Automobile racing originated in Europe as automobile manufacturers worked to test their car designs and market them to consumers. Wealthy Philadelphians formed the Quaker City Motor Club, which introduced automobile racing to area residents in 1906 at Point Breeze Racetrack, a horse track in South Philadelphia. This race also marked Pennsylvania’s first automobile racing fatality when Ernest D. Keeler (ca.1879-1906) crashed during practice for the event.

The Quaker City Motor Club also sponsored automobile endurance races on area roads. From 1908-11, the club organized a 200-mile race on an eight-mile course through Fairmount Park for American-manufactured automobiles with stock chasses. The event attracted local drivers such as brewer Erwin Bergdoll (1890-1965) as well as nationally-known racers including George Robertson (1884-1955) and Louis Chevrolet (1878-1941). City leaders debated the benefits of these races, and the Fairmount Park Commission suspended all racing in 1912 after concluding that motor races endangered participants and encouraged recklessness among the city’s automobilists.

Philadelphia-based interest in auto racing expanded in 1919, when a group of local businessmen founded the National Motor Racing Association. They promoted automobile races in Byberry, Pottstown, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, as well as Harrington, Delaware. The National Motor Racing Association and other regional promoters held automobile races on horse tracks during annual agricultural expositions at area fairgrounds.

In 1926, the National Motor Racing Association constructed one of the nation’s first purpose-built dirt speedways in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. Nicknamed “the big left turn,” the mile-long Langhorne Speedway featured a unique circular design, which allowed drivers to reach higher speeds. Area residents drove their family automobiles to the track located along Route 1 between Philadelphia and Trenton to see the nation’s leading drivers race against local favorites.

Drivers from Greater Philadelphia garnered national acclaim for their racing exploits during the interwar period. In 1928, Charles Raymond “Ray” Keech (1900-29) of Coatesville set a new land speed record of 207 mph at Daytona Beach, Florida. Keech recorded several wins on local dirt tracks and won the 1929 Indianapolis 500 in a car entered by Philadelphian Maude Yagle (1885-1968). The only female car owner to ever win the Indianapolis 500, Yagle continued to hire Philadelphians, including Fred Winnai (1905-77), Jimmy Gleason (1898-1931) and Frank Farmer (1892-1932), to drive her race car over the next few racing seasons.

With the advent of smaller and less powerful race cars known as “midgets” during the Great Depression, automobile racing resumed within Philadelphia city limits. Promoters hosted midget races at Yellow Jacket Stadium in Northeast Philadelphia at Frankford Avenue and Deveroux Street. Formerly home to the National Football League’s Frankford Yellow Jackets, the stadium had been converted into a paved, one-fifth-mile speedway. Yellow Jacket Stadium held night races each week prior to World War II and remained popular with local residents who could walk or take public transportation to this speedway in the city.

The Office of Defense Transportation suspended all motorsports across the United States in 1942 in an effort to conserve the nation’s limited supplies of gasoline and rubber. Racing resumed immediately following the Allied victory. Postwar interest in automobile racing remained high, and a second Yellow Jacket Speedway located at Erie Avenue and G Street hosted biweekly midget racing programs from 1945 to 1950.

Over the next four decades, drivers competed in American Automobile Association (AAA)-sanctioned events, NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Racing), and in racing motorcycles and USAC (United States Auto Club) sprint cars at area speedways. Langhorne Speedway continued to attract the nation’s top open-wheel drivers, including A.J. Foyt (b. 1935), Mario Andretti (b. 1940), Al Unser (b. 1939), as well as NASCAR stars such as Lee Petty (1914-2000), Tim Flock (1924-98), and Edward “Fireball” Roberts (1929-64). Concerns over drivers’ safety as well as development along Route 1 led to the closure of Langhorne Speedway in 1971. Dirt track racing continued at local fairgrounds, including Harrington, Delaware and Flemington, New Jersey, until the 1990s.

The rising national popularity of stock car racing encouraged the construction of two area asphalt speedways for NASCAR racing events. The one-mile Dover International Speedway (originally called Dover Downs Speedway) located in Dover, Delaware, opened in 1969. Pocono Raceway, known as the “Tricky Triangle” because of its three sharp turns, began hosting races on its 2.5 mile speedway in 1971. Among the largest sports venues in the mid-Atlantic, Pocono Raceway and Dover International Speedway are known as “superspeedways.” Each track hosts two NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races each racing season. Large crowds of race fans camp on-site in order to attend qualifying races, related events, and socialize throughout the weekend of the race.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, racetracks throughout central Pennsylvania, such as Williams Grove, Lincoln, and Port Royal Speedways, as well as New Jersey’s Atco Dragway, New Egypt Speedway, and Bridgeport Speedway, hosted a variety of racing programs each season. NASCAR racing also continued annually at Pocono Raceway and Dover International Speedway.

Shared interests in speed, automobiles, and technological daring brought people from diverse backgrounds together at the region’s speedways, and automobile racing remained a popular leisure activity for mid-Atlantic residents. Motorsports, especially NASCAR events, continued to provide significant income to area tourism.

Alison Kreitzer is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. She is writing a dissertation about dirt track automobile racing in the mid-Atlantic region. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In Philadelphia, the first all-Black baseball teams surfaced in the 1860s. By far the most prominent was the amateur Pythian Club, which not only scheduled games against several white opponents but also unsuccessfully attempted to affiliate with the National Association of Base Ball Players, the major baseball organization of the era. Although the assassination of Octavius V. Catto (1839-71), the club’s driving force and local Black leader, brought the Pythians’ story to a premature close, other organizations emerged to take their place. The mid-Atlantic-based Cuban Giants, considered to be the first Black professional team, debuted in 1885 and was heavily comprised of Philadelphia amateur players. Initially perceived as a gimmick (the players spoke a sort of mock-Spanish to pass as Cuban), the Cuban Giants soon had fans buzzing about their exceptional talents on the field. To survive, the team took on any and all comers, rambling up and down the East Coast in search of profitable games.

In the years that followed, the Cuban Giants regularly visited Philadelphia, an especially attractive venue thanks to its thriving semiprofessional baseball scene and large Black population. But local African Americans had no hometown professional team to support until the formation of the Philadelphia Giants in 1902. Like other Black clubs, the Giants spent a good deal of time on the road, although they sometimes rented Columbia Park, the Athletics’ home field at Twenty-Ninth and Columbia Streets.

Rise of the Hilldale Club

The Philadelphia Giants were a success on the diamond but not at the box office and finally disbanded in 1911. In the meantime, a group of Black teenagers established the Hilldale Club, an amateur team playing in an “open field” in Darby southwest of the city. With dozens, if not hundreds, of similar squads organizing and folding each season, no one foresaw that Hilldale would one day become a major Black institution.

