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The New York Times
Man Says He Lived in Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium for Years
PHILADELPHIA — Like other Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, Tom Garvey chased one job after another, fending off memories. Unlike other veterans, he said he turned a concession stand in a major American stadium into a place to crash for three years. The venue was Veterans Stadium, capacity some 60,000, home to two professional teams and, partly, where Philadelphia fans earned an infamous reputation as either the best worst fans or the worst best fans in the United States. For Garvey, now 78, it was also a home, a community and a kind of purgatory as he adapted to life after war. He has detailed his years as a secret stadium dweller, from 1979 into 1981, in a self-published book, “The Secret Apartment,” and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported his story last week. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times In an interview at his home outside the city, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, Garvey, a retired real estate agent, said he took no photos of the room because he feared being caught by authorities or, worse, the uncles who got him a job running the stadium’s parking lots. The concession stand, like the rest of Veterans Stadium, was demolished in 2004. But four people — including Bill Bradley and Jerry Sisemore, former Philadelphia Eagles and members of the team’s hall of fame — said in interviews that they had visited the apartment. Three others said they knew of it at the time, including Vince Papale, a former Eagles receiver, and Skip Denenberg, a musician. And the story of the secret apartment, if difficult to substantiate, falls in the Philadelphia tradition of taking a strange idea as far as possible (see also: cheese substitute, Gritty, revolution). “It’s hard not to think that this is the kind of thing that could only happen in Philly,” said Denenberg, who said he knew of the room but never saw it. Compared to other events in their South Philly circle, he said, “Tom being Tom, doing what he was doing, wasn’t as big a deal as it is made to be now.” A Left-Field Idea Garvey said he found work at the stadium after years of struggling to find direction. “There were some serious dark areas creeping into my head, and the Vet kind of pulled me out of that,” he said. When he returned from Vietnam, he kept himself “hyperbusy,” he said, calling it, in retrospect, a way to avoid processing his experiences. He went to college, worked odd jobs, biked and struggled to write. When his uncles, who ran a catering business that had a contract with Veterans Stadium, offered him a job in the parking lots, he seized it as a chance to get out of his mother’s house. By 1979, he was managing the lots, a job that came with the keys to an inconspicuous entry and an empty concession stand in left field, where he put boxes of parking tickets. The idea to convert the room into an apartment came that year with Pope John Paul II’s visit to Philadelphia. The city opened the stadium parking to visitors, forcing Garvey to scramble to assemble a team. He recruited some friends from a South Street bar. Not trusting them to show up on time, he held a sleepover in the storage space. One of the friends, Michael McNally, made the critical suggestion. “I thought this would be awesome to turn this into an apartment, fix it up and build some walls, box it in,” McNally recalled. “That was the conversation that got it started” Garvey estimated that the space, whose ceiling sloped down with the 300-level seats above it, was about 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. He created a hallway of cardboard boxes to disguise the apartment from the door. “I open the door, and it looks like a storeroom,” said Bradley, the former Eagle. “But if you walk down between the boxes, it opened up into one of the neatest apartments I think I’d ever seen.” There was AstroTurf carpet, a bed, some seating, a coffee table and lamps. Devices included a toaster oven, coffee maker, space heaters and a stereo. “You walked in, it was very dark, and there was equipment and boxes and crap sitting around,” said McNally, a former general manager of the Electric Factory, a Philadelphia concert venue. “He had constructed, in the back, a couple walls, a refrigerator, a couch, some chairs, a hot plate. It’s not like it was a luxury apartment.” Garvey called it “cozy,” with “everything a guy would want.” Bathrooms were across the hall, employee showers downstairs. Terry Nilon, Garvey’s cousin and another former stadium employee, said he saw the apartment but didn’t think much of it at the time. “I thought it was funny,” he said. ‘Disbelief Is the Key’ In his book, Garvey describes “an off-the-wall South Philly version of ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’” including encounters with Eagles coach Dick Vermeil, Sixers legend Julius Erving and Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw. He also recounts elements of daily life, including the friendships that helped him adjust after the military, and the time alone, roller-skating around the empty stadium at night with the city’s skyline, rivers, bridges and flights as a backdrop. “It was euphoric,” he said in the interview. “It was like a form of meditation for me. It just — it helped me a lot.” He hid in plain sight: Everyone knew him, he said, and his job gave him a reason to be around at any hour, every day of the week. “It was right in front of their eyes; they just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I wouldn’t believe it myself. The disbelief is the key to how I got away with it.” McNally estimated that 25 to 30 people knew about the room. “That’s the weird part,” he said. “It seems to me that everybody knew about it,” but nobody who did said anything. Papale, the former Eagles receiver whose story was told in the movie “Invincible,” said he “never had the honor of an invitation” but had heard about the apartment from friends. “Tommy, he was just one of the guys,” he said, and the stadium “had so many nooks and crannies to it, it was an easy place to hide.” John Spagnola, a former Eagles tight end, said he knew “peripherally” that Garvey had a private space in the stadium. Around 1981, he said, Garvey also lived in a town house that Spagnola shared with two other players. “Tom was the most likable, affable person you’d ever meet,” Spagnola said. “He was always around, just kind of bumping into people.” Sisemore, another former Eagle who said he once slept in the apartment, said Garvey simply knew everyone — players, security, vendors. “He had the golden key,” he said. Leaving the Vet Spagnola said the stadium, in addition to being “a horrible, horrible facility in which to play,” was full of odd spots. “There were a lot of those little places in Veterans Stadium,” he said. “He found one and carved it out for himself.” When Garvey’s family lost the parking lot contract in 1981, casting him adrift again, Bradley invited Garvey to stay at his home in Texas for a year. Eventually, Garvey returned to the Northeast, meeting the woman who would become his wife in the shore town of Wildwood, New Jersey. The legacy of the stadium still lingers for Garvey and the city. It was where the Phillies’ mascot emerged in 1978, defying taxonomy; where fans pelted the Dallas Cowboys with snowballs in 1989; where dozens of fights broke out and someone fired a flare gun in 1997; and where the city briefly installed a courtroom to deal with unruly fans. Behind bathroom walls, rats raced along leaky pipes as cats stalked after them. Players feared injuries caused by the turf itself. “It was raucous at the Vet,” Garvey said. He added of Philadelphia’s reputation, with an obscenity, “I mean, who’s kidding who; they put a jail in there. We kind of come by some of that stuff honestly.” When the stadium was replaced with a new field in 2004, many residents, former players and employees had mixed feelings. Spagnola said he lives with an injury he suffered at the Vet but still wishes there were something to memorialize the stadium. Papale said that demolishing the Vet was “necessary” but that he cried at its loss: “It was my Taj Mahal.” Garvey said he felt “melancholy” watching the stadium fall. “It was more than a home,” he said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
