Steel Curtain

Kennywood Park – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

There’s always an anomaly to any rule. In this case, the rule is “the United States leads the trend in building record-breaking roller coasters.” More than any other single country in the world, American parks have historically adopted the “bigger is better” mentality. While there are a few coasters overseas that have edged out and held onto the current records for their categories,¹ most of the landmark record-breakers that preceded those slightly larger and faster installations in their category were built on American soil. The first mile-plus long coaster. The first 200’, 300’ and 400’ tall coasters. The first 100mph coaster. Numerous inversion records have been set in the US, too: the first modern looping coaster (Knott’s, 1975) and vertical loop (Magic Mountain, 1976), the first triple looping coaster (Cedar Point, 1976), four loops (Carowinds, 1980), five loops (Darien Lake, 1982), six loops (Kings Island, 1987), and seven loops (Great America, 1988).

But then… that was it. Spain took the record for eight inversions in 1995, then the U.K. took the records for 10 in 2002 and again for 14 in 2014, doubling the previous American record… and at a theme park that’s oddly famous for how many building restrictions it has. Not only was 1988 the last time an American coaster would break the world record for inversions, it also appeared to be the last time the American record for inversions would be broken for quite some time… even years after the coaster that first claimed that record had been retired for scrap. While numerous stateside coasters would equal that prime-numbered loop count, for whatever reason not a single American park in more than thirty years would ever take the step to break the domestic inversion record. The anomaly to the rule.

Not that anyone really cared. The number of inversions weren’t really the marker of a great coaster, so if you’re not going to get a worldwide record out of it, why bother? Still, it always struck me as an odd phenomenon given this country’s obsession with all things excessive, that not one single American park in the course of three decades would get around to building an 8+ inversion coaster, even as they became relatively commonplace in Europe and Asia. Somebody had to do it eventually, right?

That “eventually” turned out to be 2019, and the “somebody” was the classic Kennywood, located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, working with S&S Worldwide. Not exactly the park nor the manufacturer I would have put money on to finally cross that particular Rubicon, but in a way I’m glad that Kennywood was the ones to have done it. Not only is it a nice national record for this traditional amusement park to hold onto (and going one extra with nine inversions even, technically a world-first!), but the unexpected nature of its record-breaking spirit even oddly fits with the park’s own history. While I love Kennywood for its collection of classic wooden coasters and vintage rides, the Steel Phantom-turned-Revenge also quite literally looms large over the park’s legacy. Not “just” a traditionally-minded amusement park, Kennywood also has an identity as the small park that’s not afraid to think big, really BIG, but only when the opportunity is just right.

Like the Phantom, Steel Curtain’s national inversion record doesn’t feel like a gimmick just for the sake of record-breaking. It feels organic to the coaster’s unique character, a recognition of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a landmark attraction that just so happens to pick up a few national and/or international records along the way. First, in the early 1990’s there was the chance to finally build down the side of the park’s iconic ravine… and thus while they’re at it, claiming a record for drop and speed. (If you’re gonna commit to it, why waste that extra vertical real-estate going any shorter?) Then, with the Steel Phantom’s loops long-gone, in the late 2010’s there was another chance to build on one of the park’s last large open parcels on the site of the venerated Log Jammer flume to make a new signature 200+ multi-looping coaster… and thus while they’re at it, also easily claiming a national inversion record. (Again, if you’re gonna commit to it, why waste that extra kinetic energy on any fewer elements?)

Steel Curtain feels every bit as much of a worthy successor and counterpart to the Phantom legacy. It would have been easy for Kennywood (and especially their new-since-2007 parent company, Parques Reunidos and Palace Entertainment) to have taken a half-measure and built a decently middle-of-the-line steel coaster, the kind you can find by the dozens across all the second-tier Six Flags or Cedar Fair parks. But Kennywood should be a more special place than any of those parks, and so if they’re going to risk disrupting the carefully balanced sense of historic character the park has cultivated over the last century, better to go the Phantom route and make a statement that will itself stand the test of time.

I will admit, however: the scale did worry me. Unlike Steel Phantom, which was built on the outer boundary of the “new” Kennywood where the former Sunlite Pool and paid parking lot once went, and thus had a fairly clean slate to chart a new identity for that area, Steel Curtain was going into the historic core of the park, next to and even over the central lagoon, where it would be immediate neighbors with a classic attraction preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary later this decade. While newer rides aren’t completely foreign to this part of the park, such as the 2000’s-made Aero 360, or even the relatively “new” 1970’s-made Log Jammer that Steel Curtain replaced, those have been modest attractions that fit with the scale and style of traditional Kennywood. There’s nothing traditional about Steel Curtain.