The man behind the Hilldale miracle was a gentlemanly little postal clerk named Edward Bolden (1881-1950), who began as the team’s scorer but soon took control of the young club. Over the next several years, Bolden heavily publicized the team in the pages of the Black weekly Philadelphia Tribune, rented home grounds at Chester and Cedar Avenue in Darby, and aggressively recruited the best local players. Their following grew so rapidly that Bolden and a group of fellow postal employees incorporated the team in 1916 with plans to move to an all-salaried roster the following season.

As a full-fledged professional team, Hilldale (also known as the Daisies) became one of the most successful Black ballclubs in the country in the 1920s. The thousands of rural Black southerners pouring into the Philadelphia region as part of the Great Migration further expanded Bolden’s already sizable customer base, which eagerly turned out for Hilldale’s regular Saturday home games in Darby (Pennsylvania blue laws prevented Sunday baseball until 1934). Strong white semiprofessional teams, often sponsored by business and industrial concerns such as Lit Brothers, Strawbridge and Clothier, and Fleisher Yarn, provided additional revenue. Flush with cash, Bolden signed nationally known superstars such as catcher Louis Santop, but he always kept his eye out for area talent. Future Baseball Hall of Fame third baseman Judy Johnson was a product of the Wilmington sandlots, while infielder Billy Yancey got his start on the fields of South Philadelphia.

The post-World War I prosperity of Hilldale and other Black teams led to the formation of the first permanent professional leagues: the Midwest-based Negro National League (NNL) in 1920 and the Bolden-backed Eastern Colored League (ECL) in 1922.   Not surprisingly, Hilldale captured the ECL’s first three pennants and participated in the Negro Leagues’ first World Series in 1924. Although beaten by the Kansas City Monarchs five games to four, Hilldale got the better of the rematch in 1925, taking the deciding game at Phillies Park (later known as the Baker Bowl) at Broad and Lehigh Streets.

The Depression Takes a Toll

Bolden had built a tremendous ballclub, good enough to beat a barnstorming group of Philadelphia Athletics in five of six games in 1923. But Hilldale struggled to weather the subsequent economic downturn in Black Philadelphia, culminating with the onset of the Great Depression. By 1930, Bolden had departed, soon to be replaced by John Drew, a wealthy Delaware County politician and bus magnate. After watching attendance shrink to less than 200 fans per game, Drew finally pulled the plug on Hilldale in July 1932.

Although the business of Negro League baseball was at its nadir, Bolden returned in 1933 with a new club, the Philadelphia Stars. This time, Bolden brought in financial backing from Eddie Gottlieb (1898-1979), a veteran promoter and key figure in professional basketball, first with the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association and later with the Philadelphia Warriors. Eager to attract the rapidly growing Black population of West Philadelphia, the Stars obtained home grounds at Passon Field at Forty-Eighth and Spruce Streets before moving to Parkside Field at Forty-Fourth and Parkside. The park’s location, adjacent to a Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse, was hardly ideal for baseball. Trains entering or departing the roundhouse generated heavy smoke, which not only affected visibility but also showered coal dust and soot on unfortunate fans.

In 1934, the Stars joined the now eastern-based Negro National League and won their first and only championship that season. In general, the club was never able to match Hilldale’s dominance of the 1920s, often falling short to the powerhouse Homestead Grays. Still, Black Philadelphians faithfully continued to support the Stars as a vital African American institution, one that provided otherwise unavailable opportunities for a number of elite local athletes. Outfielder Gene Benson attended West Philadelphia High School, infielder Mahlon Duckett and catcher Bill Cash went to Overbrook, while catcher Stanley Glenn starred at John Bartram. But the Stars missed out on the era’s best local Black ballplayer, Nicetown’s Roy Campanella, who eventually signed with the Washington Elite Giants in 1937.

Financially, the Stars reached their peak during the early 1940s, when a booming war economy transformed the previously shaky Negro Leagues into one of the major Black businesses in America. Now able to fill larger venues, Gottlieb and Bolden began to lease Shibe Park, home of the A’s and Phillies, for weekly night games in 1943. Two years later, the Stars drew an impressive 101,818 fans for only nine weeknight dates at Shibe (the Phillies and A’s, meanwhile, drew only 773,020 combined for the entire season).

Integration Dooms the Negro Leagues 

The Stars’ prosperity did not last long. The postwar integration of Major League Baseball dealt a crippling blow to the Negro Leagues, worsened in Philadelphia by the abandonment of Parkside Field after 1947 and death of Bolden in 1950.  Gottlieb and Bolden’s daughter Hilda briefly attempted to keep the team afloat by selling top players to Organized Baseball, but Black Philadelphians were now far more interested in the Brooklyn Dodgers and other integrated teams. The Stars disbanded after the 1952 season, and Negro League baseball itself collapsed by the early 1960s.

Hilldale Park and Parkside Field are long gone, but the proud history of Negro League baseball in Philadelphia has not been forgotten. Historical markers commemorate both of these ballparks where African Americans congregated in the thousands each week to watch the best Black baseball talent in America.

Neil Lanctot is a historian who has written three books, each reflecting his keen interest in sports and race.  His writing has also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, and several other journals and anthologies. (Author information current at time of publication)

From the time the game was created to its organization into a professional league, and from the first National League game ever played to some of the earliest World Series, the city of Philadelphia has played a prominent role in professional baseball history.

Variations of the game of baseball became popular some three decades prior to the start of the Civil War. Beginning in 1833 and during the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of teams organized to play “town ball” throughout the city of Philadelphia. The popular bat-and-ball game was similar to “rounders,” an English game in which players scored by running around four bases on a square field.

As early as 1831, a Philadelphia club team known as “Olympic” played town ball while another called “Athletic” formed in 1859. Within the city limits, many games were played at Twenty-Fifth and Jefferson streets, often drawing several thousand spectators to the field. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia blue laws prevented clubs from playing games on Sundays, so the teams often traversed the Delaware River to play in New Jersey towns like Camden and Gloucester.

In 1845, town ball evolved into baseball with the formation of the Knickerbocker Club in New York and by 1860, the Athletics reorganized as a baseball club while other amateur teams sprang up all over the Philadelphia area. As baseball’s popularity grew throughout the country and became a form of recreation and civic pride, the sport’s first governing body was formed. The National Association of Base Ball Players grew to include more than 300 clubs — including the Athletics — by 1867. In 1866, Philadelphia hosted a championship series between the Athletics and the Atlantics of Brooklyn, which was played at Columbia Avenue and Fifteenth Street and is said to have attracted 30,000 spectators, many of whom crowded the outfield.

