John F. Kennedy Stadium anchored the southern end of Broad Street for 66 years. Originally named Sesquicentennial Stadium, it opened to much fanfare on April 15, 1926. It was demolished in 1992 to make way for what was first called Spectrum II, then the Wachovia Center, and more recently the Wells Fargo Center. The origins of the stadium were a culmination of the public’s growing fascination with spectator sporting events in the late 1800s, its specific location in an isolated swamp known as The Neck (or Varesville), and the controversies surrounding planning for the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The Rise of Philly Stadiums

Philadelphia’s population nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900, and this period coincided with growing enthusiasm for professional and collegiate sports. At the turn of the century the city hosted two professional baseball teams: the Philadelphia Phillies of the National League and the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League. There were also semi-pro and amateur baseball and football teams including those supported by Philadelphia companies such as the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Phillies were the first team to build its own stadium, located at Broad and Huntington Streets, known as the Philadelphia Ball Park. It was constructed of brick and steel and opened in April 1887. After a fire in 1894, the stadium was rebuilt with attendance capacity of 18,000 and named the National League Park. After a 1923 renovation it became known as the Baker Bowl.

Philadelphia’s second professional league baseball park opened in 1901 at 29th and Oxford Streets in Brewerytown with a capacity of 13,600 spectators, but its unexpected popularity, causing thousands of fans being turned away, led the Athletics to built a new stadium only eight years later. Shibe Park on Lehigh Avenue opened in April, 1909 with seating capacity of 23,000. Later known as Connie Mack Stadium, it was baseball’s first steel reinforced concrete ballpark.

Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) constructed its 6,000-seat Penmar Park in 1903 at Belmont and Parkside Avenues for its employees through the company’s sponsorship of its PRR YMCA. It relocated its field here from PRR’s previous site at 41st Street and Westminster Avenue adjacent to its 40th Street passenger station. The Parkside site previously held the railroad’s Centennial Depot when the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was staged nearby. PRR’s employee football team had existed since 1886, playing against local college and athletic club teams. PRR made its multi-sport field available to the community, hosting games played by local high schools, colleges, and the Philadelphia Stars of the Negro National Baseball League. In that era it was common for large companies such as Midvale Steel and U.S. Gauge to field their own semi-pro teams, and the Philadelphia Stars played against several of them. My stepfather, a former member of the U.S. Gauge company team, recalled playing against them.

The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) opened its football, baseball, and track stadium, first known as the Penn Bowl and later Franklin Field, in 1905 with a seating capacity of 30,000. It was designed by architecture firm Frank Miles Day & Brother. By 1916, the stadium was already at maximum capacity. Penn officials began discussions with the City to build a 100,000-seat stadium on the nearby Woodlands estate at a cost of $1 million and to designate it as a combined collegiate and municipal facility. At the same time, department store extraordinaire John Wanamaker suggested that Philadelphia host the Sesquicentennial International Exposition of 1926 (Sesqui). The two ideas became linked.

Staging the Sesquicentennial

Serious planning for the Sesqui began in 1920 with Mayor J. Hampton Moore’s appointment of a planning body led by Edward W. Bok, head of Curtis Publishing Company. A point of disagreement immediately arose. The majority of decision makers wanted to host an Old Home Week event focused on Philadelphia’s historic role as the site of the Declaration of Independence. The event was to occur in and around Independence Hall. They wanted the surrounding neighborhood, by then a rundown warren of single room occupancy boarding houses and taller building obscuring the view of Independence Hall, to be restored to its original appearance. A minority of realtors and building contractors wanted an international exhibition housed in temporary structures built for its one year duration in order to generate economic activity. A compromise was struck. The neighborhood surrounding Independence Hall would be restored and the exhibition buildings would be built on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which had been recently cleared of the old buildings occupying its route. Architect Paul Phillippe Cret produced a concept plan for restoring the neighborhood including an Independence Mall stretching north from Chestnut Street to the new Delaware River Bridge (now called Benjamin Franklin Bridge).

Plans changed radically after the election of a new mayor, W. Freeland Kendrick, who assumed office in January 1924. Beholden to the Vare family of contractor brothers who funded his election campaign, Kendrick took charge of the Sesqui planning committee and declared that Philadelphia’s celebration would focus on an international exhibition to be constructed on the swampland in The Neck. Today such a site would be described as freshwater intertidal wetlands. Much of the proposed site was owned by the Vare family and the City would lease it from them, improving their land by filling in the wetlands with material dredged during construction of the North Broad Street Subway. Vare Brothers Contracting was hired to truck in the material down there, of course.