Theme park design has long placed a prime importance on scale and perspective. Those factors are what allows a space to feel composed and balanced when you enter it. Scale tells your eye where to look (the bigger items stand out first), and perspective helps determine how and in what sequence you look at them, moving your eyes (and feet) across the space in a natural flow. These principles are also what make techniques such as “forced perspective” possible, creating the appearance that a structure is larger (or more distant) than it really is.

I strongly believe these principles should not be viewed as exclusive to theme parks. Kennywood is proudly a traditional amusement park, not a theme park, but it uses many of the principles of themed design. The historic character of Kennywood isn’t purely the result of museum-like preservation. Much of its vintage appeal has to be intentionally restored, re-created, or even re-imagined to keep it alive and evolving in the 20th century. That requires deliberate attention to the designed space.

Wandering Kennywood for a full day for the first time in over a decade, I was struck by how careful attention is paid to color theory, landscape design, zone identities, sightline control, and creating moments of compression and release. Often Kennywood provides better examples of these design techniques than many top-rated modern theme parks. One thing that sets Kennywood apart from many of those theme parks is the way it integrates a large number of mechanical rides into the design and mise-en-scene of each area, which lends the park overall a much more compact and kinetic quality. However, seeing how much modern theme parks have trended toward a design orthodoxy emphasizing uniformity and stasis for the purposes of hyperrealism, I’d say that’s a very good counterpoint for Kennywood to provide.²

So, then… how does an NFL-themed 220-foot tall coaster affect the balanced scale and perspective of the rest of Kennywood?

From a distance, the addition is impressive. Phantom’s Revenge has the bigger drop, but it’s down a ravine, with only the dark, spindly first two hills visible from outside. Iconic, yes, but Steel Curtain avoids using the ravine to stand at a much higher altitude above the Monongahela valley than the Phantom. The bold black-and-gold colors representing both the Steelers, the city of Pittsburgh, and even Kennywood itself (with its iconic arrow signs) certainly help inspire a uniquely local sense of arrival.

Getting inside the park and walking around the bend to reveal the full lagoon, my first impression was, “that’s… too… big!” Having such a large structure placed directly above and behind the scene renders the foreground structures (namely the Racer’s signature arched station and the nearby clocktower facade) to appear much smaller by contrast, by drawing the eye upward and thus pushing those structures downward, minimizing their presence and the overall balance of the lagoon.

If Steel Curtain’s core layout somehow could have been turned backward, with the lift hill rising away from the park to put the largest columns further in the distance, as well as to highlight the unique symmetry of the banana roll facing the park, it would have been so much for the better. But I don’t know how that would have been accomplished without messing with the layout’s bridge and lagoon pass, which is a segment that I actually kind of like its appearance within the park. It keeps the footprint to a minimum while activating the midway and the backside of the lagoon in a really kinetic and artful way. It’s certainly much better than the Skycoaster, which continues to look like a high-tension power line in the middle of the park for over a quarter-century now.

Plus, while the scale of the main structure is a bit too large for that zone, it used the best possible location, positioned at the furthest corner of the lagoon to serve as a secondary visual anchor for the western edge of the park opposite the Phantom. Most of the structure’s base is hidden behind the Racer as you approach, which helps mask the true distance and makes the ride both appear larger and slightly unreal.

Once you’re inside the new Steelers Country zone, the coaster truly dominates. Getting to walk underneath those massive columns with the coaster trains inverting overhead is quite a staggering presentation that keeps all eyes glued to the sky whenever it passes by. The rest of Steelers Country was little more than concrete and some planters as of 2019, but I’ll give it a pass for now. The area development, which includes a handful of football-inspired interactives and a new dining location, is being carried out by Cincinnati-based JRA, and should finally be online for the 2021 season.

The queue is positioned beneath the coaster. Waiting nearly 3.5 hours for my first evening ride in the front row, I had plenty of time to appreciate (and photograph) Steel Curtain’s design.³ I was stunned that a coaster this large and with so many elements could also be as compact as it is. The layout, designed by the prolific Joe Draves of Ride Centerline, is an object lesson in efficiency and elegance for compact coasters. Normally I like to imagine alternative layouts to see if one might provide a better emotional arc for riders, but here every element fits inside one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, in a way that I really can’t imagine moving or swapping any parts of it around without fundamentally altering the whole concept.

