Heidelberg Raceway: Where the Big Top Fell

This site outside Pittsburgh once hosted two very different kinds of spectacle. Heidelberg Raceway opened in nineteen forty-eight as a Pittsburgh Racing Association track, drawing stock-car fans and and hosting several NASCAR races on its oval, beginning in nineteen forty-nine.

But the moment that sealed its place in entertainment history came in nineteen fifty-six, when Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus performed its final show ever under the traditional canvas Big Top right here. Rising costs and competition from movies and television had made the tent-circus model unsustainable. After generations on the road, the canvas came down for the last time on this ground. The raceway itself closed in nineteen seventy-three, leaving behind a field that once witnessed the end of two American eras in a single decade.