... Last November demolition began on the venerable Spectrum at which time I posted a blog about my memories of attending and/or working more than 2,000 events in that building over four plus decades. Now, four months later, the Spectrum is all but gone and the site at "Broad and Pattison" on which it stood is little more than a rubble filled hole in the ground. To honor the memory of this now departed friend I am reposting that blog once more (along with some pictures I have taken of the demolition process) in the hopes that it will remind you of a few of your own favorite recollections of the Spectrum as well. ...
(See demolition images at the end of blog)
The Spectrum (1967-2010)
While the massive
"Coliseum" in
Rome has not hosted a "show" of any kind for many many centuries, at least it is still there, and so are many other places of public entertainment in Europe and the rest of the world that have not been otherwise destroyed by war or natural disaster. However in the
"throw away" culture of North America (where only one real "modern war" -- the American "Civil War" -- has ever been fought),
arenas and
stadiums (and buildings of all kinds for that matter) seem to be almost as disposable as yesterday's newspaper (and you may not be able to find one of those in the years to come either).
In my home town of
Philadelphia, for instance, such former houses of sporting glory as the
Baker Bowl, Connie Mack Stadium (formerly called
Shibe Park), the
The Philadelphia Arena (at 46th & Market Streets),
Convention Hall, Municipal Stadium (later called
JFK Stadium), and
Veterans Stadium are all gone, as are many of the great theaters of my childhood that once populated the city such as the
Mastbaum, Erlanger, Boyd, Locust Street, Earle, Goldman, Stanton, Orpheum, Palace, Randolph, Plaza, and
Metropolitan Opera House among others. Today -- November 23, 2010 -- one of the greatest of all of the city's palaces of culture and sport began to fall as well --
The Spectrum.
The
2010-11 hockey season is my
42nd one working in the game. I was
21 years old the first time I walked into the Spectrum was
October 4, 1967, for an ice show. I was
63 the last time I attended an event in the building which was the AHL Phantoms final playoff game there (ironically against arch rival Hershey) on
April 18, 2009. Over that time I have spent more
2,000 nights at the Spectrum including virtually every
NHL, AHL, or
RHI hockey game there leaving me with many, many memories of
glory -- and some
gloom as well -- about the Spectrum.
As the noble arena begins to fall let me tell the story of how, because of the creation of the
Philadelphia Flyers, that the
The Spectrum came into being in the first place.
* * * * * *
When the NHL announced in
1965 that it was going to double in size from
six teams to
twelve beginning with the
1967-68 season,
Philadelphia, PA, looked like quite a longshot to get one of those half dozen new franchises if, for no other reason, than no adequate arena for such a team to play in was either in place or on the drawing board. At a minimum, the league had announced that it would require a
12,500-seat indoor facility be already available (or construction committed to) for a franchise bid to even be accepted for consideration. While minor professional hockey had been played in the city more or less continuously since
1927, the only brush that Philadelphia had ever had with the NHL came for just one awful season (
1930-31) with the worst team (
4-36-4) in the history of the league -- the
Philadelphia Quakers -- which now almost
eight decades later
still holds the
league record for the
fewest wins in a season at just
four!
In
1965 the only existing building that had ever hosted pro hockey in Philadelphia was the old, and by then considerably run down
"Arena" in West Philadelphia -- a
1920 vintage structure with barely
6,000 seats and virtually no parking. Although the
NBA Philadelphia 76'ers played only a few blocks away from the Arena in the city's 1930's WPA era
Civic Center Convention Hall, that building had no permanent ice plant and could seat no more than
8,500. (Later the
WHA Philadelphia Blazers (
1972-73) and the
NAHL (
1974-77)/
AHL (
1977-79)
Philadelphia Firebirds would use that facility for hockey playing on a portable rink.)
A group of businessmen that included then Eagles' Vice President
Edward M. Snider put together a bid for an NHL expansion franchise for the city. When it was determined that the necessary new arena with a seating for approximately 15,000 could be built in time for the 1967-68 season, the group began planning in earnest. On Tuesday,
February 8, 1966, after a year of almost secret preparation, the Philadelphia group made its presentation before a meeting of the
NHL Board of Governors in
New York City along with a dozen other expansion franchise applicants from a total of
eight cities.
Although many hockey people had long known about the Philadelphia group's interest (as did
City Hall), the formal submission of the proposal came as an almost complete surprise to Philadelphia's sports fans. Although the Philadelphia group had made an excellent proposal, so did many of the other groups. Whether or not Philadelphia would get one of the six prized franchises was no sure thing.
The next day, however, the NHL announced that Philadelphia was indeed one of the
six winners in the expansion derby. Along with the other new entries to be located in
Minneapolis-St. Paul (Minnesota),
Pittsburgh, Oakland, St. Louis, and
Los Angeles, Philadelphia would join the league's new
"West" Division and begin play in just twenty months. In the meantime each new club would have to pay the league an entry fee of
$2,000,000 -- pocket chage by today's standards -- and find a place to play that met the NHL's requirements.