Paid Players

In 1865, the Athletics signed Alfred J. Reach, one of the first men paid to play the game. The emergence of paid players challenged the amateur nature of the national association which, as a result, split teams into amateur and professional groups. In 1871, the top professional teams formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Members included clubs from Boston, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and each team traveled to and from those cities to compete. A new NAPBBP club based in Philadelphia, also called the Athletics, won the league’s inaugural championship.

Although considered to be the first professional baseball league, the National Association is not recognized as such by Major League Baseball due to various issues with instability and mismanagement during its brief existence. Instead, Major League Baseball acknowledges the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, formed in 1876, as its founding organization. The first game in the new National League occurred in Philadelphia on April 22, 1876, between yet another team called the Athletics and the Boston Red Caps. Boston won the game by a score of 6-5 at the Jefferson Street Grounds in front of 3,000 spectators. The Athletics lasted just one season. They were expelled from the National League for refusing to make their final scheduled road trip of the season after winning only fourteen games.

Thereafter, various Philadelphia teams dissolved as quickly as they were established. Another club carrying the Athletics moniker represented the city in the upstart American Association from 1882 until the league’s collapse in 1891. This team was the first in the American Association to travel west, competing in cities like Louisville and St. Louis while playing home games at Jefferson Park.  Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Quakers of the Players’ League, which lasted only one season, had games at Forepaugh Park at Broad and Dauphin Streets in 1890.

The Game Grows

Despite the failure of many professional Philadelphia baseball clubs to stay afloat at the end of the nineteenth century, the game quickly gained national appeal and its language seeped into the American lexicon. One person who held the game in high regard was Walt Whitman. The American poet played the game in his youth and incorporated some of the first reports on local games in articles for New York newspapers he edited. Later, Whitman referred to the game in his writings, admiring it for something that was wholly American and lauding its camaraderie and the athletic ability of its participants.

In 1883, the National League took a chance with establishing a new team in Philadelphia. Alfred Reach, the professional ballplayer who later made his fortune as a sporting goods magnate, was asked by league president A.G. Mills to start a new team, which Reach named the Phillies to identify it by its host city. The team played its first game on May 1 at Recreation Park on Twenty-Fourth Street and Ridge Avenue and finished its first season with a 17-81 record, which remains one of the worst marks in major league history. The dubious start was a fitting one for the Phillies, the oldest continuous one-name, one-city franchise in all of professional sports. In 2007, the Phillies suffered the 10,000th loss in team history, becoming the first professional team in any sport to achieve such a feat.

By 1895, the team had outgrown Recreation Park, which was later used by local sandlot teams, and moved into Baker Bowl, named for owner William F. Baker, on a city block at North Broad, West Huntingdon, and North Fifteenth streets at West Lehigh Avenue. The stadium was notoriously small. It could only accommodate fewer than 19,000 spectators, and the right field fence sat just 280 feet from home plate (a real advantage for hitters). The team failed to draw fans as the losing seasons piled up. The team managed to win only one league pennant during its first sixty-seven years of existence, reaching the World Series in 1915. Over the next thirty-five years, the Phillies endured one of the worst stretches in team history, finishing in last place sixteen times. While the Phillies redefined futility in the early twentieth century, their American League counterpart flourished.

The Athletics Ascend

Founded in 1901 as a cornerstone franchise of the new American League, the latest Philadelphia Athletics team became a model club, winning eight pennants and five world championships during its fifty-four-year stay in Philadelphia. A former National League player and manager, Connie Mack, was charged with finding financial support, players, and a field for the team. Benjamin Shibe, who had been Al Reach’s partner in the sporting goods business, invested in Mack’s Athletics. In 1909, the A’s moved from Columbia Park to Shibe Park at Twenty-First Street and Lehigh Avenue (some nine blocks from the Phillies’ Baker Bowl), with row houses to the south of Lehigh and commercial and industrial enterprises to the east. Many Athletics players lived within a few blocks of the park, and rookies took up residence on Twentieth Street. The area was predominantly Irish, a boost to team loyalty, especially because of Mack, born Cornelius McGillicuddy to Irish immigrants in Massachusetts in 1862. In 1910, the Athletics won the city’s first World Series championship and claimed two more in 1911 and 1913. Given the team’s success, fans came to Shibe Park in droves, walking up Lehigh Avenue from their homes, crowding streetcars to get to the stadium, and gathering on rooftops that stood tall over right field just to catch a glimpse of Mack’s A’s. The area around the ballpark prospered with businesses and residences while support for the team reached a fever pitch.

While the Athletics brought winning baseball to Philadelphia, baseball became more popular than ever as leagues even sprang up in shipyards during World War I. In 1918, the Delaware River Shipbuilding League included baseball clubs from shipyards in Bristol, Chester, Cornwells, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; Camden, N.J.; and Wilmington, Del. Games played in those shipyards were well-attended by fans throughout the summer months. The teams were made up of shipyard workers, including recent or retired big league ballplayers. Charles “Chief” Bender, of the 1909 A’s, pitched for the Hog Island shipyard team and was one of the better-known pros to play in the league. Famously, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson played for the Harlan & Hollingsworth team of Wilmington, which beat Standard Shipbuilding of Staten Island, N.Y., in an Atlantic coast shipyard championship played in Baker Bowl and at New York’s Polo Grounds. The league folded in 1919.

In the professional ranks, the Athletics lost the 1914 World Series to the Boston Braves, causing Mack to sell off his top players. The A’s finished in last place for seven straight seasons, but began to climb from the bottom rungs of the American League in the latter half of the 1920s, when Mack rebuilt the team around players like Jimmie Foxx. The Athletics won back-to-back World Series in 1929 and 1930 and made a World Series appearance in 1931. Over the next twenty years, however, the A’s finished no better than fourth in the standings and were in last place eleven times while attendance waned. While the Athletics scuffled, things weren’t much better for the Phillies, who moved in to share Shibe Park with the A’s in 1938. It had gotten so bad for the Quaker City’s National League franchise that pitcher Hugh Mulcahy earned the nickname “Losing Pitcher” because he ended up on the losing end of so many of the Phillies’ games. The team even tried to change its name in 1942 to the Blue Jays because “Phillies” had become associated with so much losing.

