- [Presenter] We were able to make this program thanks to contributions from all the wonderful people who are members of WQED.

(lively music) - [Presenter] This program is part of WQED's "Pittsburgh History Series".

(lively band music) - [Narrator] Everybody used to go to the Allegheny County Fair, but there hasn't been a county fair since the early '70s.

If you look hard enough, you'll see me sitting in that crowd.

I remember when Officer Toody from "Car 54, Where Are You?"

came to South Park in 1962.

The fair was a big annual event.

I grew up about a mile from South Park, just off Route 88, not far from where this flower shop and garden center is now.

There used to be an Isaly's dairy store here.

I miss the funky old Isaly's building.

I had my first banana split there.

Everyone misses certain places and assorted pieces of the past.

Many people around Pittsburgh remember places like West View Park, places where you used to go to have fun, to ride the Dips.

It used to be you could have fun just riding streetcars all over town.

And town used to be different, too.

Lots of department stores, nightclubs, and there was the old Jenkin's Arcade.

And on a fine summer day, it was only natural to sneak away to Oakland and catch the ballgame at Forbes Field, they called it the world's greatest ballpark.

Pittsburgh's not the city it used to be.

Most of the heavy industry is gone.

(chuckles) Most of the smoke is gone, too.

And although Pittsburgh has been known internationally as a city where people work, it's also had its share of great old places where Pittsburghers used to go to have fun.

We're going to take a look at some of those vanished places that people remember fondly.

We call this program "Things That Aren't There Anymore", and we're saying it's Volume One because there are too many such things to include in just one program.

Right across Route 88 from Hahn's garden center, someone's putting up a new office building.

There's nothing left to let you know that this lot was once a drive-in movie theater.

It was the South Park Drive-In.

It opened in the late 1930s when outdoor screens were a new idea.

It was the third drive-in in the world.

It closed in 1985 because nobody went anymore and it cost too much to operate.

When I was a kid in the 1950s, the only movies I ever saw were here at this drive-in.

There are other old dead drive-ins around the area.

Some still have screens like empty billboards.

There were 30-some drive-ins in Southwestern Pennsylvania at one time.

But people's movie-going habits changed.

Lots of people remember how they used to go to the movies, when there were first run movie houses downtown and smaller theaters in every neighborhood.

George Anderson likes the South Hills Theater in Dormont because it reminds him of older theaters that aren't around much anymore.

- This looks like a theater from those days.

I mean, it really has that sense to me.

You have interesting hallways and stairs that you don't quite know where they go and you're not quite sure how to get from one balcony to another.

You have a mezzanine, you have a wonderful wide theater.

It's got all sorts of decorations, little eagles on the walls and things that you don't need but just add to the experience.

(fast-paced piano music) - [Narrator] The experience of going to the movies actually started in Pittsburgh.

The world's first movie theater, the first space devoted exclusively to showing moving pictures was downtown on Smithfield Street.

It opened on June 19th, 1905, the Nickelodeon.

It was an immediate huge success.

And the rest of the world adopted the new Pittsburgh word Nickelodeon and the idea of the movie house.

Over the years, Pittsburgh has had many downtown movie theaters.

The Warner Theatre on Fifth Avenue was famous for showing Cinerama movies.

- My favorite theater downtown was the Loew's Penn, which of course is now Heinz Hall.

And it's much more grand as Heinz Hall, but I loved it as the Loew's Penn.

When I got to be a teenager, I would take the bus to Pittsburgh and see three movies in one day.

You know, I always start at Loew's Penn because they started at 10 a.m. - [Narrator] Like the Loew's Penn, the Stanley had stage shows as well as first run movies.

Vera Hubbard remembers those days before the Stanley became the Benedum Center.

- We used to bring all the Black artists to the Stanley and we used to dip school.

My mother would've killed me.

We saved our lunch money and we'd go to see all the shows.

I went to see all the shows in town I loved.

- [Narrator] Movie houses were impressive buildings at one time.

And people all over the area remember favorite old theaters.

Growing up, Dewey Garral went to the movies in McKeesport.

- On one stretch of Fifth Avenue in McKeesport, there were four theaters.

I remember two of them.

There was the Liberty, which I remember seeing like "Dumbo" at when I was four or five, and there was the Memorial Theatre.

It was a great theater.

It probably sat 5 or 600 people.

It was a big theater.

And they had great old statues and just great architecture.

It was amazing.

But it was destroyed in the fire.

What they did was they turned it into these two smaller theaters.

The popular rumor was if you crawled over the ceiling tile in the McKee cinema, if you went upstairs and crawled over the ceiling tile, all the statues and everything were still there, like the guts of the building were still in there.

I don't know how true that was.

But of course now there's no cinema at all there, there's nothing.

- [Narrator] George Anderson started going to the movies in the town of Arnold PA at the Star Theatre.

- I can remember, we were so young and so naive, that I can remember this theater.

It was so little.

It had a ladder on the wall where the projectionists would have to come in and climb the ladder to get into the booth to show the movie.

And while we were sitting waiting for him, you could always see shadows on the screen and there were lights back there, windows open or something.

And I can remember my older brother telling me, "Those are the actors getting into place for the movie," and I believed that.

And that was so, I mean, here the guys come out on horses, how would they be backstage in the theater?

But we were so, we were the perfect movie generation.

We believed everything we saw.

- [Narrator] In those innocent days, there were movie houses in every neighborhood and always an Isaly's store nearby.

