A little over one week post surgery, and I’m stuck on my couch at home for the time being with my foot elevated. I am happy for any diversion, and so when I saw the short tribute video for The Climbing Wall, posted on Gripped Mag online, I watched it. I loved seeing views of this place I have loved but hadn’t seen in a while and hearing how much other people loved the place. I was sad to hear “us-them” language from people interviewed in the video. I know that feelings were hurt because a beloved place was closing, but I didn’t realize that because people had left TCW for another gym, we were somehow the enemy, somehow less-than. It made me sad that the climbing community in Pittsburgh had been divided in some people’s minds. I also heard the word “history” bandied about in some of the interviews– The Climbing Wall did have a lot of history before it closed. The video wasn’t able to get at all of that history, so I want to contribute my own part of the story, just to add a little slice. It goes back much farther than the Ascend schism… all the way back to the early 90s.
In 1994, I walked through the entrance of The Climbing Wall Inc. for the first time with my then boyfriend Brian, who was an employee. This was back when there was merely a chunky wooden school teacher’s desk sitting inside the entrance, everything was done on paper, and pea gravel filling the walkways, later to be replaced by shredded tires, and then finally, gymnastics flooring. Brian brought me there, kicking and screaming, to teach me the mechanics of belaying and to see if I could actually climb the walls. I was terrified of embarrassing myself in front of this guy I was falling in love with. I made it out alive, dignity intact, and with an appreciation for this crazy sport that instantly clicked for me.
Plus, I met Spyder that night!
Brian had been at The Climbing Wall almost from the moment its doors first opened. He learned how to climb, and he met his first climbing partners there. He was a part time employee through college, and post graduation he became the full-time manager for four years. And wither he went, there I followed. I also worked at TCW part time, worked so many birthday parties, and became a route setter in the small bouldering area that was added on around ’95 (my memory is a little fuzzy here). In addition to that, we climbed four days a week. Brian and I lived and breathed climbing at TCW half the time and at the New River Gorge the other half. Working in a climbing gym and trying also to be a climber took much of the joy out of it for Brian and in 1999, he went in a different career direction. But TCW remained our gym for many years after that. For one thing, if you are a manager of TCW, your family gets a lifetime membership. For another, it was still the best, and only, place in the city to climb. Even in the early 2000s, it was getting busier and busier; even after it took on the Shady Skates area and the bouldering moved over there.
Regulars came and went, some to new cities, some to new activities, and yet Brian and I, true Pittsburgh die-hards, now with kids, stayed.
When rumors started spreading that some local guys wanted to open a state of the art gym, Brian and I were excited. Finally! TCW was bursting at its seams, and even with improvements to the bouldering area– air conditioning!– it was still packed on week nights and weekend days. The reality was, even before those rumors started, that the gym was old and dirty, sometimes it was even hard to breathe. In such an old building, making any grand improvements much less expanding was impossible. Seeing this limitation and the ever growing interest in climbing, every manager of TCW in his time would eventually start looking around to either open a new separate facility or find a place to move that had potential for growth, and all of them were unsuccessful. The gym didn’t have the funds.
A chunk of the Pittsburgh climbing community was ready for a state of the art facility. Every other major city in the world had at least one. It seemed that Pittsburgh was the last hold out. Other rumors were abounding at the same time that someone from the “outside” was going to come in and build a gym, and we were worried about that. We were worried that people were going to come in and build something that wasn’t right for the Pittsburgh community because they didn’t know Pittsburgh. So Brian and I decided to support the local guys in opening a gym. We wanted to be part of that. We didn’t think it would ruin TCW, but it would ease away some of the crowding issues, and make it a safer place for the people who did want to continue to climb there. We knew there would be people who would continue to climb there, even if it wasn’t us.
When Ascend South Side opened in 2017, our family went back and forth between the two facilities for a while. Our young sons did some kid classes at TCW, there were hours once a week for homeschoolers we attended, and I still set routes on occasion as I had been over the years. Eventually though we switched to climbing at Ascend. We did not leave with bad feelings, we left because it was time. We had out grown it, which is sometimes how life is. We loved the wide open space and clean lines of the new gym. We had paid our dues to the tiny gym model, and it had served us well. My strongest outdoor climbing years so far were TCW years.
I was saddened a few years later when we heard that TCW was going to close for good, and a little miffed that its final demise was accelerated by Ascend building a new facility practically right next door. Business is business, I suppose. Buying the smaller gym out was probably a kinder way of doing business in this case then just opening something up and letting the life blood trickle out of the older place. I had a little bit of a sentimental attachment still left, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to TCW’s closing party. I didn’t want to say goodbye because I already had in my own way, a little bit at a time. Honestly, I didn’t want to cry about it, and I would have.
Climbing is an equalizing sport on many levels. It brings people together from all sorts of disparate corners of society and forms them into a community where the commonality of climbing surmounts many barriers. My friend John Sweeney came to mind just after watching the video. He passed away last year. He was another regular at TCW until he, like so many others, moved away. He was a colleague of my first boss at Pitt, a higher-up in the faculty there, a big wig, but at the gym he was just a man who wanted to climb. He was a beginner in his 50s, but he would climb with Brian and I all the time for a couple of years. The three of us were just people together, just a few nerdy goofballs who loved to climb. Climbing makes us all into plain-old people.
At the Ascend gyms, people can come and just be people climbing together, in a similar way. That isn’t different. It’s part of their mission to nurture that sentiment. But certainly the climbing community has changed as it has grown, and this is true outside of Pittsburgh too. It can never be the same as it was 10 years ago, or 15, 20, 30 years ago. I hope we can figure out how to deal with those growing pains and still call each other friends, and if not that, at least be people together who love to climb. It seems to already be happening as I look around at Ascend Point Breeze and more often see some old faces of those I once knew from TCW.