At the same time, World War II impacted major league teams like the Phillies, which watched its players get drafted into military service. In 1941, Mulcahy became the first major league player drafted into war. Due to travel restrictions, teams were not permitted to hold their typical spring training in Florida, so the Phillies prepared for upcoming seasons in Hershey, Pa., while the Athletics practiced in Wilmington. After the war, the Phillies finally began to have some success. In 1950, the team returned to the World Series after a thirty-five-year absence. Led by future Hall of Famers Robin Roberts and Richie Ashburn, the “Whiz Kids” (as they were nicknamed because of their youth) won ninety-one games and clinched the National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers on the final day of the season before losing the World Series to the New York Yankees in four games.

Minor League Teams All Over

With two professional teams in Philadelphia, the city began expanding its baseball footprint throughout the U.S. and Canada with minor league affiliations. The A’s were the parent club to minor league teams in Williamsport, Pa.; Elmira, N.Y.; Lincoln, Neb.; Savannah, Ga.; and even Toronto and Ottawa in Canada. The Phillies had players develop in minor league outposts throughout New York, Florida, Arkansas, California, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, among other states. In 1967, the Phillies began a partnership with Reading, Pa., which remains the home of the Double A Reading Fightin’ Phils. The team  currently has farm clubs in Allentown, Pa.; Williamsport, Pa.; Clearwater, Fla.; and Lakewood, N.J., and hosts rookie league teams in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Minor League Baseball’s presence in the region also includes a team in Wilmington, Del. (affiliated with the Kansas City Royals) and the independent Camden Riversharks of the Atlantic League, while various semi-pro leagues compete throughout the region.

The first all-black baseball teams began playing in Philadelphia in the 1860s, and Negro League teams played into the early 1960s, despite the integration of Major League baseball in the late 1940s. Philadelphia teams were among the last to integrate. In 1953, a year before their final season in Philadelphia, the A’s signed the first black player in team history in pitcher Bob Trice. Philadelphian Roy Campanella followed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers a year after he joined the team in 1947. During his first year in Major League Baseball, Robinson was met with racist abuse from other teams, including the Phillies, who did not sign a black player until 1952. It was not until 1957 that a black player, shortstop John Kennedy, would make the Phillies out of spring training.

On September 19, 1954, the once-proud Athletics lost their final game in Philadelphia to the New York Yankees, 4-2. The franchise was sold to businessman Arnold Johnson, who moved the team to Kansas City in 1955. The A’s moved to Oakland in 1968. At the start of the 1960s, after the A’s had been relocated, the Phillies were still floundering. But in 1964, the team was seemingly on its way to recapturing some of the magic the Whiz Kids had enjoyed more than a decade earlier. Under the ownership of Bob Carpenter and the leadership of manager Gene Mauch, the 1964 Phillies raced out to a fast start. Everything was in place for the team’s third World Series appearance, but with twelve games to play in the regular season, the Phillies blew a six-and-one-half-game lead to finish in second place. The collapse haunted the Phillies and thereafter became a byword for baseball futility.

The Veterans Stadium Era

Less than a decade later, the Phillies moved into Veterans Stadium, a 60,000-seat multi-sport venue located off of Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia that they shared with the Eagles of the National Football League. Named in tribute to the veterans of all wars, “the Vet” became known more for its artificial playing surface and the rowdy, vociferous fans who watched games from its upper levels than the teams that played there. Despite the notoriety of the home park, the Phillies enjoyed a stretch of success during which they appeared in three straight National League Championship Series, from 1976 to 1978. In 1980, ninety-seven years after Alfred Reach brought the Phillies to Philadelphia, the franchise finally won a World Series. Following their first championship, the Phillies had sporadic success, returning to the World Series again in 1983 and 1993, but they often remained league basement dwellers. In 2004, the team moved into Citizens Bank Park, a 43,000-seat natural grass stadium situated across from Veterans Stadium, which was later torn down. It was here where the Phillies enjoyed their most successful run, winning five consecutive National League Eastern Division titles from 2007 until 2011 while selling out a National League record 257 consecutive games. The team appeared in back-to-back World Series for the first time ever, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays in 2008.

With roots in America’s birthplace, baseball — America’s great pastime — is more than just a game. In Philadelphia, it became as synonymous with the city as the U.S. Constitution, a symbol of civic pride and passion, connecting the generations of the city’s people who first played early versions of the game on the Jefferson Street Grounds to fans who streamed to ballparks throughout the region every summer.

Ed Moorhouse is an editorial/media specialist at Rutgers–Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Basketball dates to 1891, when James Naismith (1861-1939) invented the game at the YMCA in Springfield, Mass., as an indoor activity for the winter months. The sport incorporated elements of rugby, lacrosse, and soccer: passing, the jump ball, shooting toward a goal, and the shape and size of the ball. Naismith nailed two peach baskets to the lower rail of the balcony in the gymnasium and drafted rules for the new game. Basketball quickly became a popular winter sport, and by the end of the decade professional leagues formed in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. 

Professional basketball in Philadelphia began in August 1898, when the sports editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Horace Fogel (1861-1928), organized the National Basketball League with three teams from the Philadelphia and three from South Jersey. In this era, a twelve-foot chain link cage ringed the court to separate players from fans, but the cage mainly led to hockey-style body checks and fans sticking pins and lit cigars into the players’ flesh. (Rope replaced the iron cages in the 1920s.) Players from the Philadelphia region competed on teams that included the Clover Wheelmen (also known as the Pennsylvania Bicycle Club), Germantown Nationals, and Hancock Athletic Association, but none of the Philadelphia-based teams won a title before the National Basketball League folded in January 1904.  

Early Game Venues 

During the early years, games took place in local armories and fraternal halls, and most players gained experience with the game by playing for fraternal organizations or athletic clubs. Squads representing fraternal organizations such as the Elks and Moose also played in professional leagues of the early twentieth century: the Philadelphia Basketball League (1902-09, revived 1923-28), the Eastern Basketball League (1909-17 and 1919-20, revived 1929-36), and the American Basketball League (1918-19, revived 1926-28 and 1933-49).   

During the first half of the twentieth century, the Philadelphia SPHAS—named for the team’s original owner, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association—reigned as the region’s top team. Owner Eddie Gottlieb (1898-1979) founded the team with sporting goods magnate Harry Passon (1897-1954) and schoolmate Edwin “Hughie” Black (1897-1986). The majority of the team’s players were Jewish, and enthusiastic fans jammed the ballroom of the Broadwood Hotel on North Broad Street on Saturday nights to watch them play. The team won eleven championships while playing in a series of leagues between 1930 and 1945, but after a change in ownership in 1950 became one of three touring opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters. 