(lively music) And Isaly's was a kind of proto-convenience store, a combination restaurant, small grocery, and ice cream parlor, brought to Pittsburgh from Ohio in the early '30s by Henry Isaly.

Margie DeArmitt remembers working at Isaly's when it stayed open 'till midnight to accommodate all the customers.

- They would go to a movie and they'd come to the Isaly's and get milkshakes and get banana splits and get ice cream cones.

At that time, the world lived, you know, 'till 12, one o'clock at night.

All our stores were open.

- [Narrator] Now there are still about 10 Isaly's stores around the Pittsburgh area.

And they may have some similarities to the old shops, but during its heyday Isaly's included nearly 100 stores in the Pittsburgh area.

Isaly's central offices and dairy operations were in Oakland on the Boulevard of the Allies.

(lively swing music) George Krohe started working for Henry Isaly in 1931, about a week after the business opened in Pittsburgh.

- I was 21 years of age at the time.

The store in Homewood was a very small store.

It was actually open even before the Boulevard of the Allies.

They opened it on a trial basis to see if the people would go for the ice cream cones and ice cream cones for a nickel, buttermilk for a nickel, a milkshake for a dime, a cheese sandwich for a nickel, a ham salad sandwich for 10 cents, and a baked ham sandwich for 15 cents.

For 25 cents, you could get a baked ham, Swiss cheese combination sandwich.

How could you turn it down?

- [Narrator] George eventually became vice president of the company.

But he remembers the super success of those early days.

- Crowds.

You wouldn't believe the crowds that came in there.

You wouldn't believe.

In those days, I get back to the Depression days, I used to have free movies up in Schenley Park.

There was a bandstand up there and they'd shift the movies.

These people would sit on the grass, sit on chairs, all around.

Quite a few hundred people, I can't say how many.

And all of a sudden, the word you got, "Here they come," and you'd look up the street and you couldn't drive a car down the Boulevard of the Allies for the people coming from Schenley Park running to get to Isaly's to get their nickel ice cream cone.

And that store got so full.

It was unbelievable.

We would have 20 people behind the counter digging ice cream cones, 20 people.

Just making 'em as fast as they could make 'em.

- We used to have a short person and a tall person working the ice cream cans.

One worked the front can, and one worked the back can.

I always was a short person, so I always worked the front can.

- [Narrator] Isaly's was famous for these very tall, pointed ice cream cones known as skyscrapers, made with special scoops.

- And they were five cents.

And the length of the scoop, the length of the cone had to be the length of this scoop from here to here.

- [Narrator] Years before 31 flavors became standard, Isaly's delighted customers by serving unusual flavors with unexpected names.

June Isaly recently saw a list of some old flavors.

- Maricopa was one of my favorites.

The other favorite was coffee ice cream.

But maricopa was a mix of vanilla and marvelous butterscotch.

And I think that was one of Henry's originals, and it just was so good.

But I saw that sign the other day and hadn't thought of maricopa for, what, 30 years.

- White House was an exclusive.

It was a vanilla flavor with maraschino cherries.

And they called it White House because it represented the White House with the cherry trees behind.

That's how it got the name White House.

- Chocolate chip with the little jimmies in, not the chips as they put in now, the jimmies.

That was originally Isaly's.

- [Narrator] Isaly's sold a full range of sundaes and cones and milkshakes as well as their famous Klondikes, squares of ice cream dipped in chocolate, sometimes with mysterious crispies included.

Klondikes are now sold nationwide in old fashioned foil wrappers with the Isaly's name and an uptown version of the old polar bear trademark.

But what's not there anymore are lucky pink centers that meant you got a free Klondike.

- Every row of 12 had one pink center and the customers would bring those things back.

I can remember people maybe living in Greensburg that stopped in the Jeanette store to get Klondike and they got a pink center and they'd come all the way back, (chuckles) melted down, show us a pink center so they could get the free one.

It was just a little something that caught on, the pink center.

- [Narrator] Isaly's sold more than ice cream and dairy products.

Every store had a carefully arranged deli case with salads and sandwich meats.

It was at the deli case that Isaly's established another Pittsburgh culinary classic, chipped ham.

Jack McGeary is a former isle's manager whose picture once appeared in a chipped ham ad.

- I wish I had tell you how many thousands of pounds that we used to sell that stuff.

When I first started with Isaly's on a Saturday, I was like, I don't whether you remember Charlie Chaplin, he was on a assembly line, I think it was, and he was going like this and then he'd walk home.

He was going like this, you know.

Well, on Saturday we had the old, we didn't have a chipper, we had the slicer, we had to chip it down.

And I'd go in all day, Saturday, I'd be chipping, cutting that meat up as it was ordered, you know.

And then going home, I was going like this.

(laughs) - [Narrator] This 1951 model of the electric chipper is still going strong at Mitchell's Deli in Etna.

And though the name isn't outside anymore, you know what's inside.

- [Speaker] It is exactly an Isaly's store.

We serve every day at lunchtime.

We serve everything that Isaly's ever served at lunchtime.

- [Speaker] We still even use Isaly bags and chipped ham.

We sell the exact same products.

We go about things in the same way that was tried and true for many years.

- [Narrator] Lou Mitchell started at Isaly's when she was 16.

- There were many of us who worked in the stores.

You went in and you worked on your day off without pay.

It didn't make any difference.

You always covered your fellow workers, you know.

If it was a very busy day and you happened to be out shopping and you walked in the store to get a coke and they were busy, you dropped your purse and went behind the counter and you worked.

