Then-Pitt chancellor recalls North Shore campus expansion that launched lasting bond with Steelers

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh’s North Shore has transformed over the past 25 years, and that transformation has helped build a strong and lasting partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and the Steelers.

Pitt and then-Chancellor Mark Nordenberg knew it was a tough decision to tear down Pitt Stadium and extend the campus to the North Shore and Heinz Field.

“Someone once said to me that moving out of Pitt Stadium has to have been the hardest decision you’ve ever made,” Nordenberg told Channel 11’s Lisa Sylvester. “It wasn’t because we did know that something had to be done.”

It was the mid-1990s. The Pitt football team was in a slump, and Pitt was in a slump of its own, crumbling and breaking down.

“We also brought in a new coach, Walt Harris,” Nordenberg said, “and one of the things that Walt said was that when it comes to recruiting, recruits buy with their eyes, and what they could see with their eyes at Pitt in those days, wasn’t so good.”

That’s when the Pitt and Steelers partnership began, and with it, the move to the South Side and North Shore.

“I would say that it was kind of a mutual coming together,” Nordenberg said, “though I do want to say the two of the visionaries were Steve Peterson, our athletic director, and Freddie Fu, who was in charge of the sports medicine program here.”

UPMC signed off on a medical complex near the new joint practice facilities on the South Side. Construction began there and on the North Shore.

“I’m sitting in my office one day, and Dan Rooney calls, and he says, ‘We’re going to be looking at carpet samples for the east club. Would you like to come down and see them?’” Nordenberg recalled. “Now, the truth is, I wouldn’t look at carpet samples for a building on Pitt’s campus, but that was a sign of how he wanted the partnership to work, which was incredibly generous of him.”

That relationship has grown, thrived and improved just as the North Shore has.

Plus, the move to extend Pitt’s campus from Oakland to the North Shore helped students explore Pittsburgh and expand their horizons.

“We had more students attending those games down at what then was Heinz Field than we had attending the games when they were on campus,” Nordenberg said. “The students really came to view it as an outing, a chance to be involved in another part of the city.”

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