Some of the SPHAS’ top players joined the region’s next professional basketball team: the Philadelphia Warriors, formed when Philadelphia received a franchise in the new Basketball Association of America (BAA) following World War II. Eddie Gottlieb (by this time no longer active with the SPHAS) became coach and general manager of the Warriors, whose players also included athletes from the University of Pennsylvania, St. Joseph’s College, and Temple University. Playing in the Philadelphia Arena at Forty-Fifth and Market Streets, the Warriors attracted crowds of more than eight thousand fans as they won the inaugural league title following the 1946-47 season. After three seasons, the Warriors became a team in the National Basketball Association (NBA), which formed from a merger of the BAA and the National Basketball League. Splitting home games between the Philadelphia Arena and the higher-capacity Civic Center beginning in 1952, the Warriors won the league championship again in 1955-56 with a roster including homegrown players from LaSalle, Penn, and Villanova. 

Enter Wilt Chamberlain

A new star player came to the Warriors in the 1959-60 season. Seven–foot Overbrook High School graduate Wilt Chamberlain (1936-99), who also played for the University of Kansas and the Harlem Globetrotters, led the NBA in scoring and rebounds on the way to winning Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player honors. In March 1962, in a game against the New York Knicks played at Hershey Sports Arena to expand the Warriors’ fan base, Chamberlain scored 100 points. Remarkably, given Chamberlain’s record as a notoriously bad free throw shooter, he went 28-32 in the game while playing all forty-eight minutes. In Philadelphia and with other teams, Chamberlain ultimately played sixteen seasons in the NBA. 

Following the 1961-62 season, Gottlieb sold the Warriors to a group from San Francisco led by Franklin Mieuli (1920-2010), a radio and television producer. However, the NBA returned to Philadelphia in 1963-64 when investors Irv Kosloff (1912-95) and Ike Richman (1913-65) purchased and relocated the Syracuse Nationals. Renamed the 76ers (or Sixers), the team did not fare well in its first season. The next season, the team acquired Wilt Chamberlain from the Warriors, but it took two more seasons for the Sixers to achieve greatness. During 1966-67, Chamberlain led the 76ers to a 68-13 record and their first NBA championship. After the next season—the first season of play in the new, 15,000-seat Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia—the Sixers acceded to Chamberlain’s desire to play on the West Coast and traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers. The trade began a decline that reached its nadir in 1972-73, when the Sixers compiled a 9-73 record, the worst in NBA history. 

The Sixers found a winning path again after acquiring American Basketball Association star Julius Erving (Dr. J) (b. 1950) before the 1976-77 season. As new owner Fitz Eugene Dixon Jr. (1923-2006) increasingly invested in talent, the team reached the finals following the 1976-77, 1979-80, and 1980-81 seasons. Harold Katz (b. 1936), who bought the Sixers in 1981, continued improving the team. Then, after acquiring Moses Malone (1955-2015) from the Houston Rockets before the 1982-83 season, the Sixers swept the Lakers and won the championship. In later years, the Sixers reached the playoffs eighteen times and the NBA finals once. Comcast Spectacor bought the Sixers from Katz in 1996 and expanded the potential attendance for Sixers games to 21,000 with the opening of the CoreStates Center (later renamed First Union, Wachovia, and then Wells Fargo Center). Ownership changed again in 2011 when an investment group led by New York billionaire Joshua Harris (b. 1965) and actor/singer Will Smith (b. 1968), a Philadelphia native, purchased the team. Key players during the post-Erving era included power forward Charles Barkley (b. 1963), point guard Allen Iverson (b. 1975), and swingman Andre Iguodala (b. 1984), who later earned most valuable player honors in the 2015 NBA finals while playing with the Golden State Warriors. In 2019, the Sixers made it to the playoffs but lost to eventual NBA champion Toronto Raptors on a last-second shot in the seventh game.  

Women’s Basketball 

Women’s professional basketball came to Philadelphia in 1979, during the second season of the first women’s professional league, the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League. The Philadelphia Fox played just ten games in November and December 1979, winning two and losing eight, before financial difficulties and ownership disputes ended the team. Nearly two decades passed before the 1996 gold-medal performance of the U.S. women’s basketball team at the Olympics ushered in a new generation of women’s professional leagues—the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) created by the NBA and the American Basketball League (ABL). Philadelphia gained a women’s team once again when the Rage, formerly based in Richmond, Virginia, moved before the 1997-98 season. With the Rage came team leader Dawn Staley (b. 1970), a Philadelphia native who had been a standout player for Dobbins Technical High School, the University of Virginia, and the U.S. Olympic team. Despite Staley’s star power and a home court at the University of Pennsylvania’s Palestra, the Rage attracted lower than expected attendance and compiled a losing season of 13 wins against 31 loses. Staley left for the WNBA, and by December 1998 the bankruptcy of the ABL also brought an end to the Rage. 

Women also played a role in coaching and management. Although Philadelphia has never had a WNBA franchise, in 2019 Collingswood, New Jersey, native and former Lehigh University player Cathy Engelbert (b. c. 1965) became commissioner of the league.  Former WNBA player Lindsey Harding (b. 1984) in 2019 served briefly as an assistant coach for the 76ers before leaving to coach for the Sacramento Kings. A developmental professional women’s team also began play in Philadelphia in 2019 with a goal of growing into a WNBA franchise. The Reign, of the Women’s Basketball Development Association, played home games at Chestnut Hill College during the 2019 season. 

Beyond Philadelphia 

Professional basketball players from the Philadelphia area made their mark elsewhere in the NBA and other leagues. A player from Villanova, Paul Arizin (1928-2006), became the league’s first great scorer and one of the top NBA players of all time. Earl Monroe (b. 1944), who played college basketball at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, helped the New York Knicks win the NBA title in 1973. Rasheed Wallace (b. 1974), who played at the University of North Carolina, led the Detroit Pistons to the NBA title in 2004. Joe Bryant (b. 1954) of LaSalle played eight seasons from the Sixers, San Diego Clippers, and Houston Rockets, and his son Kobe Bryant (1978-2020) went straight from Lower Merion High School to the Los Angeles Lakers and led them to five NBA championships. Louis “Red” Klotz (1920-2004), who started with the Philadelphia SPHAS, later formed the teams that played the Harlem Globetrotters. Dawn Staley, in addition to her play in the ABL and WNBA for more than a decade, was a three-time Olympic gold medalist and coached at Temple University, the University of South Carolina, and the women’s national basketball team. Adding to a professional basketball heritage extending over 120 years, these Philadelphia–area basketball players contributed to the success of Philadelphia teams and others in professional leagues.  

