Historic Philadelphia

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Right: The Phillies led the National League
by six and a half games in 1964, with 12
left to play. The championship was a sure
thing, so the team printed World Series
tickets. But the Phils lost ten games in a row,
and the St. Louis Cardinals won the
pennant by one game. The tickets are
collector’s items that make old Phillies
fans weep.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Opposite: A local basketball player named
Wilton N. Chamberlain, shown here in high
school in 1955, joined the Warriors team in
1959, after starring at the University of
Kansas and performing for a couple of
years with the Harlem Globetrotters. He
had first drawn attention at Overbrook
High School, where he once scored ninety
points in a game. At age twenty-three, the
new Warrior was seven-foot-one. In the
1961-62 season, he averaged 50.4 points
per game. On March 2, 1962, he scored one
hundred points as the Warriors beat the
New York Knicks, 169 to 147. The game
was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and
not televised; only 4,124 fans witnessed the
masterpiece. Wilt and the Warriors
wandered off to San Francisco in 1962, and
the 76ers became the hometown team.
Chamberlain came home in 1965, and led
the Sixers to the 1967 championship.
COURTESY OF THE URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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said Tyner: “He was looking for the stars you
can’t see.” The death of “Trane” seemed to end
the era in which the city produced a stream of
major jazz musicians, including Dizzy
Gillespie, Stan Getz, Jerry Mulligan, Lee
Morgan, Philly Joe Jones, the Heath brothers,
Benny Golson, and Grover Washington.
Talk about a new stadium had started in
the Dilworth administration. The Phillies
played baseball in Connie Mack Stadium,
built as Shibe Park in 1909. The football
Eagles were using even older Franklin Field at
the University of Pennsylvania. In 1961,
serious disagreement started, always the first
phase of such a project. A Dilworth plan for a
South Philly site was replaced by a proposal
for a Torresdale Water Filtration Plant
location, which was rejected. An appointed
panel sifted through five sites, then deferred
to a scheme to build over the railroad tracks
at Thirtieth Street Station, which didn’t work
out. Land on South Broad Street at Pattison
Avenue was selected in 1964. An architect’s
plan in late 1966 described a stadium with
twenty percent more seating than any modern
stadium in the country, voters approved a $38
million plan in May of 1967, and, on October
2, ground was broken.
Then came a furious commotion about a
name. Philadelphia Stadium was a public
favorite; others liked Independence Stadium;
more whimsical minds proposed Philadium.