While three of the new cities (
St. Louis, Oakland, and
Pittsburgh) had suitable existing buildings already available, the franchises in
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and
Minnesota would have to build new ones from scratch. A site in Philadelphia was quickly made available by the city -- a municipally owned five acre tract adjacent to the then existing
1926 vintage
100,000-seat
JFK (formerly called
Municipal)
Stadium, the long time home of the
Army-Navy Game, at the South end of
Broad Street just north of the sprawling
U.S. Navy Yard. Once part of the grounds of the
1926 Sesqui-Centennial Exposition, the site had later been used for a drive-in movie theater.
On
May 19, 1966 -- eight years to the day before the Flyers would bring the
Stanley Cup to Philadelphia -- the city granted a
50-year lease for the land, and
twelve days later on
June 1st -- less than
four months after the NHL awarded Philadelphia its franchise -- ground was broken at the corner of Broad Steet and Pattison Avenues for the new arena,
The Spectrum.
While the new NHL hockey team, the
Philadelphia Flyers, was to be the building's principal tenant, the
NBA 76'ers quickly agreed to move from Convention Hall to the new facility as well. Together these two clubs immediately guaranteed the new arena up to one hundred dates a year. Ice shows, other indoor sporting events, circuses, concerts and other shows would soon add another 150 or more dates annually to the building's calendar eventually making it one of the busiest arenas in the country.
The Spectrum was finished in
16 months at a cost of
$7 million. The expansion Flyers had a good deal of success on the ice in their first year (finishing
first in the West) although crowds were slow to build. The most memorable event of the inaugural season, however, came on
March 1, 1968, when high winds blew a portion of the covering of the Spectrum's roof off during a performance of the
Ice Capades forcing the building to close for a month while the damage was repaired.
While the 76ers were able to move their home games to Convention Hall or to the
Palestra, neither of those arenas had ice rinks at the time and there were no other NHL-quality sites in the Philadelphia area. Thus the Flyers hurriedly moved their next home game (against the
Oakland Seals) to
Madison Square Garden in
New York followed by a meeting with the
Boston Bruins played at
Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto (a game which featured the famous
stick fight between Flyers defenseman
Larry "The Rock" Zeidel and Boston's
Eddie "The Entertainer" Shack) before establishing a base at
Le Colisée in
Quebec City, home of their top minor league team, the
AHL Quebec Aces, for the remainder of their regular season home schedule. The roof was repaired in time to permit the Flyers to return to the Spectrum to open their first ever Stanley Cup play-offs against the
St. Louis Blues on
April 4, 1968, but the Flyers lost that series.
Three-and-a-half years after the Spectrum hosted its first event, construction on the city's long awaited new
65,000-seat multi-purpose outdoor sports facility, the now departed
Veterans Stadium, was completed. Located directly across
Pattison Avenue from the the Spectrum, the Vet opened its gates in
April, 1971, as the
NL Philadelphia Phillies hosted the
Montreal Expos, the same club that had helped them close their old park,
Connie Mack Stadium, at 21st & Lehigh in North Philadelphia the previous September. They were soon followed to "The Vet" by the NFL Eagles who left the
University of Pennsylvania's venerable
Franklin Field (built
1922-25) in West Philadelphia thereby completing the move of all four of the city's major league clubs to the massive new sports complex.
The Vet was, like most of the so-call "multi-purpose" facilities built in the 1970's for both baseball and football, not really well suited for either purpose, and most of them -- like the Vet -- are now gone. The Vet closed after little more than three decades and was replaced by the
Citizens Bank Park (baseball) and
Lincoln Financial Field (football). Closed in
2003, the Vet was demolished in
2004 and the site is now occupied by a parking lot. Along with the
Wells Fargo Center (formerly known as
Spectrum II, Corestates Center, First Union Center, and
Wachovia Center), these four facilities made up the massive
South Philadelphia Sports Complex, but with the announcement in the fall of 2007 of the development and a new shopping center complex to be called
"Philly Live" to occupy the parking lot between the Center and the Spectrum -- and a new
hotel to go where the Spectrum now stands -- the fate of
"America's Showplace" became sealed by "progress" and another one of America's great palaces of sport would fall to the wrecker's ball. After much discussion, the closing of the Spectrum itself at the end of the 2008-09 hockey season became official with a formal announcement by Comcast-Spectacor chairman Ed Snider on
July 14, 2008.
"This will be the final year of the Spectrum," he said. "This has been one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make. The Spectrum is my baby. It's one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me, but after a lot of thinking and discussions, we all feel it is in our best interest to close the Spectrum at the conclusion of the upcoming 2008-09 Philadelphia Phantoms and Kixx seasons."
The last regular season game "opening faceoff" at The Spectrum - April 10, 2009
The Phantoms beat the Hershey Bears in the game, 5-2, before an SRO crowd of 17,380
The Epilogue ...
The Spectrum
... The work started by the wrecking ball last November has been all but completed leaving the Spectrum for me as no more than forty+ years of memories -- including among them
graduating from college there in
1968, drinking from the
Stanley Cup in the
Flyers' lockerroom in
1974, and from the
Calder Cup in the
Phantoms' room in
1998. Those memories will always remain vivid, of course, and the
old barn in which they were formed will continue to be sadly, sadly missed by me each and every day for the rest of my life.
The demolition of the grand old lady began in November ...
... and ended in March.
Join the Discussion:
»