Karen Guenther is Professor of History at Mansfield University and author of Sports in Pennsylvania, published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The first two-wheeler in Pennsylvania was crafted by a blacksmith in Germantown from the parts of a threshing machine in 1819, at the request of artist and antiquarian Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). Technically a French-invented “velocipede,” the machine lacked a chain-drive transmission and brakes among other accoutrements. Peale, then nearly eighty years old, encouraged his sons and daughters to ride the 55-pound iron juggernaut and noted how they were able to travel—downhill, at least—“with a swiftness that dazzles the sight.” Not everyone was as enthusiastic. The same year that Peale acquired his velocipede, Philadelphia issued the first citation for riding on the city’s sidewalks, a spoke-stopping $3 fine. Even the museum proprietor soon lost interest in the heavy, ungainly two-wheeler.

This changed, however, with Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Among the varied exhibits was the English-designed “ordinary,” a machine with dissimilar wheel diameters that perched the rider several feet off ground. Spectators gathered to see this mechanical oddity in action, deftly demonstrated by Philadelphian John Keen. This was the high-wheel’s first public unveiling in the United States. As “ordinaries” became more widely available by the end of the decade, well-to-do riders gathered to socialize and formed local clubs, including the Philadelphia Bicycle Club (founded in 1879), the city’s first. The club promoted “the proper use of the bicycle and similar machines [as] a benefit to good health” and fellowship among cycling enthusiasts. Members shared advice on navigating gravel, dirt, or cobblestone roads that were also thronged with horses, carriages, and pedestrians. Members donned dandyish livery consisting of navy-blue flannel shirts trimmed in linen, brown corduroy breeches, and navy-blue knee stockings— – which served to invite even more ridicule by the press and public. Undaunted, similar associations formed in neighborhoods and towns across the region, from Ardmore’s Cycle and Field Club to the Wissahickon Wheelmen.

Safety Issues

While the “ordinary” provided a much more controlled and enjoyable ride than its velocipede forebears, the machine remained extraordinarily unsafe due to the high center of gravity required of its riders. “Taking a header” by vaulting headfirst over the handlebars was a common accident befalling non-helmeted high-wheel operators.

It was not until the early years of the 1890s that, following innovations such as chain-drive transmissions, pneumatic tires, and reduced height, the Philadelphia area shifted into its first bike boom. Like the “ordinary,” these “safety” bicycles were publicly unveiled in the United States for the first time in Philadelphia, in 1891. With a marked decrease in the chances of cracking one’s cranium, a much shallower learning curve for operation, and a smaller price tag, these “safeties” provided a variety of riders— professionals, laborers, men, women— with a democratic means of travel, recreation, and sport.

Although many of the earliest cycling clubs were founded by and for men, the “wheel” of the 1890s became an engine of emancipation for women. “The new means of propulsion has found especial favor with the advanced and progressive femininity of the present age,” wrote Philadelphia historian Julius Friedrich Sachse (1842-1919) in 1896. “No class of persons has taken more readily to the wheel than the new or strong-minded woman.”

In the 1890s, custom confined many women to corsets, long gowns, and other voluminous garments, modes of dress wholly unsuitable for riding. For “New Woman” cyclists, this was far more than a sartorial or safety issue: this was a matter of sovereignty. If women could not determine something as personal as their own clothes, how could they demand public rights, such as getting the vote? Clad in divided skirts, knickerbockers, and bloomers, these “belles of the boulevard” stirred a national controversy. “Thoughtful people … believe that the bicycle will accomplish more for women’s sensible dress than all the reform movements that have ever been waged,” observed an 1895 issue of Demorest’s Family Magazine.

New manufacturing methods, many of which foreshadowed the assembly-line production techniques of the twentieth century, brought the price of bicycles within reach of millions of Americans. Demand sparked the rise (and fall) of several dozen bicycle manufacturers in the greater Philadelphia area alone, including Philadelphia’s Sweeting Cycle Company, Reading’s Packer Cycle Co., and the Haverford Cycle Company. Even the department store magnate John Wanamaker (1838-1922) joined the craze, with his 1897 Falcon model a particular hit. Like any new industry boom, a handful of upstarts flourished while many floundered. Founded in 1892, Philadelphia’s Common Sense Bicycle Manufacturing Company proved to be anything but, as the company folded the following year.

Mapping Routes

For a sense of the popularity of riding, consider that, beginning in 1896, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a series of bicycle routes, complete with a hand-drawn map, a narrative describing road conditions and landmarks of cultural or historical significance riders would encounter, and a coupon offering discounts on hotels and restaurants along the way. Many routes were confined to Philadelphia— such as “Philadelphia, Darby and Chester, A Pleasant 15-Mile Spin”—while others— “Harrisburg to Lewistown, En Route to Pittsburg”— crisscrossed the central and western regions of the state.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, a golden age of bicycle racing captivated millions of Americans, while men, women, and children used their two-wheelers for leisurely jaunts and exercise. Local printers and cartographers, cashing in on the craze, produced guides advising cyclists on the best way to navigate the region’s roughed and rumbled streets. In tandem with electric streetcars, the bicycle also upended business practices from mail delivery to police work. By 1894, only Chicago and New York had more bicycle-bound uniformed patrolmen than Philadelphia. So popular was the machine that, the following year, more than fifty thousand buggy and carriage horses were no longer needed in the City of Brotherly— and Bicycle— Love.

While the “safety” bicycle lived up to its name in many ways, the region’s dilapidated road network posed great challenges to cyclists, whether they were racing or commuting. To smooth out the city’s rutted roads, the Associated Cycling Clubs of Philadelphia (ACCP) published two pamphlets, “Improvement of City Streets” and “Highway Improvement,” in support of bicycle-friendly infrastructure projects, including macadamized surfaces. Petitions in favor of constructing bicycle paths in Fairmount were put to park commissioners as early as 1897. That same year, ACCP president William Tucker (1845-1930) petitioned Philadelphia’s Department of Public Safety to consider a “more careful and systematic use of water upon the highways” to reduce roads’ wheel-choking mud.

During the 1920s, public interest in cycling waned as automobiles— rendered affordable through many of the same manufacturing methods previously applied to bicycle production— emerged as the vehicle of choice for excitement, speed, and convenience. Gasoline rationing during the Second World War sparked a brief renaissance in bicycle-riding, but nothing approximating the near-hysteria of earlier decades. In the post-war period, the bicycle became primarily associated with children’s recreation, popularly conceived of as a vehicular prelude to owning an automobile.