- Working with Isaly's, it was like working in the family.

I mean, you felt that you were part of the family.

- It's a shame that it ever got out of family because once people considered it a business, it was no longer good.

It was only good when it was family, when it was fun.

- The Isaly family sold the business in 1972, and it's changed hands several times since.

The Boulevard store closed in 1984.

But one of Henry's grandsons, Phil Isaly, is keeping the family name in the food business with a pizza parlor in the North Hills.

- Good morning, ladies.

I guess I'm finally allowed to tell, this was a family secret and I was never ever allowed to say this.

But the crunchies on the Klondike are really Cracker Jack.

And see, nobody ever knew that.

And I was not, and forbidden, to tell anybody that.

And I remember when they would bring the Cracker Jack, usually on a Saturday morning we'd go down to the plant on the Boulevard of the Allies with my dad and they'd have the Cracker Jack in these big bins and all you'd have to do is lick your hand and stick it in the bin.

And we'd sit there for an hour eating Cracker Jack and get sick as a dog, but we did it every Saturday.

- [Narrator] Tasting things must've been a great part of working for Isaly's Bob Pierce, on the left here with potato salad, worked at Isaly's in the late '50s.

He met his wife there over the counter.

(jukebox whiring) (coin rattles) He still loves old '50s music and memorabilia.

And although he's now in the insurance business, he has collected enough vintage Isaly's products, display materials, glassware and dishes to make a small Isaly's in his basement, a mini museum of the Isaly's that was.

- The Isaly banana split was made with this famous banana split dish which had the handle.

You would cut your banana in half on each side, you would put vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream.

Now on the chocolate ice cream, you put the pineapple topping.

On the strawberry ice cream, you put the chocolate topping.

On the vanilla, you put your strawberry topping and then you put your whipped cream across that, a cherry right in the center.

And then if they wanted nuts, you would sprinkle the nuts over the top.

Of course, when you serve it, you serve it with that convenient little handle.

- [Narrator] Cones, scoops, milkshake machines.

But no Isaly's memorabilia can top Jack McGeary's hand-carved miniature Isaly's complete with saucers, counters made from old cheese boxes, everything whittled to scale and carefully painted by hand.

- [Jack] Trays here for the people to serve themselves.

- [Narrator] He even made a perfectly detailed deli case with all the milk cartons, the salads, the buttermilk megaphones, and the deli meats on their tiny beds of leaf lettuce.

- These carvings were done, I guess, in 1941.

I was head clerk.

I had a mop.

And that's whenever I was moping the floors and that gave me a pain, you know where.

So I'm holding back there.

And then this one, I carved it, it's the manager.

He's the big shot with a scoop and the skyscrapers cone.

And this was the original slicer that they had in those days.

We had no chipper.

And then after they come out with a chipper, I used to go to bed and save my prayers, I'd say, "Thank God for the man that invented the chipper," 'cause, boy, that saved me a lot of work.

- [Narrator] Jack McGeary and his wife Dorothy both worked for Isaly's, and they used to go downtown to the fabled dinner meetings for managers.

- [Jack] I spent 40 years with Isaly's, active years, you know.

- [Dorothy] And then you know what Isaly really means?

I shall always love you.

- [Jack] Yeah.

- Mm-hmm, I don't know if they know that, but that's what it says.

(chuckles) I shall always love you.

(chuckles) - [Narrator] Jack McGeary used to manage that big old Isaly's Country Garden that I could walk to when I was a kid.

Lots of people drove past there on their way to South Park, where there used to be legendary traffic jams every Labor Day weekend, for that event that's not there anymore.

- Oh yes, the county fair.

One we took all the children.

- The county fair, yes.

I used to go to South Park.

And again, watch, look at the animals and just everything.

- The cows and the pigs.

I love the cows and the pigs.

- [Narrator] The cows and the pigs don't come around much anymore.

The last fair was in 1973.

Recently, the county's been working on the grandstands, which aren't so grand anymore.

George E. Kelly was director of the fair for many years, including back in the late '30s.

- People loved the fair.

They came out here by private car, would park as many as 25,000 cars here on the hills.

And it was quite a mess when it rain, but nevertheless we parked that many cars.

- [Narrator] Betty Molman was manager of the fair in the late '60s and early '70s.

She had some snazzy sunglasses then, but she can still picture the way it was.

- I see the grandstands filled and people milling around and looking at things.

And children, that was the big thing, how they enjoyed it.

(lively music) - [Narrator] The county fair was first held in 1933.

And except during World War II, it was an annual celebration.

- [Speaker] It was usually said we had a million out here attending the fair in five days, and I think we did.

Some occasions it'll look as though we had even more.

- [Narrator] The county of Allegheny was a good place to live, the workshop of the world.

And this fair gave city folks a chance to come out and mingle with farm families, smell the country air.

It was an agricultural fair with livestock competitions, poultry, price produce, blue ribbon arts and crafts, and plenty of new equipment.

The fair was also a chance to be entertained and to see what you could see.

- [Speaker] We had a fireman's parade.

Then of course we had the daredevils, you know, that went around the track.

- [Narrator] People sat for hours in the hot sun to watch all sorts of parades and competitions.

This rolling pin throwing competition was just one.

(quirky folksy music) - [Speaker] We've had about everything here at one time or another.

In one of the early fairs, it was said we had 796 different contests during the five days of the fair.

That worked out to about 159 a day.

- [Narrator] There was often a certain military patriotism on display.

At early fairs in the '30s, civil war veterans received special recognition.

