, dreaming one day of playing for his hometown team. He did and was a part of two NL East championship clubs. Fittingly, it was Wehner who hit the final home run at Three Rivers Stadium.

So, on a very cold and crisp February morning in 2001, Ken Rice threw it to me to introduce my John Wehner story. Everything went as planned, and soon thereafter, all of those memories and moments were reduced to a pile of rubble. I love PNC Park. Heinz Field is what it is, but those of us who were there will never forget what happened at the confluence of the Three Rivers.

NORTH SIDE GHOSTS OF PITTSBURGH BALLPARKS PAST

By Tom Rooney

In 1913, then a twelve-year-old and the oldest of a brood of nine kids, my uncle, Art Rooney, the founder of a professional football team that would eventually be named the Steelers, moved with his family into the upstairs living space of his father’s drinking establishment on General Robinson Street in the lower part of Pittsburgh’s North Side. Art’s dad, my grandfather Dan, named it the Dan Rooney Café & Bar. As my sister Kathy Rooney’s illustration on page 18 indicates, the business was very convenient to Exposition Park, the most completely finished and the final version of three ball parks with the same name. Although the Pittsburgh Pirates had moved east to the new Forbes Field in the city’s Oakland neighborhood in 1909, Exposition Park III, as some historians referred to it, was still a busy place. Semipro baseball and semipro football, the latter providing the seeds for what would be pro football, brought continuous activity. I can relate to some historians calling the park Exposition Park III for clarity purposes. With the Irish tradition of a son naming his first son after his own father, you have cycles like this one. My great-grandfather, an Art Rooney, was my grandfather Dan Rooney’s dad. He named his first son Art (Steelers founder), who named his first son Dan (a Steelers president), whose oldest son is Art (known as Art II and a Steelers president), whose oldest son is Dan. Reads like Genesis 10. All of us Rooney clan trace ourselves to two Norths: to the Northern Ireland town of Newry, which we have visited and where the clan engaged in the metal work business along the canals, and to Pittsburgh’s North Side. Uncle Art Rooney was most pleased that Three Rivers Stadium was built in walking distance from his own North Side home, and I’d wager that as PNC Park and Heinz Field came on line more than a decade after his passing, he’d be happy that his beloved North Side would be in its third generation of professional sports venues.

A historical marker commemorating the first World Series in 1903 is located on a sidewalk as fans approach Heinz Field. The Pirates were upset by Boston in that initial Fall Classic five games to three in the best-of-nine series. Courtesy of David Finoli.

PIRATING A POPULAR NAME

Team names tell a story themselves. Names were often repeated in a town to grab a little quick credibility. The first Pittsburgh entry in the National Hockey League was the Pittsburgh Pirates, and they played their games in a renovated trolley barn at Fifth and Craig in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh called Duquesne Gardens. If you ask politely, the lady behind the desk of the apartment complex (which replaced a similar building on the site) might let you review a yellow, dog-eared scrapbook that has some highlights of the old Gardens.

The Pirates were also the name of Uncle Art’s NFL team from 1933 to 1939. One has to think that the popularity of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team and their success in that period—with a triumph over the Washington Senators in the 1925 World Series followed by a losing appearance to those legendary 1927 New York Yankees—made that name attractive, so much so that two upstart teams adopted it. Alliteration is always handy, which is how in part we also got the Pipers and the Penguins later in 1967 in the same venue, the Civic Arena. Even the mythical Pittsburgh team in the regrettable movie The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh was the alliterative Pisces. There was even the one-year wonder Piranhas of the minor circuit Continental Basketball League. The Piranhas gotten eaten alive in red ink but did go to the championship series before bowing to the pesky Yakima Sun Kings.

Ironically, the baseball team that would lend its name to the newbie NHL and NFL teams was not originally called the Pirates—at least not the first pro baseball team.

THE ALLEGHENYS

The franchise that would become the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club was something else and also called something else in the early days of professional baseball. The twenty-first century Bucs have the Allegheny Base Ball Club of Pittsburgh in their DNA, and they played first in the major-league American Association in 1882 at what was later designated Exposition Park I, followed by Exposition Park II in 1883, both in the general environs of the lower North Side, which was named Allegheny City at the time, hence the name of the team. Drawings in that part of this chapter illustrate that these were informal, moveable edifices hardly worthy of being called a ballpark, but they were functional. Then it was on to another facility, Union Park in 1884, which subsequently was remodeled and renamed Recreation Park for the 1885 season. They would remain at Recreation Park until 1890.

Prior to the 1887 season, the Alleghenys left the American Association and joined the National League. It was in 1891 that the Pirates name came into being because with chaos and confusion involving other startup leagues and teams, the Alleghenys took advantage by signing someone off the Philadelphia roster. A player named Louis Bierbauer, who was formerly on the roster of the Philadelphia club in the American Association yet was left off their reserve list following the 1890 season, was claimed by our local team the Alleghenys, and that started a baseball war. One official called it piratical, according to David Nemec in his The Beer and Whiskey League, although this phrasing has never been officially pinpointed and has become the oft-repeated oversimplification of a complex situation. In fact, according to historian Len Martin, the closest quote that he found was on page six of the March 1891 edition of the Pittsburg Dispatch, where Washington Statesmen team secretary Thomas Kalbfus said, We are now pirates and have hoisted the black flag against the National League for the good of baseball. The team slowly and gradually became known as the Pirates during the 1891 season and in subsequent years. The new team name coincided with the move to Exposition Park III, a real ballpark, until Forbes Field opened after the start of the 1909 season.