Declaring that the negotiations with Penn were pointless, Kendrick claimed that the City needed a municipal stadium with a capacity of 250,000 and rejected the university’s offer in March 1925. Penn had constructed its stadium’s lower tier in 1922 and then proceeded to add a second tier after negotiations with the City were terminated. Designed by Day & Klauder, this 65,000 seat multi-sport facility is the largest two-tiered stadium in the United States.

Kendrick hired architects Simon & Simon to design the stadium, a horseshoe shaped structure modeled after Harvard Stadium in Boston. When Kendrick’s grandiose structure was costed out, its capacity was pared back to 125,000 at twice the cost of the original Franklin Field alternative and finally to a permanent seating capacity of 86,000. His transparent bait-and-switch alternative selection process left many apprehensive about how Kendrick would stage the Sesqui. In April 1925, the first of several thousand 30-to-40 foot long white pine piles was driven for the stadium’s foundation at Broad Street and Pattison Avenue.

The Sesqui seemed to be plagued with bad luck from start to finish. Weather during the lead up to the event was unusually rainy, hot, and humid. Its exhibits were late in being constructed on the difficult, unstable site and some were even finishing or installed after the celebration had ended. Visitors complained about the lack of hotel rooms, and word spread that the Sesqui was not worth the trip. The event closed having attracted only a quarter of anticipated attendance. Its soaring deficit was met by the mayor with funds originally borrowed to extend the subway to Roxborough.

Two notable Sesqui events were held in the new stadium: a Catholic mass service and a boxing match. The mass, celebrated by Philadelphia’s Cardinal Archbishop Dennis Joseph Dougherty on a rare cloudless day, attracted 108,000 worshipers on October 3. The boxing match featuring the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, the “Manassa Mauler,” against Gene Tunney, who had been the U.S. Marine Corps champion boxer of the American Expeditionary Corps in France, occurred during an all-day rainstorm attended by 120,000 fans on September 23.

A “Touch of Grey” at JFK

Following the Sesqui, Municipal Stadium, renamed John F. Kennedy Stadium in 1964, soldiered on, a white elephant remembered as the site of many Army-Navy games, Philadelphia Police Department Thrill Shows, dwarf car races, and various collegiate sporting events. The Philadelphia Eagles used the athletic field for practice and the northern end of the stadium horseshoe as the site for an inflated structure or “bubble” providing them with an enclosed space.

As mega rock concerts grew in popularity, the stadium became a go-to Philly venue for scores of music legends like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Sly and the Family Stone, and many others. It was also host to the Live Aid concert in 1985 along with Wembley Stadium in London. At one of these events an attendee who was a civil engineer noticed cracks and gaps in the walls, which he attributed to differential settlement. He alerted the City’s building inspectors who commissioned an engineering study. It concluded that the structure was imminently dangerous and its estimated repair would cost a prohibitive $25 million. The stadium was closed on July 7, 1989 moments after a Grateful Dead concert ended.

JFK Stadium’s ultimate demise was precipitated that year through attempts by Philadelphia 76ers owner Harold Katz to escape leasing space at the Spectrum nearby and entering into negotiations with the State of New Jersey for a new arena in Camden. When word of this reached Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, he directed his staff to negotiate a solution which would keep the team in the city.

The Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation reached out to the Spectrum’s owner, Ed Snider, and entered into discussions for the construction of a new arena in the city. The site Snider chose for it was JFK Stadium. He neither expected nor requested public subsidy for its construction, but he did assume that the City would deliver him a cleared and environmentally clean site with utilities and adequate highway access. Responsibility for preparation work fell to PIDC using grant funds provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The Eagles practice bubble was relocated to Packer Avenue. In March 1992, a demolition contract was awarded to Alcon Demolition Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey. Fortunately, “as built” construction drawings still existed to assist planning the demolition. Original blueprints on linen had been nibbled away by mice. They were still mostly legible, but they were not always accurate. There was no indication in the old architectural and engineering plans that the stadium had been constructed with wind braces, but they were there, hidden behind the sandstone parapets. The first swing of the three-ton wrecking ball bounced harmlessly off of the building.

Later, another comparison of the drawings with the actual building revealed an additional feature undisclosed on the plan: a locked storage room. Breaking down the door, the astonished workers discovered a human skeleton sprawled among a pile of empty beer cans. Hadn’t Edgar Allen Poe foretold this scene in his Cask of Amontillado? Could this poor soul have been a lost Dead Head? Suspecting a crime scene, police were summoned, but quickly determined that the skeleton had been a display model perhaps from a biology class.

After a two year hiatus, while Snider assembled his construction financing, his Spectrum II project was finally under way in the summer of 1994 and was completed in August 1996. Snider hosted a grand party at the new arena for everyone associated with its construction, an event that is fondly remembered by those who attended it.

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