Three Rivers Stadium

I give full credit to my friend Dan Bonk, whose idea I am shamelessly stealing for this blog post.

Dan posted the above picture on Facebook yesterday, and it generated quite a bit of comment there. Pittsburghers of a certain age will recognize this picture as the original architectural rendering of the North Side Stadium that was to built for the Pirates and Steelers in the 1960's. It had an open-ended design with a view on to the Point and downtown Pittsburgh. We may also remember what happened: the bids came in over budget, the stadium was redesigned, and Three Rivers Stadium became what came to be known as a generic concrete, cookie-cutter stadium.

Dan asked the question: if Three Rivers Stadium was built as originally designed, would the Pirates and Steelers still be playing there today? This is one of those "what if?" kinds of questions that are fun to consider.

My own thought is that if historical events happened as they did, especially the success of the Steelers in the 1970's, that the Steelers would have lobbied to have the stadium capacity increased (as they eventually did at Three Rivers) and that the open end of the Stadium would have been closed (as happened at Candlestick Park), and we would have ended up with a concrete bowl of a stadium anyway. This Stadium would have been considered outmoded as a baseball park as the Camden Yards of the world were built, and we would probably have been forced to abandon it and build PNC Park and Heinz Field anyway.

As I said, this generated lots of comments on Facebook, and one of the things I said was that, although Three Rivers Stadium was disparaged in its final years, we all seem to forget how mind boggling and magnificent it was when it first opened. It was a product of the era in which it was built, and because of that, it gets a bad rap in hindsight.

Again, thanks to Dan Bonk for providing the inspiration and the picture for this blog post.