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January 25, 2008
Old sports arenas never die; they just get demolished and sold for scrap metal.
Eager developers recently unveiled a model for a new entertainment complex in South Philadelphia. Casually missing from this grand model was an 18,000 seat indoor arena known as The Spectrum, in its place stood a hotel.
Though I fully admit that winding through nostalgia was much better back in the day, I felt that something had to be said for the building that hung musical placards like “Grateful Dead- 53 Spectrum Sell-Outs” in the rafters like they were sports championship banners (I know I know… they needed something to fill all the empty space).
The Spectrum is the very building that once felt the reverberations of a Dr. J dunk, once housed the Broad Street Bullies as The O.K. Corral housed Wyatt Earp, and once held its breath when Mr. T pounded the title away from Rocky. True these sports memories are great, but one of them is not even real which is why The Spectrum rightly met its true calling as a concert venue. After all, the building’s first event ever was for a concert, the Quaker City Jazz Festival, in 1967.
My favorite and most popular of Spectrum rock lore occurred when the building helped pen Roger Water’s magnum opus “Comfortably Numb.” As Rolling Stone once reported, Water’s inspiration for the song occurred at The Spectrum when he was shot up with tranquilizers to treat his hepatitis by a resourceful Philly doc during the 1977 Animals tour. Waters couldn’t finish the show and when recalling the event said it was “the longest two hours of my life…trying to do a show when you can hardly lift your arm.”
If this is in fact the last days of The Spectrum we’ll miss you. I thank you for the memories and the children conceived in your bathrooms during the Twisted Sister tour of 1984 thank you for the gift of life.
Posted by Yonah Korngold at January 25, 2008 05:30 PM
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