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More seats from Three Rivers to be auctioned within weeks
Thursday, February 08, 2001 By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
If you didn't get to buy a blue or red seat from Three Rivers Stadium at the recent public auction, there's still hope.
The Sports & Exhibition Authority is stockpiling at least a few hundred of the older, orange-colored seats from the upper level of the stadium, agency spokesman Greg Yesko said yesterday.
"We are developing a plan to sell some seats that we've put in warehouses temporarily," he said. "There was a tremendous demand for seats" over and above the 10,000 or so that were auctioned Jan. 6.
The sale will be within the next several weeks. Some sales will be via Internet, so Pirates and Steelers fans who have moved away from Pittsburgh will have a chance to buy them.
Lots of details still have to be worked out, such as how many seats will be for sale, when and where the sale will be and prices.
In view of the fact that buyers at the auction paid as much as $875 for one of the newer, blue, floor-mounted seats, Yesko said he doesn't want to flood the market with orange seats and lower the value of the auctioned seats.
"We're not only working out a plan to market these seats but a plan to price them fairly. With everything else we have before us -- getting this building imploded -- we've put this on the back burner, but we will make sure people who want seats get them. There was a lot of interest from people from outside the region who weren't able to get in for the Jan. 6 auction."
Yesko said he's been deluged with phone calls, faxes and e-mails from people locally and around the country asking if it's too late to buy a seat and from nonprofit and charitable groups that want to auction a seat or two to raise money.
The level of interest rose sharply with publication in Tuesday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of a picture showing hundreds of dismantled orange seats littering the old field at Three Rivers, waiting to be hauled to a landfill.
KDKA Radio morning host John Cigna berated sports authority Director Stephen Leeper on the air for throwing all those seats away when people wanted to buy them.
Yesko and Leeper have both stressed the tight time limits the authority is under to have Three Rivers demolished. The Steelers played their last game there Dec. 16 and then the newer seats had to be removed in time for the Jan. 6 auction.
Yesko said the authority had to give its demolition contractors, Bianchi Trison Corp. and Controlled Demolition Inc., several weeks to knock out concrete and load the dynamite that will bring the stadium down Sunday morning.
The implosion can't be put off any longer because the tons of debris that will result must be cleared and then rights of way, 120 feet wide, created. The site where the stadium has been for the past 31 years will have new roads and temporary parking lots. They are to be ready by late July.
The deadlines simply haven't allowed enough time to remove all 58,000 seats from Three Rivers, especially the older, back-mounted orange and yellow seats on the two upper levels. The ones that have been pulled out required the use of a crane to lower them to field level.
"They're the oldest seats in the building and the most difficult to extract," Yesko said.
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