President Harry Truman came to the fair in '47.

Lots of radio stations broadcast from the fair in the early days.

And many people saw their first glimpse of television at the fair in the late '30s.

From the mid '50s on, you could watch live daily TV broadcasts from the fair.

Many celebrities and performers of all kinds strutted their stuff on the fair's stage.

There was boxing, bouncing balls, Ed Shaughnessy, Arthur Godfrey, and sometimes it looked like Las Vegas in South Park.

(lively jazz music) Starting in the late '60s, there was an added attraction at the fair, the Skybus, a prototype for a monorail mass transit system.

- It was great attraction.

People rode it for 10 cents.

It just looped the area, the fairgrounds.

It started on a midway and it just went all around the grandstands, the back grandstands, all the way around and came back to the terminal.

So it just circled the fairgrounds.

But I thought it was wonderful.

But it really didn't prove to be that effective.

- [Narrator] And it's not there anymore.

But neither are streetcars, for the most part, which, for decades, were Pittsburgh's favorite means of mass transportation.

Vera Hubbard says she misses streetcars.

- Oh heavens, yes.

I even have a streetcar token, believe it or not.

(chuckles) We got three, you got three tokens for a quarter.

And on Sunday we used to by a pass, my mother bought a pass, and we'd go streetcar riding.

That was a big recreation.

Oh yeah, we would ride streetcars and it was great.

- [Narrator] Streetcar lines used to run all over the area.

There were tracks embedded in most major streets.

And starting in the late 1890s, there was a spiderweb of wires hanging over all the tracks so that the electric trolleys could get their power.

The city's system of street railways once included more than 70 routes.

Some cars went way out into the country.

This line went all the way to Washington, PA until that line was discontinued in 1953.

At one time, lines went to Charleroi to Butler, and New Castle, and beyond.

Ed Lang is a retired streetcar operator, who remembers when each car had a motorman and a conductor.

- Those days when the conductor had nothing to collect fair, he had chance to converse with the public.

So he was almost like a bartender.

But today, they don't do that.

- [Narrator] Some Pittsburghers today remember older, boxy cars like this one.

These were painted orange but the color faded fast, and this type of car became known as a yellow car.

They were discontinued in 1954.

This type of car, introduced in Pittsburgh in 1936, is called a PCC car after the president's conference committee that developed them.

But they're often called Streamliners.

At their peak around 1950, there were 666 streamliners in Pittsburgh and they rode through downtown streets until the mid-1980s.

You can still ride a streamliner on a few of the last remaining lines that run from the subway out into the South Hills.

Ed Lang says that back when streetcars ran on the north side, the Fineview line that started on Federal Street was a favorite of trolley buffs and Pittsburgh tourists.

- [Ed] Fineview was quite a ride.

It was quite a sightseeing place because Fineview had narrow streets and you're climbing a hill all the time and you could look over the city.

It was another Grandview Avenue.

And then you wind around through the street and into the back of the neighborhood where you got into, where there was a park or a little bit of a forest back there where Channel 11 is now.

We go back into there.

And then you come over there and you come out in over to, back in through East Street.

It was all one way.

But it was a wonderful trip and I'd love to go up there.

In fact, we used to take a lot of sightseeing trips for chartered cars that way 'cause you could look over the city.

- [Narrator] It may now sound oddly exotic, but there used to be islands in the middle of some Pittsburgh streets, islands where passengers could wait to board the streetcars.

Those islands are all gone, so are many of the convenient joys of streetcar riding.

- The streetcar had a rhythm of its own.

In other words, the rocking of the streetcar and also the clicking of the wheels seemed to have a sound to it just as well when you ride a train, and it was just wonderful the rhythm.

(streetcar dings) In the past years, getting older, I dream on some nights that I'm driving the streetcar.

Something happened, I wake up and think that, "Where am I?"

I remember falling asleep and waking, dreaming I was out driving the streetcar.

- [Narrator] Lots of Pittsburghers still remember and maybe dream of great old trolley rides.

The number 10 streetcar used to make a loop into the North Hills, heading for a beloved place that's not there anymore, West View Park.

- West View Park?

Yeah, sure, everybody went to West View, yeah.

- The park itself with the rides and that.

We used to have our school picnics out there.

We went to Brookline School.

- Everybody went to school picnics.

That was a big affair for us.

- The old West View with that old roller coaster that used to come out, out to the road, used to amaze me.

- The Dips.

The Dips is my special to ride.

- I'm afraid of those.

- I loved that.

Going up to the top, you hear the click, click, click, click, click.

And up to the top of the hill, it would just, you know, just take off down.

It was great.

I loved it.

- [Narrator] Lots of people loved West View.

It was masterminded by Mr. T.M.

Harton, who converted an old swamp in a narrow valley into one of Pittsburgh's most cherished amusement parks.

West View opened on May 23rd, 1906.

Its most famous roller coaster was known as the Dips.

It originally didn't have its famous hairpin curve at the end of the park.

That was created when the ride was remodeled in the 1920s.

The park's other major coaster was the Racing Whippet built in 1928.

It was a race between two trains on a special track that was really one long loop.

Father Jack Hickey, who became a priest in 1986, was the park's last general manager.

- I imagine, in its time, before these big parks started with the family parks, once it probably ranked about the seventh or eighth in the country.

And so at one time there were more roller coaster track in Western Pennsylvania than any place in the world.

- [Narrator] Most of West View Park sat between its two big coasters.

