A pirate ship, red brick, row houses and other rejected designs for PNC Park (2024)

Today, it’s hard to imagine PNC Park being built anywhere but where it is, or looking any different than it does. Twenty-one years after the Sixth Street Bridge was renamed the Roberto Clemente Bridge and construction crews broke ground beside it for the 13-acre stadium, PNC Park is the jewel of Pittsburgh’s North Shore and, according to many, the best ballpark in America.

But when a design team from Kansas City-based architecture firm HOK Sport, now named Populous, landed at Pittsburgh International Airport in the summer of 1996, the ballpark’s blueprint was but a twinkle in their imaginations.

This was a scouting mission. The eventual exodus from Three Rivers Stadium, which the Pirates and Steelers shared, was far from a certainty at the time. (Funding for PNC Park and Heinz Field wouldn’t be finalized until February 1999.) In the meantime, the Pirates and city leaders were considering 13 sites for the future ballpark. They took the design team on a site tour.

One site was in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh, in the shadow of the U.S. Steel Tower on Grant Street. Today there’s a city park, surface streets, and a light-rail station at that location. “We were wondering if we could squeeze the ballpark into that site,” recalled Steve Greenberg, the Pirates’ then-vice president for ballpark development.

That idea was scuttled. Too small. A more promising site was on the south banks of the Allegheny River between the city’s convention center and the Strip District, across Smallman Street from the Heinz History Center. That site is now occupied by parking lots and a hotel.

Then the tour continued to the site at the foot of the Sixth Street Bridge. It was only a short walk from Three Rivers Stadium, but the new ballpark would be open and oriented to have the bridge, the river and the downtown skyline as the backdrop. The design team needed little convincing.

“We saw it right away,” said Populous founder Earl Santee.

“Standing there, looking over the river,” Greenberg said, “I knew that was the right site.”

For a week, David Greusel drove through Pittsburgh neighborhoods and walked city streets. As a senior project designer for HOK Sport at the time, Greusel’s work began with a character sketch. He wanted a stadium design inspired by its surroundings. So, he took note of the skyline, the homes, the tunnels, the rivers, the elegant steel bridges, and their giant stone piers.

“I was trying to get the grit of Pittsburgh under my fingernails, so to speak, before I ever tried drawing anything,” said Greusel, who now runs his own firm, Convergence Design. “The story that we crafted about Pittsburgh was this city of contrast. The cool rivers and the hot steel. Labor versus management. And this notion of gritty and refined came to define the ballpark.”

Initially, the ballpark’s working name was Forbes Field II. This was a calculated choice. The Pirates, Greenberg said, hoped their next stadium would have a “neighborhood-type concept,” conjuring flashbacks to the way Forbes Field, the Pirates’ home from 1909 to 1970, was nestled in the Oakland neighborhood.

“We wanted the most intimate ballpark in baseball,” said Greenberg, who had grown up going to games and selling concessions at Forbes Field.

Today, PNC Park, with a capacity of 38,362, remains one of the smallest stadiums in the majors. That was by design. The center-field wall is 399 feet away from home plate, for example, because painting a ‘400’ on the wall would make it look a lot bigger. PNC Park also was built with a cantilevered second deck, making it the first two-deck Major League ballpark built since 1954.

The end result is hard to argue. But some design decisions were hotly debated.

In his Kansas City basem*nt, Greusel has a roll of drawings and dozens of sketches from the PNC Park design process. “They have value to me,” he said, laughing, “if not to anyone else.” These hand-drawn renderings run the gamut of design styles. Some are retro. Some are modern. Some are red brick. Some are stone. Early in the design phase, Greusel was throwing every creative idea onto the page. One rendering leaned into the look of a pirate ship and a cove. In another sketch, Greusel, inspired by the row houses lined side by side along Pittsburgh streets, drew the exterior of the stadium’s facade as a series of row houses.

“That idea never got any traction with anybody but me,” Greusel said. “But I think that would have been kind of a cool way to do it.”

In the late 1990s, Camden Yards, which opened in 1992, was the gold standard of Major League stadiums. Understandably, many in Pittsburgh wanted a similar-looking ballpark — red-brick facade, city view and an open outfield concept. By contrast, Three Rivers Stadium was from a generation of 1960s builds reminiscent of concrete doughnuts plopped amid parking lots.

“I used to call them space ships,” Greenberg said.

While several of Greusel’s early sketches utilized red brick, he came to a conclusion as he walking through downtown Pittsburgh: Prominent civic buildings — the Allegheny County Courthouse, the City-County Building and Heinz Hall, among others — were built with stone. PNC Park should be, too. Greenberg agreed, but not everyone was on board, Greusel recalled. “It took them a while to absorb that this wasn’t going to be a red-brick ballpark.”

The character sketch was complete. The design story that HOK Sport presented for PNC Park, and that the Pirates and the city of Pittsburgh accepted, revolved around two materials: Stone and steel.

But it would not be all smooth sailing from there.

The morning after Tom Sokolowski returned to Pittsburgh after a trip to Bilbao, Spain, in June 2000, he opened the newspaper and was immediately incensed. Sokolowski had an eye for good art. He was the director of The Andy Warhol Museum, after all, and he’d just visited the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But what Sokolowski was seeing in the paper had him in a huff.

“I was furious about it,” Sokolowski, who died earlier this year, told the Post-Gazette in 2000. “That stunning museum in Bilbao and the Good Ship Lollipop in Pittsburgh. If that isn’t an incongruity, I don’t know what is.”

Greenberg had announced plans to build a pirate ship — 50 feet high, 70 feet long, 22 feet wide — in the southwest corner of the PNC Park plot. The ship, painted bright red, would be the ballpark’s kid zone. There’d be batting cages and an arcade below deck, rope-climbing courses and other games on the upper level, and two masts with crows nests and Jolly Roger flags flying above.

