For our annual stadium trip, Brady and I headed to Philadelphia last Friday to check out the Eagles hosting the Bengals at Lincoln Financial Field aka The Linc.
This was our first visit to The Linc, but we had visited The Linc’s predecessor Veterans Stadium on two occasions many years ago. We caught an Army Navy game there and then later a Phillies baseball game. In more recent years, we have also been to the Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park a couple of times to attend a Phillies baseball game.
Veterans Stadium was one of several multi-purpose stadiums built in the 70’s that ultimately turned out to be a not-so-good idea.
Kind of like life itself, it was case of where if you try to do more than one thing at a time, you sometimes end up not doing either one very well. Those stadiums were built to accommodate both baseball and football games. However, they were ultimately deemed failures and replaced with nicer venues which catered to only one sport.
The flying saucer design coupled with problems in continually converting the field from baseball to football and vice versa, just made for an overall lousy experience for both sports. This from Wiki talking about Veterans Stadium:
Hence, all but two of those old stadiums have since been torn down. Houston’s Astrodome and D.C.’s RFK Stadium are the only ones still standing. (Suggestion for 45/47: if you want to demo and rebuild something that really does need to be torn down and rebuilt, why not tackle RFK? It is your kind of project just awaiting you and your Midas touch. They could even name it after you!) P.S. I just learned that RFK is in its final stages of being demo’d (click here.) Thank you for that, Steve!)
Veterans Stadium was torn down in 2004 and replaced with Citizens Bank Park for the Phillies and The Linc for the Eagles. Citizens Bank Park I really like and is up there as one of my favorites of all baseball parks.
The Linc was also a nice and a very functional facility but I wouldn’t revisit it anytime soon. It reminded me of something Buzzy once said about someone “He seems like a nice enough guy, but there is just not a lot to him.” The Linc was like that. It was a nice experience; but nothing special about it other than being there amidst all those crazy Eagles’ fans. (Note that there are those who might say that being amidst a bunch of Eagles’ fans is not so special an experience!)
Although Bruce omitted any stadium shots in his video below, it still gives you a decent overview of Philly’s good and not-so-good parts of town. Note – we stayed in a hotel adjacent to the Philadelphia City Hall that appears in the opening scene of the video.