The way the lift hill and the banana roll both frame and support each other; the way the sea serpent inversions trace the path below the corkscrewing dive drop; the linear simplicity of the lagoon segment, especially with the incredible arch bridge over the midway supporting both an airtime hill and the zero-G stall. Virtually every element on this coaster shares or cantilevers off support columns used by another element, a fact that both lends to its visual elegance and no doubt helped Kennywood maximize the impact of their new ride without completely blowing the budget. More than nearly any other coaster I can think of, Steel Curtain is one giant single kinetic sculpture.

I want to explore the concept of “elegance” as applied to design and roller coasters. To evaluate the quality of a design, one should strive to make it as simple as it can be, but not any simpler. “Elegance” is a good way to describe this type of relative simplicity. Simplicity implies a composition of as few components as possible. Minimalist coasters such as Shivering Timbers might be this kind of simple. Steel Curtain, with its nine different inversions, nearly all of them unique from one another, is clearly not that kind of simple. Yet, when you look at its footprint and layout, a pattern emerges which all of these elements fit neatly within. The pattern is simple, even if the elements that compose that pattern are very diverse. Elegance is simplicity achieved from complexity. The pieces are all different, but every piece has its place.

Looking over Steel Curtain’s layout, the pattern can be reduced down to four nearly symmetrical groupings, which I shall give each its own cutesy name inspired by its overhead plan view configuration:

“The Arrow” – The straight lift hill symmetrically bisected by the banana roll.

“The Wave” – The corkscrewing dive drop and sea serpent slightly offset and vertically stacked on top of each other.

“The Line” – The airtime, dive loop, zero-G stall over the lagoon, all forming a double-layer straight line.

“The Circle” – The final two inversions that form a wonky helix finale directly underneath “The Wave”.

(Of these four,“The Circle” could benefit from a little more simplification, for reasons outlined later below.)

This isn’t quite the same thing as the “sequencing theory” of coasters I’ve proposed before, which is much more focused on the linear on-ride experience rather than the design and appearance of the physical layout itself. Note that both “the Arrow” and “the Wave” are composed of two separate elements from different points along the layout. While the rider experience is the more important perspective to take for evaluating the quality of a ride, the design elegance of the layout is important for making the ride appear at harmony within its physically situated environment.

Perhaps that’s why, going back to my original questions about scale and perspective, I came around to appreciating Steel Curtain’s towering modern presence in traditional Kennywood: there’s an elegance to the rides appearance that emerged the longer I looked at it, internalizing its patterns and presence within a park landscape that already felt close to whole. And it’s that kind of subtle, emergent elegance really is the mark of a contemporary classic among countless other timeless classics.

On a related note: there’s been much hullabaloo over the choice of IP for Steel Curtain and Steeler’s Country. Much of this has already been discussed in other forums that I don’t have much to weigh in on here. Does IP belong at a traditional park like Kennywood? Not my preference but it has precedence. Does making it a hyper-local IP like the Pittsburgh Steelers make it better? Sure, especially since it lends the gold and black color scheme which looks great in Kennywood. What about the future of the NFL and other professional sporting leagues as sources of IP for regional parks in the future? As a professional working in this industry, I have to say that’s a great innovation. If IP is the way of the future for parks, it’s better to have more diverse and localized sources to pick from, especially as the legacy media studios become increasingly consolidated. But speaking personally as a hobbyist, I really couldn’t care less one way or the other that it’s a sportsball coaster.

Apart from the color scheme, the one element that I thought the Steelers theme contributed well to the experience was the audio. The in-station safety recordings are by Steelers broadcast announcers Bill Hillgrove and Tunch Ilken, whose vernacular and imperative commands humorously meld the tones of both sportscasting and ride safety procedures. And the lift hill plays the opening 45 seconds to Renegade by Styx, which is apparently a Steelers tradition but it also works well in providing a moody atmosphere to anticipate the ascent and the corkscrewing dive drop. It’s a little hard to hear over the anti-rollbacks, but it still adds an extra layer of theatricality to the experience.

