There’s a sweet, sentimental song by Frank Sinatra called “There Used To Be a Ballpark.” It’s a touching lament remembering things from our youth, particularly classic old ballparks (think of Forbes Field, Ebbets Field). Call me odd but I think that way about barns.

I can’t quite put it into words, but I just love old barns. I was born in Pittsburgh (Magee-Womens Hospital), first lived in the Verona-Penn Hills area, moved to Russellton (a small coal town in northern Allegheny County) and then grew up in suburban Butler. In Butler, we lived on a farm for several years. It was wonderful. The acreage, corn stalks, rolling hills, the woods, the pond and of course, the barn.

I can’t quite explain it, but there’s something so distinctive and comforting about a barn for a kid.

There’s the feel, the smell. There’s the large entrance door, big enough to drive a tractor through. There’s the wooden floor, massive beams, stalls for animals, old machinery and of course, the hay.

In the cold of winter, it’s warm in the barn because of the hay. Ask anyone who raises animals and they’ll tell you about what a wonder hay is.

We kids would hang out inside the barn with the dog and cats, and jump from the loft into hay piles. We would explore with friends and cousins who thought the barn was really cool. We even took the unusual step of mounting a basketball hoop and creating an indoor court that was the neatest thing. During the brutally cold winter of 1979, I spent hours inside shooting hoops and throwing baseballs inside bushel baskets turned on their sides — strike zones to practice pitching.

You can do stuff like that in a big old barn.

I would often go inside alone and sit and think and read. It was a place of calm and serenity.

My grandfather and his siblings had a barn in the Emporium-Rich Valley area of Cameron County. That was more of a conventional farming barn, filled with chickens. We would collect eggs to bring to the house to fry up with ham for breakfast.

I’m thinking of this now because I’ve been watching a classic old barn down the street get knocked down.

It’s sad to see a barn get torn down for some new housing development or for no reason other than the fact the barn is no longer being used.

We’re often told the barn is maybe no longer safe and ought to be razed for insurance reasons.

I wonder how true that is.

Two barns within three miles of my house were torn down for those reasons. One was leveled about 10 years ago and is now a pile of rotting rubble. The other was just torn down next to an abandoned home we called “the chicken house.” If that barn was hazardous, you could’ve fooled me. It took the wreckers weeks to bulldoze it.

As they say, they don’t build things like they used to.

Now, I drive by these one-time mementos of a simpler, slower time and say to my kids, “There used to be a barn here.” My kids listen as their old man waxes nostalgic. They find it odd, but they also ask, “Dad, can we go find a barn and go inside?”

I tell them that I would like to, if we could find one.

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