- [Speaker] West View was a one midway park, and people wouldn't get lost because you'd run into them going back and forth or up and down the hill.

So people would come out and they'd get a seat and a bench and tell the kids to show up every so often and will be okay.

- [Narrator] Until it closed at the end of the 1977 season, West View was a place where people went to picnic, to hear music, probably to be seen, and to have a good time.

Many went just to ride the Dips.

- [Speaker] We never knew why West View's Dips wasn't the number one coaster in the county 'cause nobody ever came and found it.

Greatest coaster that's ever built.

- [Speaker] You'd be at the light out here on Route 19 and you'd hear the Dips coming and they'd come around that sharp end and you'd just hear everybody screaming, and you knew what was going through them, you know.

It was neat.

It was really neat.

(riders screaming) - [Speaker] The ride itself drew hundreds and thousands of people.

- [Speaker] I think there was nothing like their roller coasters.

It was great.

(chuckles) - [Speaker] When my husband went, he did all the roller coaster.

I cannot do roller coasters.

(lively music) - Barry Schell grew up near West View and remembers the small stage called the Talkie Temple.

- We would go down many, many times to watch the shows at Talkie Temple and the free acts at the free act stage.

(cheerful music) As a young child, I can remember, 12, 13 years of age, sitting on the walls on Saturday night watching and listening to the big bands.

(dreamy music) - [Narrator] From the beginning, West View had this large and famous dance hall called Danceland.

Tony Ruffolo used to go there.

- Well, I quit going dancin' around 1950, '55 I think it was.

'Cause I met my wife down at the dance, and I quit.

(laughs) - [Narrator] Over the years, as styles of popular music changed, many kinds of bands played at Danceland.

- I was a policeman down there where the first Rolling Stones, when they came to Danceland, I guarded the Rolling Stones at Danceland.

And we didn't know who the Rolling Stones were, except it was a group that came over from England.

- [Narrator] But one girl in the audience was smart enough to take some snapshots back in June of 1964.

She got no closeups of Mick Jagger, but she captured on film the early Stones with Brian Jones at Danceland.

Jazz musician Walt Harper, who played there himself, remembers going to West View for the music.

- Yeah, that's the first time I heard James Brown, when he was at West View Park.

James Brown was at West View Park once.

A friend of mine says, "Let's go and hear James Brown," and he was at West View Park.

- [Narrator] Danceland also became known for record dances.

Mad Mike Metrovich, one of Pittsburgh's most popular disc jockeys, played records there regularly, and his fans loved Danceland.

- [Speaker] Danceland was real big and- - [Speaker] Oh what dance hall- - It had the tables and all the lights and the music- - And the runway.

- Yeah, and it was really had a great place.

- [Narrator] Every so often people who used to hang out at Danceland get together and remember great times.

The old mirrored ball from Danceland now spins in the West View Fireman's Hall, and Mad Mike still spins the records.

- Let's go and get crazy.

Are you guys crazy?

(crowd cheers) All right, all right.

(lively music) West View Dance was very unique because of the fact that we had our own world of music, of Mad Mike moldy, oldie but goodies, which that's what I termed them as.

And it was unusual music that was not popular to the general world, only the world that evolved around yours truly, Mad Mike Metro.

- We wore hot pants and boots.

- Gogo boots.

- You know, that was, yeah, like gogo boots.

And there was a stage, and the prettiest girls would be up there dancing.

That was sorta of- - Yeah.

- Well, we had a long straight hair then and, you know, that was in the early, early '70s.

- And all us guys would be down there drooling, you know.

See what we can see.

(laughs) - I met her at West View Danceland, and she was in a contest, a hot pants contest.

And we've been married now almost 17 years.

But we fell in love in a man like that.

- [Narrator] Danceland was gone before the park closed.

After an illustrious musical history, Danceland caught fire and burned to the ground in 1973.

When you visit West View today, there's a shopping center where the park used to be and there's been a lot of landscaping.

Many of the park's old hills are gone.

And even Father Hickey has trouble figuring out exactly what used to be where.

- When we come to this sign that says where the Kmart is, that was where the merry-go-round building and all those other parts of the park where the Penny Arcade and the things that took us down toward where the entrance to the Dips was.

The lake ran all the way down to that building, to where the highway is, and they kept filling in until they ended up with no lake.

So down around where the Taco Bell sign is was probably when, was the end of all the water.

And then the Dips ran out beyond that because there's a highway out there and it had to make that turn to come back in.

- [Narrator] The Dips aren't there anymore, but Barry's Schell helped save the old painting that hung in the Dips' loading station.

- This sign is property of the West View borough.

It is a keepsake of the big Dips.

It was at one time the control sign and the lights that you see here would show the control operator where the cars were located.

One on this hill, one on that hill, and it was the device that would control the loading and the starting of each car so that they would have a good smooth ride with not one into the other.

- [Narrator] The sign was painted in the late '40s by a West View employee.

After the park closed, a lot of the rides and buildings caught fire and burned.

- We was there 12 hours- - [Narrator] Ronald George, who's known as Wooz, and Barry Schell both worked with the West View Volunteer Fire Department.

- I believe the hottest fire we had down there, I think, was the Dips.

But there was a lot of memories in the park.

- The Dips fire probably was the biggest one.

When that was burning, that drew more of the community in the borough of West View than anything.

And they just sat there with very sad faces knowing that that was an end of an era, and there it was going up in flame.

- [Narrator] West View isn't the only local amusement park that's not there anymore.

Around the turn of the century, there were more than a dozen amusement parks in this area.