So, does it ride as good as it looks? Pretty much. A coaster that’s this tall and fast but manages to stay butter smooth is going to be a very good attraction no matter what. As I said, the elegance of the layout isn’t as apparently beneficial to the on-ride sequence, which has a fairly predictable undulating rhythm of big inverting elements, occasionally punctuated by a few quick staccato bursts of airtime. There’s not a weak moment along the layout, although it does struggle keeping the “wow” factor at the same high level all the way to the end. The overall flow of the entire experience is more important than any single element, and that quality alone is more than enough to earn Steel Curtain a spot on my list of “Very Good Coasters,” although if I had one knock against it it’s that if I were to rank each element in order of favorability, it would basically be in exact descending order from beginning to end of the ride.

The corkscrewing dive drop is, quite frankly, one of the best single coaster elements I’ve ever experienced. Maybe even the best? Nearly-vertical or vertical or beyond-vertical drops are nice, but they’re also pretty much a dime a dozen these days. The 197 foot tall Drachen Fire-inspired inverting drop is the perfect blend of grace, trick psychology, and good old-fashioned sublime thrills. It’s the tallest inversion in the world, but it’s so much more than just that. The way it teases the entry, gently flows around the inverted arc with a clear view of the ground, and then does a surprise head fake as you’re already in the most precarious of positions so it can reverse back to upside down as it drops out into a seemingly bottomless half loop freefall. What more could I ask for from a single element?

If there was an element that offered something more, it would probably look similar to the banana roll. This second element is again a sublime treat, emphasizing the gracefulness of the maneuver that feels like one continuous movement even though it manages to achieve two separate moments of inversion.⁴ Again, the sheer height and scale of it, combined with the ability to suspend riders in a state of non-uprightness for much longer than feels natural, all while maintaining a fluidity of motion, again elevates this to be among the world’s greatest coaster elements.

A small airtime dip separates the next big maneuver, the sea serpent. If the banana roll is one way to design an alternative cobra roll by tightening and elevating the middle, the sea serpent is another alternative by simply reversing the flow of the second inversion. I’m not sure why cobra rolls are as ubiquitous as they are while sea serpents are rarely seen, but based on Steel Curtain’s, I’d prefer the sea serpent a little more, as the continuous flow around the middle corkscrews just feels more satisfactory than having to bounce back out the way you came. Shredding through the bright yellow support columns for the lift and drop is a neat visual, too.

The airtime hill over the midway is a good “middle” element to signal the ride is about halfway done and shifting into an ever-so-slightly different gear. Following that, the dive loop has a good twist at the top followed by the weightless satisfaction of falling out of a half loop. Simple but effective. A short flat speed run underneath the superstructure points it back into the zero-G stall. It’s not much of a “stall”, reversing back out almost as soon as it’s inverted. This is also the snappiest (some might say choppiest) element of the entire layout. Whether that’s a good thing, I’m not certain.

There’s a slightly awkward double-up into the corkscrew; a perfectly fine if a tad perfunctory element. Rounding a helix, it rises back up into another Drachen Fire-inspired inversion, this time a cutback. While I’m glad the element didn’t go extinct, it feels like one of those awkward 90’s gimmick inversions that tries to plug together two halves of an existing element together. Is it a franken-corkscrew, or is it an overbanked turn that overreaches? Either way, I find its intentionally vacillating flow more odd than enjoyable.

The first two-thirds of the layout had such good flow to it, it’s a shame that the final few elements start to feel disjointed from one another. It’s not a bad finale, and if anything the slightly milder finish makes it so the 4,000 foot long coaster doesn’t feel like it’s ending too early. But at the same park with the Thunderbolt’s legendary final drop or the Phantom Revenge’s wicked airtime-spiked second act transformation, I do find myself wishing that Steel Curtain could have integrated its last few elements a little more thoughtfully with the overall arc and flow of the ride experience. Give us an actual finale, instead of the final few inversions left over on the list of weird inversion types to try.

As it is, I would probably rank Steel Curtain my third favorite coaster in the park… but that really just speaks to how much I still adore the aforementioned Thunderbolt and Phantom’s Revenge. Steel Curtain now lends a fantastic mega-steel coaster compliment to Phantom’s Revenge, along with the three top-notch classic wooden coasters from the 1920’s, all of them essential. Add to that list the the fun variety of elements that Sky Rocket packs in over the park entrance, along with the still goofy dark ride pleasures of The Exterminator, which somehow represent the lower tier grade coasters found here. Taken all together, I can think of extremely few other parks in the world that have a better average coaster quality. How did Kennywood ever end up with such a fantastic collection of coasters?

Kennywood