A sketch by Kathy Rooney of the saloon that the family patriarch Dan Rooney owned on the North Side. It stood between where Three Rivers Stadium and PNC Park were eventually built. Courtesy of Kathy Rooney.

THE SEARCHERS

Len Martin is a mostly retired industrial designer/illustrator from Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, and originally from Sharon, Pennsylvania, the latter about an hour north of Pittsburgh. From Sharon, he took the short drive across the Ohio state line to graduate from Youngstown State University. He is addicted to baseball park history, and he shares that history-seeking gene with Kathy Rooney, my sister, an artist and one of the Rooney clan’s deep divers into our lineage. They met each other for lunch with me at a North Side institution, Max’s Allegheny Tavern, and out from under the tabletop came drawings, renderings, photos and reference material. They were ready to talk about the North Side at the turn of the nineteenth century before and just after the time Pittsburgh forcibly annexed the fair city of Allegheny into a melting pot of people, places and things.

Martin was intrigued about the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt and looking to help a Boston contact locate drawings with an eye to developing one of those build it yourself paper kits that hobbyists crave to fill their own architectural yearnings. Deep in the bowels of stored documents, the dust hanging in the air like cobwebs, he had his eureka! moment when he uncovered an early original survey of Forbes Field, the nation’s first steel baseball park, sharing that distinction with Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Forbes Field was the successor to the latest of the three Exposition Parks. Like Three Rivers Stadium sixty-two years later, Forbes Field and Three Rivers would have their opening delayed until late June of their respective years of 1909 and 1970, and so the Pirates plied their home trade at two parks in the same season twice—both successful, with the Bucs winning the World Series in seven games at Detroit in 1909 and the 1970 team winning the NL Central before bowing to Cincinnati in the playoffs.

Martin led a successful online funding campaign to raise money to sink a steel plate where home plate was situated at the last of the Exposition Parks. He also has GPS and photos to note the spot where home plate and second base were situated at Three Rivers Stadium, the latter just twenty feet where Josh Rooney and I led the campaign to put a marker at the site of the Immaculate Reception. So, Roberto Clemente’s 3,000th (and last) hit, a double, resulted in baseball’s iconic companion piece to the Immaculate Reception moment: Roberto’s doffing of his cap. You could park a tractor trailer and cover both spots.

Martin, with fellow devotee Dan Bonk, has retraced the footpaths and base paths of many of the original parks and has navigated these markings to determine the site of the Exposition Parks and Recreation Park on the North Side, as well as doing the original research on those Three Rivers Stadium iconic spots.

Kathy Rooney and her sculptor husband, Ray Sokolowski, have done a lot of work on the precursors of that Pirates (Steelers beginning in 1940) football teams: the Hope Harveys, the J.P. Rooneys and the Rooney Reds, all tenants of the last of the Exhibition Park venues. Brothers Art, Dan and Jim Rooney all played for variations of these rosters, and my father, Vincent, much younger, was a ball boy.

THE 1903 INAUGURAL WORLD SERIES

Stand by that steel plate marking home plate for the third Exposition Park and imagine you are Honus Wagner facing Cy Young in the first modern World Series between the Pirates and the Boston American League club. The series started in Boston, and the Pirates scored four runs in the top of the first off Cy Young; behind Deacon Phillippe, they coasted to a 7–3 win in the kickoff of the best-of-nine series.

Bill Dineen, who followed up a successful playing career as an umpire for nine more World Series, blanked the Bucs the next day on three hits, 3–0. He would win two more games and outpitched teammate Young as Boston came back from a 3-1 deficit to win the series in eight games. Dineen hurled a second 3–0 shutout to close out the series in Boston, and although it is not believed they had a series MVP in 1903, it would have likely been Dineen.

Martin helped make sure that the site of Exposition Park as the home of that first modern World Series was commemorated, twice. The first historical marker was on a sidewalk on North Shore Drive, and it mysteriously disappeared and was replaced by a second marker along the cement trail along the Allegheny River that fronts PNC Park and Heinz Field. That second marker was knocked down one winter and eventually moved to West General Robinson Street, in its current location, and within the footprint of Exposition Park. Ever the digger, Martin, with the help of fellow researcher Andy Terrick, unexpectedly discovered the original one on sale on eBay. He contacted the John Heinz History Center, which made sure it got the marker off the market, although Martin doesn’t know where it is at this writing. You can’t buy or sell history, he said. He proudly directs baseball enthusiasts to check out the blue Exposition Park historical marker located on the sidewalk along West General Robinson Street just one hundred feet or so north of home plate. My grandfather Dan, the General Robinson Street bar owner, thanks him from above. Martin is now an honorary North Sider.