Luna Park in Oakland wasn't there long, but there were some fascinating old pictures of the place.

This postcard shows Luna's unusual Infant Incubators.

This was apparently a kind of scientific sideshow where patrons saw how then modern medicine tried to save premature babies.

A souvenir book says, "Little mights of humanity were taken to the incubator where, under the care of learned physicians and trained nurses, the park patrons saw them grow strong and sturdy again."

It was an odd attraction, and maybe we're lucky it's not there anymore.

But Luna still fascinates many people, including Arthur Smith, who has some slides of that park in his collection of Pittsburgh photos.

- Luna Park opened in 1905, and was very popular.

It was in Oakland.

It was at the end of what was called Grant Boulevard, which was later renamed Bigelow Boulevard.

But Luna Park lasted for only about five years.

And it didn't survive, partly because it, there was a very serious fire there in 1909 and they didn't rebuild it after that.

- [Narrator] Arthur Smith has gathered a lot of his fascinating photographs into a book titled "Pittsburgh Then and Now".

He takes old photos, like this view looking down Penn Avenue from the corner by Horns, and matches them with the same views today.

Pittsburgh has changed a lot.

In the days before suburban malls, everybody used to go downtown to shop, and lots of people remember favorite old stores.

- [Speaker] I remember Boggs and Buhls, and I remember Rosenbaums.

- [Speaker] Yeah, Kaufman & Baer, which later became Gimbel's.

Frank & Seder was a good store.

And we had McCreary's.

- Frank & Seders was where, on the corner, oh, what is that, Smithfield, right across from Kaufman's.

In fact, when you went to town, that was a big thing, with your mother, And if she was able, you know, to spare enough money for a hot dog and a root beer, oh that was a big time.

(chuckles) - [Narrator] Among the countless restaurants that aren't there anymore, one downtown establishment is remembered in a class by itself.

The place called Donahoe's, some say Donahoe's.

- Oh, and Donahoe's, do you remember Donahoe's restaurant?

That was downtown.

My mum, that's where we'd go.

She loved to go to Donahoe's.

It got cafeteria then, you know, yeah.

- They used to sell butter and the guy would have a big tub of butter and you'd ask for a pound and he'd (imitates whittling) write a pound of butter.

Really fantastic how he judge it, you know.

- [Speaker] Go to Donahoe's, get the old fresh butter off the roll, you know, rather than in a plastic container.

- And the bakery was just marvelous.

They baked right on the premises.

Yes, they always put, it was fresh, their eggs, everything.

It was just wonderful.

But the aroma, you never went in there hungry.

- [Narrator] Jenkins Arcade isn't there anymore either.

Some people say it was the first indoor shopping mall.

It's definitely a special passageway in Pittsburghers' memories.

- Oh yeah, the Jenkins Arcade.

we always called it the building with everything because, at that time, it had everything.

a doctor's office, eyes, and anything you wanted in Jenkins Arcade you could get it within that block.

- I think it was the flow of people constantly going through.

And then it had a balcony and you could look up and see people milling around there.

Of course there was a lot of businesses in the place, you know.

- But that was a place to go.

And if you didn't wanna spend a nickel, you'll walk through the Jenkins Arcade to have a shortcut from the end of Forbes over to Horns.

It was great.

And all the little haberdasheries and people who sold specialty items, it was the Button store.

I don't even know where it is today.

The Button store, Parker Button Company, that used to be in the Jenkins Arcade is now over on Fourth Avenue in the Benedum-Trees Building.

It's still full of buttons and personal service.

And the man everyone calls Mr. Parker, even though his name is Howard Korpacy, still tries to supply those hard to find items.

- That is our primary business, to find things that no one else has.

- [Narrator] He has many loyal customers.

(cash register beeping) - I remember we used to be in the Jenkins Arcade, oh God.

- [Narrator] They used the old sign from the Jenkins Arcade store as a shelf now.

And although business looks fine, you can tell Mr. Parker misses the old arcade.

- It was interesting.

We could go through seven in the morning, we could go through seven at night and you still had mobs of people.

We used to run to 30, to 40, 50,000 people a day would go by your door, which is astronomical.

You think of that 40 to 50,000 people going through this narrow hallway.

It was thrilling, shoulder to shoulder.

- [Narrator] The destruction of a building can be an unsettling event.

The old Carlton House, a hotel, apartment, and office building on Grant Street at Bigelow Boulevard, had a controlled implosion one Sunday morning in August 1980.

The Rolling Stones had stayed there, so did Nikita Khrushchev, Muhammad Ali, Richard Nixon, and Lassie when she came to appear at the county fair.

The casino theater on Forbes came to a less dramatic end after a wild and somewhat dramatic life.

I remember reading the titillating newspaper ads for the casino's burlesque shows.

George Anderson remembers the place.

- The Casino Theatre was actually a very nice theater downtown.

And it's another one that became a parking lot.

And it's too bad because it would've been a nice little theater.

But the casino, for many, probably generations, was part of the coming of age of a young male in Pittsburgh.

You had to go there.

You always started going there somewhat nervously with gangs of boys.

You'd never have the nerve to go with anybody else so you'd show up in the comfort of a nice gang.

That was a great thing.

That was real part of Pittsburgh.

- [Narrator] Nightclubs used to be a real part of the city, too.

From downtown on Liberty to Uptown on the Hill, from McKeesport to Market Square, people went to clubs to have fun.

- The nightclubs were absolutely, in my opinion, fantastic.

