Full Spectrum: The arena will be demolished next year. How will it be remembered?

Take Me Out to the Crowd

With news that the Spectrum will soon be gone, a look back at two all but forgotten Philadelphia sporting destinations. (photos by michael persico)

by Michael Fichman

Three men in a white box of a structure called “Grab the Crab” at Broad and Huntingdon in North Philadelphia busily steam and season massive lots of blue crab.

“We used to sneak into Connie Mack Stadium on Somerset Street when they would accidentally leave the gate open,” says Anthony DiBenedetto, a local pastor, who lives a few blocks east of Grab the Crab. “There was a certain smell that came out of the underground tunnels coming up to the field. It was the smell of childhood.”

Not far behind the Grab the Crab counter stands the spot where in late May 1935 an aging Babe Ruth bungled a flyball. Disgusted, he made his way to the centerfield clubhouse at Baker Bowl, just behind what’s now a Sunoco station down the block. He took off his Boston Braves uniform and never played again.

“I didn’t know that,” says Dwayne Garcia, manager of Grab the Crab. “We have a lot of history we could be more aware of.”

A group of men trying to escape the hot summer sun in a fan-cooled takeout joint at 15th and Lehigh try to remember what sat across the street before the Sunoco, the car wash and Grab the Crab.

They suggest asking Wayne, who’s been living up the street since the ’50s. “That’s always been there,” he says, pointing to the buildings at the intersection. “Only ballpark I know from around here is the Connie Mack Stadium.”

“I’ve never had conversations about Baker Bowl with anybody,” says Phillies chairman Bill Giles, who’s been part of the club since 1969.

Eddie Joost, a former ballplayer, now 92, remembers Baker Bowl. “In 1936 I went to the major leagues for the first time,” he says. “I was playing with Cincinnati. We visited Philadelphia and I was amazed to see that fence.”

The rightfield fence along Broad Street was a towering 60 feet high and was emblazoned with a soap ad that read, “THE PHILLIES USE LIFEBUOY.” Someone supposedly once wrote underneath, “BUT THEY STILL STINK.” The distance to the rightfield foul pole at the Baker Bowl was 279 feet—more than 50 feet closer than the fence at Citizens Park. A submerged train tunnel ran underneath centerfield, leaving a slight rise in the playing field, giving the ballpark the nickname “The Hump.”

Considered a marvel when it opened in 1887, the Baker was soon lampooned as a crummy ballpark with crummy tenants.

“It became very decrepit in its later years,” says baseball historian Rich Wescott. “People called it the Toilet Bowl. A balcony collapsed in 1903. Twelve people were killed and 232 injured. Gamblers made up most of the crowd some days. They’d bet on anything, like, ‘Ten cents this next pitch is a strike.’”

The Phillies left abruptly in the middle of the 1938 season.

“For years Connie Mack had been trying to get the Phillies to play in Shibe Park to collect rent,” says Wescott. “Eventually Baker Bowl was just so run down and the Phillies had no money to maintain it. It was just a case of having to get out of this awful place.”

In late 1950, after a stint as a dog track, Baker Bowl was torn down. In the years that followed, many longtime North Philly residents moved elsewhere and took their memories of Baker Bowl with them.

The painting hangs between what was centerfield and second base on the field of dreams once known as Connie Mack Stadium. “Our pulpit is sitting on home plate,” says Martha Addison, the church treasurer.

Having shuttered “only” 38 years ago, Connie Mack Stadium is much better remembered than Baker Bowl.

“I used to sit in every section I could because I just loved that ballpark,” says Larry Shenk, longtime Phillies public relations director and current Phillies vice president of alumni.

Joost, toward the end of his career, was the player manager of the 1954 Philadelphia A’s—the last A’s team to play in Philly. “I liked hitting there,” he says. “[A’s Hall of Famer] Al Simmons used to say that people ‘licked their chops’ about the short leftfield there.”

The A’s, led by dapper owner/manager Connie Mack for roughly 50 years, captured five World Series titles and the hearts of the city. But by the late 40s, the A’s were broke and lousy while the Phillies captured the National League pennant in 1950. After the ’54 season, the A’s left town for Kansas City.

“Ultimately the Phillies purchased the stadium,” says Wescott, “and named the park after Connie Mack, even though he was gone.”

With beams supporting its single deck, the upper and lower seats were so close to the field that the players’ features were clearly visible. The players had to walk through the corridors to the clubhouse, mingling with fans.

The park was shoehorned in the middle of a rowhouse neighborhood. Outside, the streets swarmed with kids selling newspapers and fighting for home run balls. But for all the love Connie Mack Stadium inspired, its death was not pretty.

After the Phillies left North Philly and moved to the massive multipurpose Veterans Stadium in South Philly following the 1970 season, Connie Mack sat empty for six years.

“Everybody in the neighborhood felt abandoned when the Phils moved,” says DiBenedetto. “It was eerie. Vagrants got in there, and trying to keep warm, they set the place on fire. I came home and there were fire engines all over the place. It was heartbreaking.”

In 1976 the wrecking ball came for Connie Mack Stadium. The site sat abandoned until Deliverance Evangelistic Church broke ground for its new building in 1990.

Going to a ballgame there is quite unlike a trip to Baker Bowl or Connie Mack Stadium, where the ballparks were engines of idiosyncratic neighborhood economies.

Though there wasn’t parking at Baker Bowl, a group known as the Unholy Seven ran an unofficial valet. Outside Connie Mack, young kids parked cars, or “watched” your car, for pocket change.

There were Baker Bowl “Ball Hawks” who returned balls hit onto Broad Street to the team for 50 cents. “Ball Hawk George,” the most famous, was known to stiff-arm children for balls.

When the Phillies couldn’t afford to pay a groundskeeping staff for Baker Bowl, they brought in sheep to do the work.

For much of Connie Mack Stadium’s early life, the residents along 20th Street sold rooftop seats, which looked over the rightfield fence into the park. Admission was the purchase of beer from the house speakeasy. In the ’30s, owner Connie Mack built up the wall to block the view, the infamous “spite fence.”

By the 1960s, more Phillies fans were driving to games from their new suburban homes. They wanted more parking, and fewer encounters with the increasingly tense racial climate in North Philly.

DiBenedetto refused to move. “People told me I was crazy,” he says, “but the Lord was telling me to stay. I’ll be the pastor of Geiger Memorial Brethren Church until we bar the front doors.”

The Phillies had no such epiphany.

“The multipurpose stadium boom was a way to save money,” says Bill Giles. “They were publicly financed. The Vet was so clean and neat, plus twice as big. It got rave reviews the first few years it was open.”

But within a few decades, the Vet was considered crusty and decrepit just like its predecessors. The Phillies moved to Citizens Bank Park­—designed to mimic the comforts of classic ballparks without any of their inconveniences.

“We took account of features at Connie Mack Stadium,” says Shenk. The centerfield “rooftop seats” are supposed to mimic those on 20th Street. Nearby, an exhibit Shenk and Wescott put together tells a pictorial history of Baker Bowl and Connie Mack Stadium.

But the “quirks” at Citizens Bank Park have been carefully designed. Its idiosyncrasy is a tightly controlled marketing of the nostalgic experience of baseball. Today, while the Phillies chase the pennant in South Philly, life continues on Lehigh Avenue, sadder and lonelier, the days of the long gone ballparks all but forgotten.