Martin sets the Alleghenys/Pirates baseball franchise timetable as the following. The Alleghenys: 1882–83 at Exposition Park I; Exposition Park II; 1884 at Union Park; and 1885–90 at Recreation Park (formerly named Union Park). The Pirates: 1891–1909 at Exposition Park III; 1909–70 at Forbes Field in Oakland; 1970–2000 at Three Rivers Stadium; and 2001–present at PNC Park.

Kathy Rooney, who has produced a lot of original artwork on Pittsburgh’s North Side and on Rooney family members individually and collectively, sourced A Sporting Life (by Rob Ruck, Maggie Jones Patterson and Michael Weber) for the following dates of the semipro pre-Pirates/Steelers predecessors: Hope Harvey Football Club (Hope was the firehouse they used as a locker room, and Harvey was the team doctor who donated his services, a naming rights deal before they became widespread) at Phipps Field (North Side) and other sites in the tristate area); Rooney Reds, 1928 (thought to be widespread locations); Majestic Radios, 1929 at Bridgeville Speedway; and J.P. Rooney’s, 1931 at Bridgeville Speedway. The Pittsburgh Pirates/Steelers debuted in 1933 at Forbes Field and eventually played games in the same season at Pitt Stadium, moving to Pitt Stadium for all games in the era between 1933 and 1969 before moving to Three Rivers Stadium from 1970 to 2000 and then to Heinz Field from 2001 to the present.

Historian Len Martin (left), whose hard work was pivotal in finding and marking the home plate area where Exposition Park stood; Kathy Rooney (center), an extremely talented artist whose sketches are displayed in this book; and contributing author Tom Rooney (right), who wrote some of the incredible chapters in this book. Courtesy of David Finoli.

IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Before passing the baton to Oakland—where the Steelers, Pirates, the original NHL Pirates and an original NBA team named the Ironmen played in a combination of Forbes Field, Pitt Stadium and Duquesne Gardens—Pittsburgh’s sports campus would have been the North Side, with pro baseball and football teams residing there. Those Pirates, Steelers and University of Pittsburgh (football) Panthers are back along the Allegheny. On quiet, misty mornings trekking the Allegheny riverbank where it dissolves into the Ohio River, you can almost hear— or at least pretend to hear—the public address announcer calling out the starting lineups for the teams in the confines of the North Side Ghosts of Pittsburgh’s Ballparks Past.

WE NEED A NEW STADIUM

A DECADE-LONG ODYSSEY

By David Finoli

Almost fifty years after the last game was played at the historic facility, most people seem to recall only fond memories of Forbes Field—the experience and the intimacy of the park. It was how baseball was supposed to be and feel when you watched a game there. They wonder why in the hell they ever tore it down. Time does that in sports when you recall the games of your youth, but I was blessed with an eidetic memory when it comes to sports and the conversations I’ve had with people I respect. I was a huge baseball fan as a kid, and I remember vividly a conversation I had on the closing of this sixty-one-year-old park where my favorite team played.

I was eight years old when the Forbes Field era was coming to an end in 1970. As the midseason opening day at Three Rivers Stadium was fast approaching and my dad was getting excited about going to the first contest against the Cincinnati Reds, I innocently asked him what was so wrong with Forbes that forced the team to move into a new park? I had only been to one baseball game at that point, the New York Mets against the St. Louis Cardinals at Shea Stadium, where my uncle Ed took us in 1969, so I never had the pleasure of watching a game at Forbes Field. My father turned to me and said, Son, the place is uncomfortable and smells like piss and stale beer. I can’t wait for Three Rivers to open. Years later, when he was in his nineties, he said just the opposite—how much he loved the place. In a smart-ass manner, I’d remind him what he said in 1970, which brought a sheepish smile to his face. His thought in 1970 also happened to be the opinion of most sports fans at the time in my world. My uncle Vince agreed with dad verbatim, and Aunt Mary Ann told me how she couldn’t get a good view of home plate from the left field bleachers (although she loved the fact that she used to be able to bring her own beer into the stadium—who wouldn’t?).

One of the original designs for Three Rivers Stadium. The open-ended facility looking into the city was an idea that was scrapped when the cookie cutter design was found to be more economically feasible. Ironically, in 2001, PNC Park was built with the same open-ended concept and has been hailed by fans and experts alike. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

As I grew up and became even more passionate about the national pastime, I kept coming back to that conversation, wondering why there was such a need for a new stadium. As I found out, it wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment event where the city and the Pirates agreed to build it and magically it appeared a year later. As it turned out, the franchise had decided that Forbes Field was outdated as early as 1948 but didn’t really begin in earnest to focus on constructing a new facility until ten years later, long before it finally got what it was asking for. The first game at Three Rivers Stadium, on July 17, 1970, the one my dad was so excited to see, was truly a decade-long odyssey.

After a group headed by John Galbreath purchased the Pirates from the Dreyfuss family in August 1946, two years later they decided to pursue a new facility to replace the aging Forbes Field. In 1955, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development agreed that a stadium was a necessary item and put together a city-county committee to study it and formulate a plan. Three years later, in 1958, it began to get serious when it sold the historic stadium to the University of Pittsburgh. By September, the deal was just about complete,