Some were really nightclubs.

Others we snidely called them upholstered sewers because they were something else.

- [Narrator] Frank Bolden worked for the Pittsburgh Courier and covered the nightclub scene.

- Now, the most unique place, and probably the favorite of everybody across the nation, was the Musicians Club, which was 5, 6, 12 doors down from Crawford Grill on the right hand side of Wylie Avenue.

That was unique in the fact that musicians who came here to play, for instance, Tommy Dorsey, people like Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Duke Ellington, when they played downtown, after the shows were over, they would come up there to the Musicians Club and sit and jam and our local musicians would jam with them.

- [Narrator] The Black clubs were mostly on or near Wylie Avenue, which Frank says was an unforgettable street.

- [Speaker] It's the only avenue in the country that begins at a church, St. John (mumbles) Church out at here in Wylie and ends up at a jail downtown.

So everything was on Wylie Avenue.

Someday someone's going to do a history on Wylie Avenue.

There's no other avenue in America like it.

- [Narrator] At the corner of Wylie and Fullerton, Goode's drugstore was a landmark open 24 hours a day.

Vera Hubbard worked nights there.

- Oh, the drugstore was a fascinating place.

Everybody that was anybody came into the drugstore.

The first time that I saw a celebrity was in the drugstore.

I think the first celebrity I saw there was Sarah Vaughn and Billy Eckstine, of course, used to come in.

It was just a community place almost where everyone gathered.

- [Narrator] While there were exceptions, at that time, most establishments, like the drugstore and the nightclubs, were essentially separate and segregated.

Around the end of World War II, the nightclub scene blossomed in the Pittsburgh area.

Lenny Litman owned the club called the Copa on Liberty Avenue back then.

- The people were jamming, every nightclub.

As soon as they opened up, they opened up the door and they rushed in.

It was that kind of business.

- [Narrator] Nightclubs offered a combination of food, drink, and entertainment.

You got to see a variety of famous and not so famous performers in a somewhat intimate setting.

People often went out for the fabled night on the town.

- A good tab would be $10, with two people, and they would get their picture taken.

That was the common thing in those days.

There was a little guy named Louie who used to come around selling flowers, or a girl would be selling cigarettes and cigars.

And all the color of the nightclub of the period was there.

You could jump from one place to the other.

For the midnight show, you could go to the Carousel, or come back to the Copa, or go to the Hollywood Show Bar, go to the Carnival Lounge, go to the Seventh Avenue Hotel, go to the Midway.

anything you wanted.

You had your choice all night long.

- [Narrator] As the years passed, clubs came and went.

In the '60s, the Crawford Grill number two in the Hill District became a hot place for jazz.

- You had a lot of patrons.

Other races came to Crawford Grill Two.

It didn't have too many at Crawford Grill One, but in Crawford Grill Two, the young set, no racial problem at all.

Mt.

Lebanon shook hands with Wylie Avenue and thought nothin' of it.

The idea was if you couldn't hear the sound, unless you got down, and that was it.

(lively piano music) - [Narrator] In 1969, the pianist from the Crawford Grill, Walt Harper opened his own club downtown.

- [Speaker] Well, the Attic was a very relaxing place.

We held about 4 or 500 people.

Just the best.

- I mean, the guy went first class all the way.

How he ever did it, I don't know.

But Walt Harper's Attic was a very important part in the '60s and the '70s.

'70s are more important.

- We had lines going around the block nightly and it was new.

We were open seven, six days a week, and Monday was like Saturday.

- [Narrator] Walt Harper's Attic was the hottest place in town when Pittsburgh was the city of champions.

- I remember one time we were playing the playoffs.

And so we played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, right, by the dugout, and Clemente was a friend of mine.

So I said, "Roberto, I haven't seen you at the club, Roberto, in a long time."

And he was kind of embarrassed 'cause he hadn't been in.

He said, "I'll be there.

I'll be there tonight."

That night there was a delegation of 80, 80 Puerto Ricans that had come into town to see Roberto and he marched into the club with 80 Puerto Ricans.

I said, "Oh Roberto!

God, I love you!"

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- [Narrator] Pittsburghers have always had considerable affection for sports stars and places where they played.

Hockey fans learned to love that sport at the Duquesne Gardens, where pre-Penguin teams, like the Hornets, stung many opponents.

Originally, a streetcar barn at Fifth and Craig in Oakland, the gardens had one of the largest ice surfaces in the world.

You also went there to see the Ice Capades and the Ice Follies, as well as less slippery attractions.

Ted Brown remembers when there was a streetcar barn near here in Homestead Park.

There was a ball field next to it.

On summer Saturdays in the early 1920s, Ted Brown was the bat boy for the Homestead Grays.

- [Ted] Oh, that was a terrific honor to be the bat boy.

- [Narrator] The Grays were originally a sandlot baseball team from Homestead.

They became the most successful franchise in the Negro National League and one of the greatest teams of all baseball history.

Ted Brown's brother played for the Homestead Grays.

- And the Grays won 98 times out of 100.

One year they opened up a season, they won their first 44 games.

That made 'em popular.

- [Narrator] In the '20s and '30s, there was another outstanding Black baseball team in town, the Pittsburgh Crawfords.

- Very few towns or cities had two good Black teams situated in here.

And Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays were two of the best.

- [Narrator] Rob Ruck is the author of a book titled "Sandlot Seasons", about the role of sports in the lives of Black Pittsburghers.

- I think it was unusual for a Black community to support two teams.

