Pittsburgh Pirates Three Rivers Stadium Undervisor Cap

At precisely 8:03 AM on Sunday, February 11, 2001, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium was imploded. Felled by 4,800 pounds of dynamite—that’s 2,700 sticks for those keeping score—the stadium, home to the Pirates and Steelers, took only 19 seconds to collapse in an enormous cloud of dust. Named for its location at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers (which meet and form the Ohio River), Three Rivers played host to teams that won four Super Bowls and two World Series championships, in addition to Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception” and Roberto Clemente’s 3,000th and final hit. It stood for thirty years, and it’s been twenty years since it met its explosive final act.

Sports fans can (and do) get all sentimental about our stadiums. Memories aside, Three Rivers Stadium was virtually indistinguishable from its multipurpose concrete brethren in Cincinnati and Philadelphia—it was big and round and concrete, outfitted with synthetic turf and completely enclosed, surrounded by parking lots and entirely walled off from its urban surroundings. The morning after Three Rivers’ demolition, one newspaper headline read, “Cookie Cutter Crumbles.”

All that having been said, all those memories are worthy of commemoration, and the 2000 Pirates appropriately marked their final season at Three Rivers with a special sleeve patch on their home jerseys. It read “three golden decades,” and, indeed, the Pirates ran up an impressive record of 1,324 wins and 1,082 losses there during that span.

The club moved into sparkling new PNC Park the following April, and while the Pirates have not enjoyed the same level of success as they did during their three golden decades in the concrete donut, the current ballpark is still considered a jewel, with one of the best outfield views in all of baseball. Remarkably, only two decades later, there are eleven MLB ballparks that are newer than PNC. As if that weren’t enough to make one feel old, fourteen of the thirty current National Football League stadiums are younger than the Steelers’ Heinz Field.

I went to only one Pirates game at Three Rivers, a forgettable Sunday afternoon game in April 1987. We sat way up in the upper deck, the home team won, we knocked back some Iron City beers, and I walked away with a free Pirates calendar, which I still have.

Three Rivers, The Vet, and Riverfront, those symmetrical concrete triplets of the National League, hosted a combined seven World Series between 1970 and 1980. Short on aesthetics but long on memories, those and other bland but functional multipurpose facilities of their era deserve some reflection as they rapidly fade into the distant past.