“I was always big on swash-buckling pirates, the logo and things like that,” Greenberg said. “I thought, Wow, what a great idea. We’ll put a pirate ship on the river.”

Greusel happily sketched the initial design.

“I was obviously having way too much fun with that,” he said. “It reminded me of how the train came to happen at Minute Maid Park. That was a funny story too. I had been drawing this train on the roof track for months, and my boss told me to quit drawing the stupid train because we weren’t going to do it.

“So, I quit drawing the train. Then the Astros owner came back from the opening of Chase Field and said, ‘They have a swimming pool in center field. What will we do that’ll get people talking?’ I said, ‘Well, there was that train.’ And he jumped all over that idea. He said, ‘That’s it. We’re doing the train.'”

Tom Murphy, Pittsburgh’s mayor at the time, endorsed the pirate-ship proposal, saying, “It will be a visually stunning adventure playground.”

But a storm was brewing. The plan was met with immediate skepticism from city officials, some of whom were upset the Pirates had announced the proposal before asking for approval. The Pirates planned to find a corporate sponsor to pay for the $2 million ship build. Sokolowski blasted the “cheesy” ship and said it would “dumb down” the North Shore waterfront. (One official in favor of the ship later snapped at Sokolowski that it had “a certain Warholian element.”)

Fans were angry, too. Consider their letters to the editor of the Post-Gazette. If you’re going to build a boat, one reader demanded, at least make it float in the water. Another wrote that putting a corporately sponsored red ship on the shores of the Allegheny River would be like slapping McDonald’s golden arches on the side of the PPG Place tower downtown. And a third, shockingly, wrote that the boat should be bigger and house a Hard Rock Cafe inside.

Facing resistance, the Pirates went back to the drawing board. They altered the proposal slightly, agreeing to paint the ship with more subtle colors, mainly green and gold and brown, and flipping it to have the bow of the ship point upriver, toward the Roberto Clemente Bridge. The ship would be 10 percent of the width of the ballpark. It would be visible from downtown but not from the playing field. The firm that would construct the ship was the same one that built the 103-foot pirate ship in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ stadium. The Pirates’ version, however, would not include cannons. This was a kids’ zone.

The city’s Sports and Exhibition Authority approved the plan in August 2000.

So, why is there no pirate ship at PNC Park today?

Newspaper archives tell one story: In January 2001, three months before PNC Park opened, Greenberg told the Post-Gazette that the ship wouldn’t be ready for Opening Day. He was still looking for a corporate sponsor, he said then, and hoped to start construction by July. And that’s the last anyone heard about it.

Now, Greenberg tells another story: He needed approval from the arts council.

“It was unbelievable,” Greenberg said. “They hated it. I had no allies. I felt like I was on an island.” Helaughed. “I had no chance. It was dead in the water.”

Ask any creative to critique their own work from 20 years prior, and they are sure to regret a thing or two. That’s true in the case of PNC Park, too.

The regrets, however, are minor. Ridiculously minor.

Take Greusel’s gripe, for example. Sure, he’s pleased with the limestone exterior, the cantilevered upper deck and the decision to remove a large light tower from right-center field. He thinks the design team could have refined a few more of the steel details around the ballpark. But what really nags at Greusel when he returns to PNC Park is a freight elevator on the southwest side of the stadium. In an attempt to cut costs, he said, the architects opted to cover the freight-elevator tower with a synthetic stucco rather than stone to save $50,000.

“We were trying to squeeze out the last few dollars to make our budget,” Greusel said. “In retrospect, I should have written a check for that $50,000.”

On the Pirates’ side, Greenberg cops to one mistake. The right-field wall was built 21 feet high to honor Clemente. That was no mistake. But when a crew painted the distance numbers on the outfield wall, Greenberg saw his error.

“I looked at it and said, ‘I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I did this,'” Greenberg said. “Right field was 320. It should have been 321, for Clemente.”

In 2021, after sitting empty this summer, PNC Park will see its 20th season.

The North Shore urban design project that began with the construction of Heinz Field and PNC Park has continued to develop. The 25 acres between the stadiums have filled in with hotels, restaurants, office buildings and entertainment space. There is a neighborhood feel, much in the way the Pirates and the city of Pittsburgh had envisioned. The ballpark blends beautifully.

“It became a destination,” Greenberg said.

Fans are forgiving of PNC Park’s (minor) faults. First-timers don’t seem to notice the freight elevator or the 320-foot marker. They are awed by the skyline rising beyond the right-field bleachers. Santee, the Populous founder, called it “one of the most remarkable views in baseball.” And that compliment comes from an architect who has designed or renovated 15 major-league ballparks.

“In baseball, there’s a chance for people to socialize during a game,” Greusel said. “You can chat with your neighbor, relax and take in the city. Obviously, there’s hardly any place in the world that’s better to do that than PNC Park. You’re just sitting across from this spectacular view of the city.”

Greusel has made many trips to Pittsburgh since he first scouted ballpark sites in the 1990s. In fact, he is now a member of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s board of directors. One of Greusel’s friends, a Pirates fan, always buys tickets on the third-base side of PNC Park so he can sit facing the city. Not too long ago, this friend said something that has stuck with Greusel.

“He said, ‘Your ballpark helps me to love my city better,’” Greusel recalled. “And that was just about the best thing anyone has ever said to me. The thing that makes me happiest is thinking about Pittsburghers going to a game at PNC Park and just being able to love their city better as a result.”

(Top illustration of PNC Park: Courtesy of David Greusel)