Pittsburgh's last public theater organ is backstage at a South Hills high school, and it's so much fun

It takes two people to wheel out the Wurtlitzer theater pipe organ in the auditorium at Keystone Oaks High School. The nearly 100-year-old organ, kept in its own special garage backstage, has been there since 1978, unbeknownst to many students and longtime faculty.

“Nobody knows that it’s here,” says Dale Abraham, the outgoing president of the Pittsburgh Area Theatre Organ Society (PATOS), the nonprofit organization that maintains the organ. “It's our job to make it more relevant.”

Most people are familiar with church organs — of which Pittsburgh has many — or stadium organs, like the one at Three Rivers Stadium that Pirates organist Vince Lascheid used to play. But in 1920s Pittsburgh, organs were also in every theater and “movie palace” including Heinz Hall, the Benedum Center, the former Warner Centre, and the Leona Theatre in Homestead.
Before the “talkies,” theater organs accompanied silent films, providing a musical score and sound effects. Each organ was operated by an organist who gave a timed, live performance during every movie showing.

“This thing imitated all the things that were going on on the screen,” Abraham tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “So if a car came down the road…” He then presses a key that fills the auditorium with a honking sound. In addition a three-tiered keyboard, the organ’s console has rows of large red, white, and yellow keys to conjure clopping horse hooves, bird song, and surf sounds to evoke the beach.
The Pittsburgh Area Theatre Organ Society’s 3/19 Mighty WurliTzer pipe organ is the region’s last theater organ that can be publicly viewed, and for 45 years, they’ve been putting on concerts and shows in the Keystone Oaks High School auditorium.

On Sat., July 13 at 7:30 p.m., PATOS will screen the 1927 silent film Wings — the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture — with live theater organ accompaniment by renowned organist Peter Krasinski. Admission is $20 in advance, $25 at the door, and free for students with ID. Tickets can be purchased in advance through Showclix.

After hearing train whistles and sleigh bells played on the organ, the first thing I ask Abraham is where the speakers amplifying it are.

“Everybody says that,” Abraham replies, and I’ll quickly come to realize my 21st century thinking.

“There are no speakers,” he explains. “There are 800 pipes behind these walls.”

Being made in the 1920s, theater organs were adapted from early telephone exchange systems and control the air going into their pipes through a large blower, pneumatics, and magnets. The Wurtlizer has 19 different “ranks” of pipe tuned to play specific tones, and backstage at Keystone Oaks, you can see them elaborately stacked alongside other instruments cued by the organ on stage. It took PATOS volunteers years to retrofit the auditorium and the organ cannot be used at another location.

“There’s your sleigh bells,” Abraham tells City Paper backstage, pointing to literal bells. "There's really a Chrysoglott up there. There's really a glockenspiel.”

The list goes on: there’s also a kettledrum, bass drum, castanets, and sandpaper used to make the beach sounds we’d heard.

The 1926 Wurtlizer — originally installed at the Prospect Theatre in Brooklyn — is also a delightful relic.

“It’s a contraption,” Abraham says. Rather than an austere church organ, the theater organ is painted Mary Kay pink with gold trim. Most theater organs are grand, Abraham says, describing the level of decoration as “mild” compared to others.

A music rack reads WURTLIZER in purple letters arced across a shining sun, and the organ is decorated with grapes, a flourish added by wine-loving PATOS board members who facilitated its restoration.

The loss of the theater organ had both local and global causes. Nearly all of Pittsburgh’s theater organs were destroyed in the 1936 Great St. Patrick’s Day flood, which deluged Downtown from the Point to Grant St. The few organs that survived soon fell by the wayside for films with sound, the talkies, which were a worldwide phenomenon by the 1930s.

“That's when the bulk of them went out,” Abraham says.

But groups of enthusiasts like PATOS remain enchanted with that brief heyday, dedicated to “preserving the glorious heritage of the theatre pipe organ and to presenting this wondrous musical instrument to the general public,” as the organization wrote on its website.

Abraham himself got hooked as a teenager in the 1960s when he went to a performance hosted by a theater organ society. He watched organist Hector Olivera play the organ as he slowly rose out of the orchestra pit at the former South Hills Theater in Dormont.

“I just, the hair on my arms stood on end,” Abraham remembers. “This guy was so good. I fell in love with it immediately.”

PATOS had feared that appreciation for the theater organ would dwindle as its members aged and there'd be few people left to maintain it — “we expected to shrivel off and die,” as Abraham put it.

But recently, silent films have experienced a resurgence, showing on Turner Classic Movies, at Row House Cinema, and at last year’s inaugural Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival. Alongside this, Abraham has seen interest in PATOS increase and “we're on an upward trajectory for attendance that we haven't experienced for decades.”

Ten years ago, their public shows averaged around 80 people in the 900-seat auditorium. Even with COVID shutdowns, that attendance number has tripled, with shows now drawing around 250 people.

The incoming PATOS president is a 22-year-old pianist, and recently, a young organist came to play Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Bruno Mars songs on the theater organ. Long hidden at Keystone Oaks High School, PATOS started holding seminars showing off the theater organ for students in the school's band.

“And they're in awe of it,” Abraham tells CP. “Young people, I think to an extent, think it's kind of campy fun. If you think it's campy, by all means, come.”

With renewed hope for the future, Abraham says “even though our instrument [is] 100 years old… [it] still has the capability to entertain.”

“I didn't really believe that myself at one point,” he adds. “But I know now that this thing can be made to appeal to modern art audiences. I want people to know that there’s this really crazy contraption called a theater organ and it can be so much fun.”