Hockey Has Deep Roots in Pittsburgh

By JEFF Z. KLEIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
December 30, 2010

The Schenley Park Casino was the site of Pittsburgh’s first organized hockey game in 1895 between students from a local college and Queens University.(PittsburghHockey.Net)

PITTSBURGH — If Minnesota is the State of Hockey, if Detroit is Hockeytown and if Buffalo is the City of Hockey, then surely this city at the confluence of three rivers is Hockeytahn, as they say here in their singular drawl.

And nothing distills the long, stop-and-start history of hockey in Pittsburgh like the Duquesne Gardens wall.

Pittsburgh will host the N.H.L. Winter Classic at Heinz Field on Saturday, if the weather cooperates. It will be the newest, shiniest stage for American hockey’s biggest annual one-day event, in a city whose Penguins draw higher television ratings, sell more merchandise and have more Web site traffic than any other N.H.L. team in the United States.

“Our fans are sophisticated enough to know how lucky we are to have seen Mario Lemieux, Paul Coffey, Jaromir Jagr, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and all the others here over the last three decades,” said David Morehouse, the president of the Penguins and a Pittsburgh native. “We’ve had 13 scoring champions in 21 years.”

Hockey runs deep in Pittsburgh. It is where the game was first played regularly indoors on artificial ice, at the luxurious Schenley Park Casino from 1895 until it burned down in late 1896.

It was home to the first professional hockey league anywhere in the world, the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League, which by 1902 was luring players from Canada, where professionalism was prohibited. The future Hall of Famers Riley Hern, Alf Smith, Bruce Stuart and Hod Stuart played for pay in Pittsburgh, eventually forcing the Canadian leagues to go pro in 1907 — a development that led directly to the formation of the N.H.L. in 1917.

And it is where the United States Olympic hockey team was born in 1920, when Roy Schooley, a Canadian who stayed in Pittsburgh, put together an 11-player squad that won silver at the Antwerp Games, in the sport’s Olympic debut.

The Western Pennsylvania league, the Olympic team and the Pittsburgh Pirates, a Roaring Twenties N.H.L. club briefly owned by the New York bootlegger Bill Dwyer, were housed at the Duquesne Gardens, a trolley car barn in the Oakland neighborhood that was converted to a civic auditorium and ice rink in 1899.

The Gardens lasted until 1956, when it was torn down to make way for an apartment building. But part of a wall was left standing, incorporated into a restaurant in the building.

That was the historic wall Jim Kubus rescued in 2008. “I found out the apartment building was being renovated, and I had 48 hours to do something before the wall would be destroyed,” said Kubus, the editor of www.pittsburghhockey.net, a local history site. He said he and his brother “went in and took the bricks.”

For safekeeping, Kubus moved the Duquesne Gardens bricks to a location they kept secret.

Mario Lemieux won two Stanley Cups with the Penguins, in 1991 and 1992. As they fell on hard times, he became their principal owner. (Reuters)

After the Gardens was torn down in 1956, Pittsburgh had to wait until 1961 for hockey to return with the opening of the Civic Arena, later the Mellon Arena. The N.H.L. returned to Pittsburgh in 1967 with the founding of the Penguins.

“We didn’t draw very well the first year,” said Jack Riley, 91, the Penguins’ first general manager. “I remember one crowd as small as 3,000 for a midweek game against the Oakland Seals.”

The Penguins tried anything to draw fans, including putting an actual penguin on the ice during intermissions. It died a month into that first season.

The Penguins were averaging fewer than 7,000 fans when Lemieux arrived in 1983. His magical career and two Stanley Cup titles sparked another Pittsburgh hockey revival. But in 1998 the Penguins declared bankruptcy, and Lemieux bought the team.

By the time he retired from playing for good in 2006, Pittsburgh was on the verge of losing hockey again. Lemieux was threatening to move the team to another city unless Mellon Arena was replaced.

It finally was this season by the Consol Energy Center. And in that new building, in a bar called the Captain Morgan Lounge, is that small section of wall from the Duquesne Gardens.

“I got in touch with the Penguins and told them I had the last part of the wall from the old Gardens,” Kubus said.

He gave a brick to Morehouse, and that sealed it — a piece of 19th-century hockey in Pittsburgh would live on in 21st-century Hockeytahn.

“We’re well aware of the long legacy of Pittsburgh hockey,” Morehouse said. “We’re cognizant that Pittsburgh has kind of transformed from a good hockey town that has had its ups and downs to a great hockey town.”

As evidence, Morehouse cites the growth of hockey after the arrival of Lemieux, when the number of area rinks ballooned to 33 from 6, resulting in the first handful of Pittsburgh natives playing in the N.H.L. And now, again, the explosive growth since the arrival of Crosby in 2005: according to Scarborough Research, the Penguins have doubled their fan base in that period to 1.2 million, half the regional population.

“We have an embarrassment of riches here,” Kubus said. That abundance will increase on Saturday, when Heinz Field joins the Schenley Park Casino, Mellon Arena, Consol Energy Center and that piece of wall from the Duquesne Gardens — all homes of hockey in Hockeytahn.