10/13/2026
35 years from us graduating high school and Winning the Stanley Cup!!
In 1961, Pittsburgh built something no other city had ever tried: an indoor arena with a roof that could actually open to the sky.
The Civic Arena's stainless steel dome was supported by a single massive cantilevered arm, and the roof split into eight curved panels, each one weighing 220 tons. When the mechanism worked as designed, six of those eight panels could swing open in about two and a half minutes, letting Pittsburgh audiences sit under open air inside a building that cost 22 million dollars to raise. The place earned the nickname "The Igloo" almost immediately, and it stuck for the next fifty years.
The dome rarely opened in its later decades, as the hydraulic system that moved it grew harder to maintain, and the last full opening came in 2001. When the arena was finally demolished in 2011 and 2012, some of that same stainless steel roof was melted down and turned into Christmas ornaments, sold by the Penguins as a fundraiser.
A building meant mostly for opera and ice skating ended up as one of the strangest, most ambitious pieces of engineering Pittsburgh ever built.
