Oakland
The old Pittsburgh Playhouse
Former Oakland theater, demolished
The Pittsburgh Playhouse stood at 222 Craft Avenue in South Oakland, three old buildings joined into one theater. It opened in 1934 as the Pittsburgh Civic Playhouse. The oldest part had been a German social club. Next to it, a house became the lobby. The Tree of Life congregation worshiped in the complex until it moved to Squirrel Hill in 1952, and that building then became the Rockwell Theatre. Shirley Jones got her start on the Craft Avenue stage. Point Park bought the playhouse in 1968 and trained actors there for the next fifty years.
In 2018 the university opened a new playhouse downtown and closed Craft Avenue. Demolition began in June 2019. On 2 August the Post-Gazette photographed what was left. That November the cleared lot, about 25,000 square feet, was sold to the Magee-Womens Research Institute, which already stood next door. While the walls were coming down, a time capsule from 1906 came out of a cornerstone, full of the congregation’s papers.
The company told its ghost stories while the building was still up. In October 2017 Point Park printed two of them. Kim Martin, then the producing director, said the Lady in White walks the balcony of the Rauh Theatre at night and calls her husband’s name. James Dworek, the technical director, said John Johns had a heart attack on stage and died in his dressing room, and that people see him afterward in the seats, in a tuxedo. A 2014 piece in the Post-Gazette, looking back at a midnight walk the Pittsburgh Press made in 1979, has the company dating his death to 1963, and tells the woman in white as a murder and a suicide in the 1930s, when part of the complex was still a bar. That piece adds a third name, Weeping Eleanor, said to have died in a fire in one of the rowhouses. The versions disagree. The building is gone.
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