It was 60 years ago today: The Beatles swept into Pittsburgh for brief but memorable visit

It was another Monday afternoon in September in Pittsburgh, with the usual industrial smoke scenting the air on a day that had seen drizzle and fog.

At exactly 4:36 p.m. on that day in 1964, the wheels of a Lockheed Electra aircraft traveling from Baltimore hit the runway at Greater Pittsburgh Airport, as the airport was then known. There to greet the passengers were an estimated 4,000 people, hordes of reporters, and two limousines and an escort of six police cruisers.

The Beatles had come to town.

Plenty of concerts in Pittsburgh’s history have gained legendary status, whether it’s a newly-electric Bob Dylan cranking up “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Syria Mosque in 1966, Elvis Presley belting out his hits at a New Year’s Eve show at Civic Arena seven months before he died, or Bob Marley playing his last concert ever at the Stanley Theatre eight months before he died. But perhaps the most legendary of them all is the Beatles’ Sept. 14, 1964, appearance at Civic Arena, the only time the Fab Four played Pittsburgh.

The stop in Pittsburgh 60 years ago was part of a 24-city, 32-concert blitz across North America six months after John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr took the country by storm after their appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Organized in the months after those landmark broadcasts by General Artists Corporation in New York, it took the Beatles to most of the continent’s major cities in a frantic, one-month span, starting Aug. 20, 1964, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and concluding on Sept. 20, 1964, at the Paramount Theater in New York.

Source: Brad Hundt/observer-reporter.com

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