Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Gardens was one of the first artificial ice surfaces built in the United States. Six years after being built as a place for streetcars to sleep, it became a 5000-seat arena, hosting all manner of public entertainment. If it drew a crowd and happened indoors, it was probably held at the Gardens.

Conveniently located near the intersection of several trolley lines, the building stood on the same corner as St. Paul’s Cathedral, a few blocks from Forbes Field, home of baseball’s National League Pirates. Both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon were located in the same neighborhood. Fans entered through a glass door and bought their tickets at one of the windows before entering the lobby. Now often seen as wasted space in commercial buildings, lobbies were once designed to be memorable - lavish, ornate and impressive. Duquesne Gardens was a product of that era.

Two rectangular refreshment stands stood in the lobby, on the left and right as people streamed in. Fans sometimes arrived hours before an event to simply take in the hundreds of photos that adorned the walls. By the 1940s, black and white shots of varying sizes covered most of the wall space in the lobby. Protected under glass were many of the featured attractions that passed through town on their touring schedules as well as the stars of local teams that called Duquesne Gardens home over the half-century of its existence.

There was no rhyme or reason to the way the pictures were displayed. Cheesecake shots of skating show stars from the Ice Follies and Ice Capades were hung next to those of local pugilists like Billy Conn, Fritzie Zivic and Harry Gebb, world champions all. Rodeo riders coexisted alongside members of hockey teams of the past like the short-lived NHL Pirates and two-time U.S. amateur champion Pittsburgh Yellow-Jackets. Legendary wrestler, Gorgeous George, noted for his bleached blonde locks and ambiguous sexual orientation was there, in all his glory. So were circus acts, roller derby jammers and basketball squads. Duquesne University, U of P, and the NBA Pittsburgh Ironmen all played out of The Gardens and were immortalized on the walls.

Entering the arena itself to take in a game, fans first came in at the Craig Street end of the building and immediately noticed a 25-degree drop in temperature. They then had a choice, sit behind the goal near their point of entry and take their place in the box seats that lined both sides of the rink or head to the other end zone. Behind the Neville Street goal was a section separated from the rest of the seating area by steel mesh. Fans entering the cheap seats were locked in for the duration of the game with no access to the rest of the building until the gates were unlocked at the end of the match. Fans sitting in the upper reaches of the Neville Street section remember having to twist this way and that to be able to follow action on the ice without having the icicles hanging from the roof obstruct their view of play.

The official timekeeping clock wasn’t a chronometer, digital with LED display. It had a minute hand, a second hand and ran all of 20 minutes. Two smaller penalty clocks, each able to record a five-minute infraction, were placed below the game clock. Between them, three red lights indicated the period in progress.

The ice surface, then as now, was resurfaced after every period of play. In the days when Zamboni was simply a family name, flooding the rink took a team, not unlike the one that drags baseball infields. Everybody had a specialized function to perform.

At the end of play, four maintenance workers came out wearing skates and carrying wide shovels, removing all the snow and ice shavings on the playing surface. Next, two barrels of hot water, mounted sideways on a wheelbarrow-like frame, each attended by a pair of attendants made their appearance. A hose with several holes punched in it let the water escape. It dripped onto a canvas cloth dragged behind the barrel and onto the ice. Yet another fellow, armed with a squeegee, who spread the water evenly over the surface, followed each wheel-mounted barrel.

When the AHL’s Pittsburgh Hornets played, the hallway outside their dressing room was open to kids wanting to collect autographs after the game. Youngsters could waylay one player and have their scrap of paper passed from one player to another. Tim Horton would sign and pass it off to Frank Mathers, Mathers to George Armstrong to Fern Flaman and on to John Ashley, eventual Hall of Famers, every one of them.

By the 1930s, Duquesne Gardens was no longer the state of the art facility it had been in its early years. Other newer and bigger arenas had been built around the continent and the rink at the end of the rails fell into disrepair. Towards the end of its life, the rink once noted for having the best ice in North America became renowned around the AHL more for the rodents that had set up housekeeping than for the quality of the physical plant.

The late Andy Barbe, one of the most popular and longest serving Hornets, stayed in the Steel City after retiring. He once spoke of informal puck-shooting competitions where players would get one point for hitting a stationary rat and two if it was on the move. Another player, a little phobic when it came to rats never dared walk barefoot in the dressing room. One Friday he brought in his wife’s pet, a mean, old tomcat, and left it in the rink after practice, sure that the unwelcome tenants would be dealt with by morning.

Come Saturday morning, not a trace of the cat could be found. His dish of milk remained, untouched. Some players were of the opinion that the cat, realizing what he was up against, escaped through some hidden opening. Others felt that he had met a somewhat more gruesome fate. According to legend, the sound of a cat wailing in the distance could be heard regularly from that day until Duquesne Gardens was pulled down in 1956.

Special thanks and credit go out to Ken Rankin, a long-time Pittsburgh Hockey fan who has seen them all, from Sid Smith to Sidney Crosby, for sharing his memories and opening his archives.