Pitt19802
22d ago
I went to Pitt from 1999-2003, I was in the stadium when Pitt played Notre Dame for the last game at Pitt Stadium.
Have a number of thoughts about a number of places you mentioned.
But mostly just wanted to say thanks, that was a ton of interesting history that I didn't know about places I've spent a fair amount of time.
Appreciate it.
Thoughts, ok, let me try to do this stream of consciousness style.
Not sure if you’re familiar with the Pixar movie Monsters University? But the nominal university setting is a basic mishmash of elements from large land grant public universities. Of the college campuses that I’m pretty familiar with (Ohio State, Penn State, UNC, Michigan, Georgia, University of Alabama, Cal) if you walk around them, you can see the elements that make up the Monsters University campus, such that Monsters University is sort of a fictionalized platonic ideal of what a big public school campus should look like.
Anyway, University of Pittsburgh’s campus is the least evocative of the Monsters University campus of any large campus I’ve been on.
I think the probable explanation is that those are all land grant universities, and Pitt isn’t. The basic feature of this is that Pitt is split in half by 2 fairly large throughfares, Forbes and Fifth. The typical land grant setup is that there is a large throughfare on one side of the campus, and then the campus is a fairly self-contained universe off to one side of that throughfare.
Ohio State’s campus fits this model. High St is a fairly similar road to Forbes, you can take it all the way to downtown Columbus, it has fairly heavy traffic, and Ohio State’s campus is a fairly self-contained university off to one side of it, so you get spaces like the Oval, and student life basically centers around that space. (CMU's campus sort of fits that model as well.)
Pitt’s campus doesn’t really have an outdoor square space that student life centers around in the same sense.
There was some effort to do stuff in the greenspace between the Cathedral and Heinz Chapel, and that was a nice green space. Sometimes they would shut down Bigelow between the Student Union and the Cathedral and do events there (I remember seeing the band Fuel perform there for free as a freshman).
When I went to school there, the space between Hillman and the Carnegie Library was a parking lot. They’ve since turned it into a fairly pleasant green space, which strikes me as a nice upgrade. I don’t really have a sense for how effective it is as community space. In general, I think the layout doesn’t really lend itself to student community life all that well.
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Anyway, on to some other stuff:
South Oakland – When I went to school there, there would be ads in the Pitt News advertising that you could rent a room in South Oakland for $200-300 a month. My general sense was not that it was a slum or anything, but that the general behavior of college-age people made it such that it made no sense to live there if you were older than 23 or so. I had several classmates who rented places there and would throw parties on the weekend. The general model was that you would pay $5, they would give you a red cup, there was a keg in the kitchen, and you would fit about, idk, maybe 100-150 people, into a 2 bedroom row house. The music blared and you couldn’t hold a conversation, then the neighbors, quite reasonably, would call the police. The police would show up and everyone would scamper away through a back alley.
I think I might have been to 4 or 5 parties that fit that description before deciding it wasn’t my scene and spending my weekend evenings doing other things. My general sense from walking around is that there were several parties like that per block in South Oakland on your typical Friday and Saturday evenings. The idea of actually living there as a college-age student didn’t appeal to me at all; the idea of some poor adult living amongst that, idk, it struck me as insane back then, and it still does.
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Schenley Farms – I had an economics professor who would invite students over to his house to discuss class presentations; he lived there. I was really taken aback by how nice his house was and how close it was to campus. I looked it up on Zillow just now and it estimates it’s worth $790k, which honestly seems a couple hundred grand too low to me.
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Carnegie Library – Yeah, absolutely, 1000% agree, it really is a great library. When my daughters were young I would take them there and they named it the ‘Castle Library,’ which, yeah, that’s about right. One of my favorite parts is that back in the stacks there are some windows that overlook some of the most impressive dinosaur fossils in the natural history museum.
For a couple of years we had Carnegie Museum annual passes, and that was a good standby outing when we wanted to get the girls together with my parents. That whole complex is great. Tip of the cap, Andrew, well done, appreciate it.
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Pitt Stadium and logistics – So yeah, Pitt Stadium’s last year was my freshman year. My dad and I had been to several games there even before then, and I have a significant amount of nostalgia for the place. The last 10 or so years of Pitt Stadium, Pitt football was not good. They’ve been much better in the 25 years since. The general rule of Pitt football attendance is that if they play Penn State, WVU, or Notre Dame, they’ll get a good crowd (and half the stadium will be rooting for the away team). If they play anyone else, you can wander around and find somewhere to stretch out and put your feet up on the seat in front of you because no one’s sitting there. There are generally lots of empty seats. That’s been true at Acrisure, and it was definitely true at Pitt Stadium.
My parents live in Monroeville. It really doesn’t take that many cars to bottleneck the Bates St exit off the parkway, and it’s generally a pain to get in and out of campus that way, I usually take the Greenfield exit and come in through Schenley Park. Where Pitt Stadium was, and where the Petersen Event Center is now, is even more of a pain to get to. We went to a basketball game over winter break when there were no students on campus; the arena was probably not even half full, we parked in the lots above the arena, and it was still a giant pain to get out at the end. That area just has a ton of bottlenecks, it takes forever. Putting a stadium in Panther Hollow sounds cool, but it would probably require a new highway exit off the parkway to make it work, and that’s not happening.
At some point when I’m a very old man, possibly after I'm gone and when my kids are very old, the consensus will be that the Pete is old and decrepit and needs to be replaced. If football is still popular then, replacing the Pete with a new football stadium might be a thing that happens. I think that’s the only real logical spot, and that’s sort of the only timeline that makes any sense.
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