During the environmental activism of the 1970s— marked by an increased concern over pollution produced by gas-guzzling four-wheelers— cyclists formed the Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition (PBC). In an effort to make the city more bicycle-friendly, the PBC campaigned for funding of bicycle infrastructure, sponsored city-wide rides, and produced publications such as 1974’s Commuters’ Bike Map for Philadelphia. The organization scored its first major victory in 1973, working with the Delaware River Port Authority to open the Benjamin Franklin bridge walkways to pedestrians and bicyclists, overturning a prohibition that had been in effect since 1950.

The Push for Bike Lanes

By the 1990s, municipalities began to designate bike lanes on city streets. In 1993, the PBC and Mayor Ed Rendell (b. 1944) planned for a 300-mile network of bike lanes and bicycle-friendly streets. Although the plan was never formally adopted, Philadelphia’s first bike lanes were installed two years later on a half-mile stretch of Delaware Avenue. Also in the 1990s, one of the PBC’s successful programs became a separate non-profit organization, Neighborhood Bike Works, and the citywide Philly Bike Ride began in 2009 and continued annually. Also in 2009, as the use of bicycles for commuting continued to grow in popularity, the PBC— renamed the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia in 2002— worked to install buffered bike lanes on the major east-west arteries of Spruce and Pine Streets. Bicycle paths along Fairmount Avenue and along the Schuylkill Banks followed in 2013 and 2014. Central New Jersey unveiled buffered bike lanes in Cherry Hill in 2013, while Delaware–which the League of American Bicyclists named the third most bicycle-friendly state in the country in 2015–began construction of bike lanes along West and Washington Streets stretching from north Wilmington to the Riverfront in 2017.

In the region around Philadelphia, a consortium of organizations and municipalities created a trail network along the Schuylkill River from former carriage pathways, canal towpaths, and railroad corridors. Alternately called the Philadelphia to Valley Forge Bikeway and the Valley Forge Bikeway, the trail’s first stretch opened in 1979, spanning from Whitemarsh to downtown Philadelphia, following the right-of-way rail trails of the former Schuylkill Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Further extensions of the trail during the 1980s included a 4.3-mile section in Montgomery County and the completed connection between Philadelphia to Valley Forge National Historic Park. Beginning in 2012, the renamed Schuylkill River Trail became integrated into the Circuit Trail project, part of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s plan to create a single network of 750 miles of trails across nine counties in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. By 2016, more than 60 miles of the Schuylkill River Trail had been completed, with a planned goal of 130 miles connecting Philadelphia to Pottsville, linking the region’s urban, suburban and rural communities.

In 2009, the Northern Delaware Greenway Trail was completed, linking Wilmington, Alapocas Run, and Bellevue state parks between the Delaware and Brandywine Rivers. The trail network, part of the larger East Coast Greenway project, spanned more than forty miles between Wilmington and the Maryland border. Upon completion, the East Coast Greenway was slated to run from Maine to Florida.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, several cities in the Philadelphia region adopted bike-share programs to promote fuel-conscious travelling. Philadelphia’s Indego, launched in 2015, generated a larger ridership in its first year than similar programs in Boston, Washington D.C., and Denver. By 2016, Camden County and Collingswood instituted bike-share programs. In a 2016 survey conducted by Bicycling, the world’s leading cycling magazine, Philadelphia ranked as the fifteenth-most bike-friendly city in the United States, the culmination of a trend stretching back to the early enthusiasm of Charles Willson Peale and his children for the velocipede in the nineteenth century. The city’s Naked Bike Ride, first staged in 2010, again displayed the machine’s power of liberation. One of the largest such outings in the country, the event promoted positive body image and bicycle advocacy with participants in considerably less rigid attire than their elaborately festooned counterparts in the region’s first cycling clubs.

Vincent Fraley is communications manager for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and writes the Philadelphia Inquirer’s weekly history column, Memory Stream. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The competitors in the Big 5 have included some of the nation’s strongest men’s basketball programs, including teams that made it to the NCAA Final Four (Saint Joseph’s in 1961, Penn in 1979, and Villanova, which advanced to the Final Four in 1971 and won the NCAA title in 1985 and 2016). Big 5 teams also excelled in the NIT (National Invitation Tournament), including champions Temple in 1969 and Villanova in 1994 and finalists La Salle (1988) and Saint Joseph’s (2005). Among women’s teams, which began to complete in the Big 5 in the 1970s, Villanova reached the NCAA tournament ten times.

Big 5 players with roots in Philadelphia basketball added to the games’ hometown appeal. Lionel Simmons (b. 1968) led South Philadelphia High School to the Philadelphia Public League Championship before going on to play for La Salle. Ed Pinckney (b. 1963) played in the Sonny Hill League during the summer before going to Villanova. Joe Bryant (b.1954), who starred at John Bartram High, led the La Salle Explorers to the 1975 NCAA tournament; his son Kobe (b. 1978) later went straight from high school to the NBA. Some Big 5 players also advanced to Philadelphia’s professional teams. Matt Guokas (b. 1944) of Saint Joseph’s played on the 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers championship team, which also included Philadelphia native Wilt Chamberlain (1936-99).

From the time of its formation until 1986, the Big 5 played in the University of Pennsylvania’s Palestra arena, which expanded in 1955 to 9,100 seats. The participating colleges shared the profits after reimbursing Penn for the building’s maintenance. In 1986, the games shifted to the gyms at individual campuses, with each team playing a Big 5 game at home and the rest on the road. Villanova withdrew from the round-robin in 1991, claiming it could not fit Big 5 games into its nonconference schedule, but resumed participation in 1999 after a coaching change.

Despite the universities’ memberships in different conferences (in 2015-16, Ivy League for Penn, Big East for Villanova, Atlantic 10 for Saint Joseph’s and La Salle, and American Athletic for Temple), the teams continued to play round-robin games and declare a City Series Champion. A great rivalry developed and became nationally known for competitive games and civic pride.

Karen Guenther is Professor of History at Mansfield University and author of Sports in Pennsylvania (2007), published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association. (Author information current at time of publication.)

By the mid 1800s, the more-affluent members of Philadelphia society were playing billiards in exclusive men’s clubs while working-class men played billiards in taverns and saloons. There was sufficient interest in billiards in Philadelphia by 1858 for the city to be the location of the first informal American billiards championship. Other national championships were held in the city in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the 1930s there were over 200 billiards parlors in the city. All the nationally prominent billiards players of the time played in Philadelphia and some lived in the area, including Willie Mosconi (1913-93), who is considered to be the second-best billiards player of all time.

