Blog Post

Mission Pittsburgh

On June 1, I traveled to Pittsburgh to testify at a City Council meeting with regard to the preservation of the Pittsburgh Civic Arena (popularly known as the “Igloo”), a modernist domed structure with a retractable roof built in 1961. Preservation Pittsburgh and Reuse the Igloo, a grassroots group led by Robert Pfaffmann, an architect in Pittsburgh, proposed the building for local landmark designation earlier this year after it was abandoned by the Pittsburgh Penguins, a hockey team who moved into a new stadium nearby. The proposed designation was rejected by the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission under pressure from the mayor.

The City Council, which must act on the findings of the commission in 120 days, held a public hearing in late May for additional testimony. Following the hearing, it appeared ready to support the Commission's findings. But one of the council members who did not agree called a special meeting of the council to gather more information. The meeting was by invitation only, although it was open to the public for observation and televised locally. Preservation Pittsburgh and Reuse the Igloo were invited to the meeting and asked WMF to testify on their behalf. The two groups have nominated the Civic Arena to the 2012 Watch. I was joined by Franklin Toker, an author and professor of Architectural History at the University of Pittsburgh and Andrea Ferster, a private preservation attorney asked to attend by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Our purpose was to provide expert testimony to the council on whether or not the Civic Arena met the criteria for designation established by Chapter 1101 of the Pittsburgh Municipal Code, which sets forth the standards for historic preservation, and to clarify the provisions of Section 106 of the Federal Statute for Historic Preservation.

The hearing was fraught with emotion and rancor, as the stadium was built on land cleared by intense urban renewal during the 1950s which largely destroyed a low income neighborhood populated primarily by African Americans and early twentieth-century immigrants, mostly Italians and Lebanese. Two of the members of the City Council representing the remains of that neighborhood today argued vehemently that the Civic Arena still symbolizes that destruction to their constituents and therefore does not deserve preservation. Others argued that it also symbolizes the dramatically reborn downtown Pittsburgh that emerged from that urban renewal process, not denying that that was flawed.

Following our prepared testimony, the City Council questioned the three of us for at least half an hour, which gave me ample opportunity to explain WMF's commitment to preserving modern architecture and expound further on the significance of the arena.

The meeting ran from 1:30 pm until after 6:00, and no determination was made, pending further information from the Pittsburgh Solicitor.