Quote:

jafabian said:
Here's the latest from
The Philadelphia Inquirer:



By Larry Eichel

Inquirer Staff Writer

All that remains of Veterans Stadium, where the Phillies and Eagles played for more than three decades, is a vast pit ringed by shattered concrete and mangled steel.

On the edge of the pit, a ticket window remains in one spot, strangely untouched. In other places, stumps of the outer pillars yet stand, some erect, others leaning inward.

Elsewhere, there is nothing to suggest that once there was a 62,000-seat sports arena at Broad Street and Pattison Avenue.

Precisely at 7 a.m. today, the Vet was imploded. The event took 62 seconds.

A barrage of 2,800 separate explosions, racing clockwise around the stadium at nearly 30 m.p.h., made the shell of the gutted structure collapse inward upon itself.

An elevator tower on the north side seemed, initially, to resist the power of all that nitroglycerin, remaining intact for a second or two as the brunt of the implosion went past. But in the end, it, too, tumbled to the ground.

Even the wind cooperated. It carried the thick, brown dust cloud due east, sparing nearby residential neighborhoods and covering the new Citizens Bank Park, where the Phillies are to start playing baseball in less than two weeks.

"It was as if the gods were spreading the ashes of the old park on the new one," said a teary Bill Giles, the Phillies chairman.

As the implosion's planners repeatedly had promised, the blast appeared not to have done any damage to the 225 homes closest to the site, those located in the area bounded by Broad, 13th and Geary Streets and Pattison Avenue.

"Anyone who puts in a damage claim is going to be laughed at," said Ron Conti, 59, who watched the implosion from his home on 13th Street. "There were no tremors, nothing. Even the noise wasn't as loud as I thought it would be."

One reason the implosion was designed to last a minute, an extremely long time by industry standards, was to minimize the ground vibrations and thus any risk of broken windows or cracked foundations.

And much of the innards of the stadium had been stripped away and hauled out in advance, thereby reducing the impact and keeping down the dust.

Spectators by the thousands turned out to witness the implosion on a cold, gray morning. They watched from the official viewing area on the south side of Packer Avenue, from two nearby hotels in South Philadelphia, from Center City high-rises and from across the Delaware River in New Jersey.

Hundreds more, eager for a close vantage point, poured onto the westbound lanes of Interstate 76 near the Walt Whitman Bridge the moment police closed the highway to traffic.

The official ceremony, set up by the Phillies, who had the responsibility for demolishing the city-owned stadium, was brief and almost perfunctory.

Phillies president David Montgomery spoke, saluting the old facility. Mayor Street called the event historic and a sign of progress for Philadelphia.

The Eagles, who had left the Vet after their 2002 season and have never exhibited much fondness for the place, did not participate.

With Street providing the countdown, the Phillie Phanatic and former Phillie slugger Greg "the Bull" Luzinski pushed a ceremonial red plunger, labeled "The Final Bull Blast." The actual buttons were pushed by two demolition workers, identified as Stephen Bill and Frank Bardanoro.

Street shouted, "Fire! Fire!" Then, the real show began. A minute later, it was over.

"It was probably the most incredible implosion I've ever seen," said Steve Pettigrew, vice president of operations for Demolition Dynamics, the Tennessee-based company that performed it. "And I've been in this business for 27 years.

"The breakage inside the bowl is tremendous. On the south side, some of the debris is five feet below grade, which will make life easier for the next phase of work."

That next phase, which will be carried out by Brandenburg Industrial Service Co., calls for the steel to be removed and the concrete to be crushed in place - so that the site can be converted into 5,500 spaces for parking by fall.

On the parking lot, once finished, will be several reminders of the old stadium, including the painted outline of where the infield was and granite markers for the bases, the pitcher's mound and home plate.

Conceived in the 1960s, the Vet was the largest of a family of round and nearly round, municipally owned outdoor arenas. The design allowed these stadiums to accommodate both baseball and football, although neither very well.

Hailed as state-of-the-art at its birth, it was much-maligned in its final years, castigated for its artificial turf as well as its lack of character, intimacy or creature comforts.

The people from Demolition Dynamics spent two months figuring out how to do away with the stadium, then two months on site, drilling 2,800 holes for the 3,000 pounds of explosives.

To prevent any premature explosions, they refrained from loading the nitroglycerin until last Monday and waited until Thursday to start installing more than four miles of detonation cord. They didn't tie it all together until the wee hours of this morning.

In the end, the implosion went exactly as planned.

The blasts in each of the 103 remaining columns around the Vet's shell - one had been removed in advance by conventional means - started on the inside at the bottom, moved rapidly to the outside, then up.

This caused the shell to fold forward onto what had been the 200-level seating area.

And it brought to an end the life of Veterans Stadium: dedicated April 4, 1971, demolished March 21, 2004.



Goodbye and good riddance,that's what I say.