Steelers win leaves Oakland a mess

Monday was a hangover.

The night before, rioters and harmless revelers alike flooded the… Monday was a hangover.

The night before, rioters and harmless revelers alike flooded the streets of Pittsburgh to celebrate the Steelers’ 21-10 defeat of the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL.

Hordes of people gathered in front of the Cathedral of Learning for a raucous hour of joyous screaming and rioting. Bigelow Boulevard was packed tight enough that a few people started crowd surfing, while a mob of students and Oakland residents flipped a parked car before dancing on top of it and trying to light it on fire.

One student yelled to the assembled crowd, “This car likes the Seahawks!”

Some people kicked in the windows of the car and grabbed whatever they could from the inside. One person held up a blanket like a trophy.

All told, 34 people were arrested Sunday night, according to a release from the city police. Three of the people arrested were juveniles. The majority of arrests, 21, were for failure to disperse.

No personnel from the Pittsburgh Police Department were available to comment because of the preparations needed for today’s Super Bowl parade – which is Downtown and starts at 11 a.m.

Pitt Police partnered with the city police to help control the crowd.

Pitt Police Chief Tim Delaney said that there were very few arrests and citations considering the size of the celebration.

“You have a thousand people standing there and two people will do something stupid,” he said.

Delaney said that there were, to the best of his knowledge, a total of four cars overturned.

On Forbes Avenue Sunday, people were tearing down street signs and carrying them like the standard of a drunken medieval army. Following them down the street was a keg carried by the combined efforts of another crowd.

On Semple Street, a group of fans lit a couch on fire. They added a tire, wooden planks and a dumpster to the blaze, but firefighters responding to the scene put it out in a flash of steam.

Some members of the crowd took to chanting “Firefighters,” in a way that sounded suspiciously similar to the tune “Let’s go Steelers.”

Delaney said that building owners in Central and South Oakland were told before Sunday to have their tenants remove any furniture from porches. In the event of a couch fire, however, there were extra fire trucks dispatched to Oakland.

The police closed Forbes Avenue between McKee Place and Bigelow Boulevard in preparation for the celebrations. At about 11 p.m., officers cleared out the front steps of the Cathedral of Learning when they discovered that students were enjoying a keg right in front of the building’s doors.

“I expect nothing less from the city of Pittsburgh,” student Lauren Judy said of the night’s revelry and spotted destruction. “I love it, it’s just crazy. People were uprooting little trees in front of the Cathedral and passing them around, and they had a keg up on the Cathedral front balcony and people were doing keg stands. It was awesome.”

Police in riot gear eventually marched through the crowd on Bigelow Boulevard and forced people to leave the street.

The party continued on Forbes Avenue, where students – many of them clad in black and gold and a few of them shirtless – ran amok, shouting Steeler slogans.

Rioters knocked over newspaper stands and trash receptacles, tearing them apart and setting fire to the waste. Streaming toiler paper rolls were flung across Forbes from the Litchfield Towers patio.

Parts of Forbes Avenue were soon covered with trash and debris, as some people emptied out rubber trash bins and kicked them around like beach balls. One trio of students uprooted a post with an emergency phone booth on it and disappeared with it down Atwood Street.

When there was nothing left to knock over, rioters tossed the toppled newspaper stands around while a pile of trash was lit aflame in front of Joe Mama’s.

“I think this is great,” student Brian McGuirk said. “I wish they hadn’t messed with the cars though. My car caught on fire a little bit from a nearby bonfire.”

At one point in the night, people piled onto the back of a WTAE van on Bellefield Avenue. The people inside the van shook the unwanted passengers and quickly drove away.

While there were many students rioting, there appeared to be an equal number of students who were out simply to watch the havoc unfold – many of them holding up cameras and camcorders to capture the moment.

“God bless Pittsburgh,” Pitt Greensburg student Aloysius Leap said. “Oakland is a zoo. I think it would’ve been like this whether we’d won or lost. I came all the way from Polish Hill to see the riots here. I think a lot of people have come down here from other parts of Pittsburgh. We came down to Oakland just to see the chaos.”

Only six of Sunday’s arrestees were Pittsburgh residents, according to the city police’s release. Twenty were from other parts of Pennsylvania and eight were from other states.

By midnight, Forbes Avenue looked like it was hit by a tornado. Tension between police and the remaining rioters grew worse as state troopers and mounted police began to systematically clear people out of Forbes and Fifth avenues from Oakland Avenue to Bigelow Boulevard

One man got into a struggle with police outside the William Pitt Union’s main entrance. The man was shoved onto a bench, handcuffed and arrested. A group of students and onlookers cursed at the police until officers shooed them away.

Elsewhere, however, the atmosphere between police and celebrants was decidedly less tense.

“People are coming up saying, ‘You guys are great,'” Delaney said. “It went well. It was a celebration.”

For more pictures of the chaos, Click Here.