Living With The Vet
Most people remember Veterans Stadium for the noise. It was loud inside, a concrete bowl that magnified every crack, every chant, every pitch of air that moved through it. I spent weekends there from when I was a kid through my early twenties, sometimes for Phillies games, sometimes for Eagles games, occasionally for concerts that somehow worked despite the terrible acoustics. The place had character because it was ugly on purpose. The architecture people call brutalist actually just means they didn't have the budget to pretend otherwise. Opened in 1971 as Veterans Stadium and quickly nicknamed the Vet, it sat on the same block as the earlier Connie Mack Stadium, replacing it as Philadelphia's shared MLB and NFL venue. Built on land between Broad Street and the Delaware Expressway, it was meant to be a modern multi-purpose stadium with a retractable roof concept that they ended up skimping on. The roof stayed fixed. The stadium stayed open-air. It worked well enough for football and baseball until the mid-1980s when everything started aging at the same time. The Eagles had some legendary runs there. The 1980 Super Bowl season, the 2002 season. Joe Montgomery's Monday Night Football games from 1975 to 1984 were broadcast from that press box and turned the Vet into one of the most atmospheric football venues in the country. The Phillies had their moments too, though the Astroturf ate more knees than any responsible person should have accepted as normal.
Here's something most casual fans don't understand about the Vet. The concrete wasn't just a design choice, it was a maintenance trap. In winter, the porous concrete absorbed moisture and expanded. You'd see spalling on the lower concourses by November and it got worse every year. I worked a season as an usher in the late nineties and we had a standard procedure for Section 131 where the concourse floor would buckle and create a tripping hazard. We'd place a wooden ramp over it and put out a wet floor sign, but that section was always the problem area. Maintenance couldn't fix it properly because the structural slab underneath was damaged beyond easy repair. That was the micro version of everything wrong with the building. The Astroturf was another deliberate choice that became a liability. The original surface installed in 1971 was the first generation of synthetic turf and it played hard as pavement. Players got hurt on it constantly. They replaced it twice during the stadium's life, eventually settling on a version that was slightly more forgiving but still not comparable to natural grass. The Phillies complained about it for decades. The NFL did too, which is partly why the league was never enthusiastic about shared baseball-football stadiums. By the late nineties, the complaints about the Vet were everywhere. The seats were narrow. The concourses were crowded because the food and beverage operations were designed for a different era. The restrooms were inadequate. The parking situation around Broad Street was a daily bottleneck. Mike Ilitch bought the Phillies in 1999 and immediately started pushing for a new stadium, which became Citizens Bank Park. The Eagles wanted out too, which led to Lincoln Financial Field opening in 2003.
I remember the last Eagles game there on December 28, 2003 against the Giants. The crowd was smaller than it would have been for a regular season game with playoff implications, but there was a heavy atmosphere anyway. People knew it was the end. The last Phillies game was earlier that year in September. Both franchises left within months of each other and the building sat empty for about a year before demolition started in July 2004. The demolition itself was slow. Unlike modern stadiums that get taken down quickly with wrecking balls, the Vet was stripped piece by piece because of asbestos and lead paint. It took most of 2004. The land sat vacant until the Nationals Park project in Washington was delayed, which briefly made people wonder if Philadelphia might build something back there, but that never happened. The site is now part of the larger development around the Sports Complex area near Temple University. If you're looking to preserve memories of the stadium, the best resources are the Veterans Stadium photographs and memorabilia collections at the Philadelphia Area Archives and the ballparkguide.com forums where former employees and season ticket holders document what the experience was actually like day to day. There's also a book called Call It a Game by David O'Brien that covers the era well, though it focuses more on the Phillies side of things.
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The uncomfortable truth about the Vet is that it was both terrible and irreplaceable. The facilities were rough. The comfort level was low. But it had a density of atmosphere that newer stadiums, with their suites and amenities and wider seats, cannot replicate. The noise inside was real because the building was small and hard and reflected sound back at you instead of absorbing it. That's not something you can design into a modern construction. It just happened because of what the building was. I don't recommend trying to recreate that experience at Lincoln Financial Field or Citizens Bank Park. They're better facilities. They're also fundamentally different environments. The Vet was what it was, and the fact that it was ugly and uncomfortable and loud and hot in summer and freezing in winter is exactly why people still talk about it twenty years later.
