Community Corner
Recalling Pittsburgh's Rich Drive-In Theater History
The Pittsburgh area used to have more than two dozen drive-in theaters. See here where they used to be located.
PITTSBURGH, PA - The Dependable Drive-in certainly lives up to its name.
The Moon outdoor movie spot opened in 1950 just as the nationwide drive-in boom was beginning. By the late 1950s and early 60s, when the industry was at its peak, there were about 4,000 scattered across the country.
But that was before the advent of multiplex indoor cinemas, cable TV, VCRS, DVDs. Faced with dwindling crowds during the late 1970s and into the 1980s, many drive-in owners were happy to sell their properties - often 30 acres or more - to real estate developers.
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Where there once were more than two dozen drive-ins in the Pittsburgh metro area, when the decade began that number had dwindled to three.
The Kane Road Drive-in in Beaver County closed in 2013 and was demolished in 2015, making way for a nine-building, 220-unit upscale apartment complex.
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In 2016, the Twin Hi-Way in Robinson was razed for redevelopment that included a Sheetz gas station and convenience store. This despite a social media campaign to save the drive-in and pleas to the township commissioners to intervene to prevent its demolition.
People obviously still cared. Why? Perhaps Twin Hi-Way owner Jerry Salonis summed it up best.
“There’s nothing like this on earth, watching a movie on a blanket, under the stars on a warm summer night,” he said at the time.
The Twin Hi-Way left the four-screen Dependable - which opened with the Betty Grable musical “When My Baby Smiles at Me” - as the last drive-in standing in the Pittsburgh area.
The drive-ins might be gone but they certainly aren’t forgotten They live on in websites such as Drive-ins and Cinema Treasures, which provide histories and photos of the places that now seem like strange locales in which to watch movies.
The map below lists the locations of Pittsburgh’s old drive-ins, the year they closed and what now occupies the sites on which they once stood. How many of them do you recall? How often did you go? Do you recall the goofy cartoons they used to show between movies to entice you to go to the concession stand?
Scroll over the Patch drive-in map and share your memories in the comments section.
Image via YouTube.
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