And it was unusual especially in that they were both Black owned, which wasn't the case in most cities.

But the Black community came out and supported these teams.

When the Pittsburgh Crawfords were just a bunch of 17 and 18-year-olds playing teams made up of older men, you would have 3 or 4 or 5,000 people coming to a game in a field like this.

- There was a lot of rivalry, but the players was all good friends.

They went back and forth sometimes.

One Saturday the player allowed will be playing for the Crawfords, then next Saturday the same player allowed playing for the Grays.

- [Narrator] Frank Bolden remembers going to see the mighty Crawfords with the famous Satchel Paige, whose pitching is legendary.

- For instance, his bee ball.

What is a bee ball?

Satchel would say, "Well, it's a bee ball.

Wherever I want it to be, it will be," and that was it.

He had a radio ball.

You couldn't see it, but you could hear it when it hit the catcher.

The best way to hit Satchel Paige was he wound up hitting it, just swing the bat and you'd meet the ball.

All of that, oh we enjoyed that.

- I think everybody, you know, who studies this, who didn't live through it, would love to have been able to been in Pittsburgh in 1935 or '36 when it had both the Grays as well as the Crawfords with this Hall of Fame team.

- Actually the Crawfords and the Grays made Pittsburgh the center of Black baseball, and together with the Pirates.

In my opinion, Pittsburgh was the center of baseball.

- [Narrator] Until 1970, the center of Pittsburgh baseball, the home of both the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Homestead Grays, was that much loved structure in Oakland called Forbes Field.

(lively music) (crowd cheering) Forbes Field was built in just four months in the spring of 1909.

- [Speaker] It was a beautiful ballpark, so green and so big.

- [Narrator] Art McKennan, who became the public address announcer at Forbes Field, remembers going to Pirate games with his father.

- He began to take me when I was about 10 at around 1916.

And I would be coming up Bouquet Street beside him, walking from our home and I'd hear the click of the bat, and I couldn't wait to get in there.

Just couldn't wait to get in there and see those players.

- [Narrator] Forbes Field was a place where no one ever pitched a no hitter and where fans, like the young Jerry Weber, knew the ropes.

- When you're a kid, we knew which gates you could sneak under, which places you could get through if you were quick enough.

There were guys that used to just run past, you know, 'cause they knew where the slow ticket takers were, you know.

We were little kids.

We were like 10 years old, 11 years old.

And we just loved the Pirates.

So we'd get into games no matter what.

People would hand us tickets on the street, you know.

It was more of a community type place.

- [Narrator] Ruth LaVallee at Kunst Bakery on Forbes Avenue was part of that old Oakland community, too.

- It was just every day happiness to talk about the ball game or go to the ball game.

It was just, I can't tell you how thrilling it was.

It was a fun time.

And people, well, they'd stop in and say, "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to the ball game."

And it was just great.

- There was tradition about the place.

And you could get to it.

And if you wanted a beer after the game, you didn't have to take a bus.

You could go up to Gustine's or someplace else in Oakland or Queens or somewhere.

- At that time, at Forbes Field, it was surrounded, on all the side streets were little like counter type establishments where you could, like, get a beer and get a hot dog in that, finish it, talk to your friends, talk about the Pirates.

And then when you heard the National Anthem playing, you'd walk right across the street.

It'd be like 10 yards right into the stadium you'd be right there.

- [Speaker] Before the game, you could actually, if there weren't too many people in the park, you could see somebody in right field and you'd be in the third base box and you could holler over to 'em, they could hear you.

And answer you back, too.

(chuckles) - [Speaker] Here I could run up, the game could start, and I could run up in between and stay there for so many innings.

And then just before the game was over, I'd say to my dad, "I better hustle back to the store."

- [Narrator] Forbes Field was also a place for circuses and concerts and all sorts of gatherings.

- [Speaker] You know, the Steelers played there, too.

Football was played down there, wrestling was down there.

They used to have wrestling matches in the Forbes Field.

- [Narrator] But it was in summer that the ballpark gained its fame as the old lady of Schenley Park.

- People grew up with Forbes Field and the beauty of it.

And you could sit there in an evening, particularly in the balcony, look over at that park.

Even the visiting riders loved the park.

- [Narrator] Of all the great games played there, probably the most remembered is the final game of the 1960 World Series when Bill Mazeroski hit his famous home run and the Pirates won.

- [Speaker] In fact, we watched him tear up the home play and it was, it was... and you just see it and see all those people.

- [Speaker] That has to be the supreme thrill, though, I think.

If you wrote it, they wouldn't believe it.

People (speaker speaks indistinctly).

Baloney, that couldn't happen.

- [Speaker] But the town went crazy.

This town went crazy.

- [Narrator] 10 years later, on June 28th, 1970, the Pirates played a final double header at Forbes Field.

- And I felt like I'd lost an old friend.

I felt like sitting up the night they closed Forbes Field with the park until morning, just like I'd sit with a sick friend or a dying friend.

And that sound silly, doesn't it?

- I think everybody loved the Forbes Field.

When they said they were tearing that down, I think I'm not the only one that cried.

I think everybody cried.

(melancholic music) - [Narrator] You know, I went to Forbes Field once when I was a Cub Scout.

I don't remember a lot about it, but people's memories and all these old pictures and movies make me wish it were still there.

I like to imagine a fine summer evening when we could leave the ballpark, (chuckles) maybe walk over to Isaly's or catch a movie at the Schenley, and then we could all take the streetcar home.

(lively music fades) (reminiscent music)