Cookie-Cutter Era Has Sweet Memories For Three Rivers Fans

Appropriately enough, Three Rivers Stadium’s 25th anniversary - one that will be observed, but certainly not celebrated today - actually should be its 35th anniversary.

In the 1950s, Three Rivers’ original projected opening date of 1960 - back when it was known as the North Side Stadium - was delayed for years by construction and financing snafus, political infighting and cost overruns. A much-praised preliminary design, with an open center field offering a panoramic view of Pittsburgh’s downtown Golden Triangle, was scrapped as too expensive.

So, rather than an East Coast version of Dodger Stadium, Three Rivers instead became a copy of others in its genre: Riverfront Stadium, Veterans Stadium, Busch Stadium and Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. It had lost its individuality, and it never got it back.

“It was nice and new, but it seemed so commercial - like watching on TV,” former Pirates star Bill Mazeroski said. “Nobody was close to the field, so the fans just sat there.”

Still, most Pirates counted the days before they could leave picturesque but cramped Forbes Field, with its tiny clubhouses and lack of parking spaces.

“I couldn’t wait to get to Three Rivers,” said Willie Stargell, whose homer totals increased 40 percent as soon as he left spacious Forbes Field.

Neither could the Steelers, who, for the first time since their 1933 founding by Art Rooney, finally had a home of their own. Until 1970, they practiced in a municipal park, sold tickets out of a downtown hotel lobby and shared a playing field either at Forbes Field with the Pirates or Pitt Stadium with the Panthers.

“It was a great thing for the fans and for the team,” former Steelers coach Chuck Noll said. “It gave the players a feeling of permanence. Before then, we didn’t even have any place to work out players.”

Despite incomplete concrete access ramps, drinking fountains that wouldn’t turn on, a labor dispute that sidelined the black-and-gold-wearing “Stadium Girls” usherettes and seats that seemed miles away from the field compared to Forbes, its opening night reviews were raves.

Except for the final score: Reds 3, Pirates 2. Stargell hit the Pirates’ first homer, but Tony Perez hit the stadium’s first homer.

“We just wanted lockers that were more than nails in the wall,” former pitcher Steve Blass said. “Three Rivers was great. There was carpeting on the clubhouse floor! Air conditioning! We thought we’d moved uptown.”

But, just like the revolutionary polyester pullover uniforms the Pirates wore for that very first game, Three Rivers soon lost its gloss and its gleam, even if its proud new tenants didn’t notice for years.

“It was innovative,” Steelers president Dan Rooney said, pointing to Three Rivers’ first-of-a-kind luxury suites and huge scoreboard with animated graphics.

But its faults became apparent on that very first night, and many have never gone away.

Just like Forbes, getting to Three Rivers, and getting out, became a 90-minute nightmare for fans afraid to journey off the stadium’s few access roads. Some longpromised interstate links didn’t open until nearly 20 years after the stadium did, and the real estate development that was to transform the seedy North Side into a mini-Golden Triangle never has occurred.

Until the modernistic Carnegie Science Center opened a couple of years ago, the hulking stadium’s only immediate neighbor was a department store warehouse and a long-closed gas station.

Now, even as the Pirates sell a commemorative yearbook honoring Three Rivers’ silver anniversary, the up-for-sale team’s prospective buyers talk of the urgent need for a baseball-only stadium to save the franchise. Much like the owners talked 30 years ago that only a multipurpose stadium would keep the Pirates and Steelers in Pittsburgh.

Still, for all of its faults - its long-delayed opening, its nosebleed seats, its unremarkable design and its now despised fake grass - Three Rivers signified an undisputed revolution in Pittsburgh sports that began almost on opening night.

Call it pride in their new surroundings, or call it coincidence, but the Pirates and Steelers immediately began winning like never before.

The Pirates, who hadn’t won any kind of championship since Mazeroski’s World Series-deciding homer 10 years before, won the National League East in their first season in Three Rivers. The next year, with Blass on the mound and Roberto Clemente in right field, they won the World Series.

The scorecard for the Pirates’ first 25 seasons in Three Rivers: nine division titles, two National League pennants and two World Series titles.

When the Steelers moved into Three Rivers in 1970, they had a new quarterback, Terry Bradshaw, an almost brand-new coach in Noll and a new conference, the AFC. And, within two years, they would have the first title in their history: the 1972 AFC Central Division championship.

And football would have one of its great moments.

On Dec. 23, 1972, in the first playoff game in Steelers’ history, a rookie running back named Franco Harris miraculously grabbed a last-play deflected pass by Bradshaw to score the most improbable touchdown in NFL history and beat the Oakland Raiders. A new era in pro football - and one its greatest rivalries - had begun.

The Steelers would lose to the unbeaten Miami Dolphins in the AFC title game a week later, but, four weeks into the 1980s, the Steelers had four glittering, silver Super Bowl trophies in their once-barren trophy case.

Maybe the stadium had nothing to do with it. Maybe it did.

“All I know about Three Rivers is a lot of championships have been won there,” former Pirates manager Chuck Tanner said. “To me, that makes it a championship stadium.”