The location and date of the origin of billiards are not really known. The game is thought to have originated in France or England in the 1400s as an indoor alternative to croquet. King Louis XI of France had a billiards table made in 1470. Shakespeare refers to billiards in Antony and Cleopatra (1606-09), suggesting that by that time billiards was sufficiently popular for the reference to be understood by his audiences.

Billiards was brought to America by both the English and Spaniards. There are references to billiards being played in Virginia as early as 1710 and in New Orleans in 1723. George Washington played billiards with the Marquis de Lafayette in 1777.

Beyond the Quaker City Limits

The earliest reference that has been found for billiards in Philadelphia is a 1793 notice of sale for the Black Bear Tavern in Southwark (Queen Village), which mentions that an adjoining building contained a large space intended to be used for billiards. This suggests that billiards may have been prevalent in taverns outside the city limits (Vine and South Streets), as were other forms of sports and entertainments frowned upon by Quakers and, therefore, not found within the city proper.

By the early 1800s billiards had become popular in Philadelphia and most other major cities. Billiards parlors were respectable places, catering to the emerging urban middle and upper class. However, by the 1840s the association of billiards with gambling and other presumed associated vices led to a class distinction in the way billiards evolved and was experienced. The more elite members of society withdrew from public billiards parlors and either created billiards rooms in their own homes or enjoyed the game at exclusive men’s clubs. On the other hand, billiards continued to be a popular activity among working-class men, played primarily in taverns and saloons, but also in workingmen’s clubs and YMCAs.

The first men’s club in Philadelphia to offer billiards to its members appears to have been the Philadelphia Club, which added a billiards room to its new facility at Thirteenth and Walnut Streets in 1849. Billiards was very popular during the Civil War period. Abraham Lincoln referred to himself as a “billiards addict” (as did Mark Twain). It is, therefore, not surprising that when the Union League opened its new building on Broad Street in 1865 there was a billiards room with four tables. The evolution and eventual decline of billiards at the Union League is a good indication of the rising and waning popularity of billiards among Philadelphia’s business and civic leaders. Initially, billiards was so popular at the Union League that in 1881 an annex was built solely for adding billiards tables. Another annex was built in 1891 for the same purpose. When these were demolished to make way for architect Horace Trumbauer’s 1911 addition, two rooms were provided in the new addition exclusively for billiards, each with twelve tables.

In addition to hosting annual member tournaments, interclub tournaments, and exhibition matches, the Union League hosted the national championship in 1913. Yet by 1954 interest in the game among members had so declined that all of the billiards tables were removed.

Hosting the First Championship

This interest among the elite members of society in Philadelphia and elsewhere led to the establishment of billiards championships. The first informal American championship was held in Philadelphia in 1858 and won by its sponsor, Michael Phelan (1819-71) of New York, who defeated Ralph Benjamin of Philadelphia. Phelan is considered to be the “father of American billiards.” Not only did he sponsor championships but he also wrote the first American book on billiards and was a manufacturer of billiards tables. Further support for championships to popularize the game came from the Brunswick & Balke Co. of Chicago, which began manufacturing billiards tables in 1845. It eventually became the world’s largest manufacturer of tables and was still in business in 2015. Brunswick tables were ornate pieces of furniture often made with exotic woods and of sturdy construction to hold the heavy, green cloth-covered-slate playing surface. So popular were they with men’s clubs that one model was named “the Union League.”

Parallel to the evolution of billiards in exclusive men’s clubs and professional championships was the continuation of billiards as a popular workingman’s game.  Although billiards tables could be found in Philadelphia workingman’s clubs such as  St. Timothy’s in Manayunk in 1877 and in YMCAs, the more popular venues were neighborhood taverns and saloons. These provided places where single men from Philadelphia’s Irish and Italian immigrant communities could congregate for both social and recreational purposes. Billiards was popular because it provided an opportunity to show skill, to be with friends, and to earn a little money through gambling. By the 1920s billiards tables were as essential to a successful tavern as the bar itself.

For many of the same reasons, billiards also was popular in Philadelphia’s black community, even in the late nineteenth century. W.E.B. Dubois promoted billiards as a respectable game for the black community, and when black YMCAs began to emerge in the 1920s, most included billiards tables. Segregation prevented black players from playing in championships, which led to the creation of the Colored Billiards Players Association in 1914, although little is known of its history. However, as with other minority communities, the primary places for Philadelphia’s black residents to play billiards were taverns and saloons.

Billiard Players

From the 1880s to the 1930s, the most popular form of billiards was played with three or four ivory balls on a pocketless table. Now this is called carom billiards and is still popular in Europe and Asia, although much less so in the United States. Willie Hoppe (1887-1959) of New York is considered to have been the best carom billiards player in history and the best billiards player of all time. Between 1906 and 1952 he won 51 championship titles. Hoppe played an exhibition match at the Union League in 1933.

Carom billiards was still the form of the game initially played by Ralph Greenleaf (1899-1950), considered to be the third-best all-time billiards player and its first real celebrity. Greenleaf dominated the game from 1919 to 1937, winning 20 championships. He played exhibition matches all over the Philadelphia area for $50 a performance. Greenleaf married a vaudeville star, Princess Nai Tai, who often appeared with him at his exhibition performances, contributing to his celebrity. In his day Greenleaf was as prominent a sports figure as baseball’s Babe Ruth and boxing’s Jack Dempsey.

Billiards was initially limited to a game with three balls because ivory balls were expensive to produce. When synthetic balls were developed in England in the 1880s, the game changed to one played with fifteen balls on a table with six pockets. The championship form of the game became “straight pool,” and the dominant straight pool player was Willie Mosconi (1913-93) of Philadelphia, considered to be the second-best pool player of all time and the best straight pool player. Mosconi began playing at a very young age at his father’s billiards parlor in South Philadelphia. Between 1941 and 1957 he won fifteen consecutive championships. Straight pool matches were played until one player reached a certain number of points, one point being given for each ball pocketed. Matches were usually played over several days to scores of several hundred points. Mosconi holds the all-time documented record for balls continuously pocketed without a miss—526, achieved in an exhibition match in Springfield, Ohio, in 1954.

Under the sponsorship of Brunswick, Mosconi toured the country promoting what he always called pocket billiards. He was the technical advisor for the film The Hustler (1961), with Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman (and was said to have made Newman’s trick shots), which increased the popularity of billiards in the United States. For a time, Mosconi owned a billiards parlor in the Logan section of Philadelphia, although he seldom played there himself.

One of the notable black Philadelphia billiards players was Edward “Chick” Davis (1907-2006). Born in South Philadelphia, Davis learned to play billiards at the Christian Street YMCA, the first black YMCA in Philadelphia. Having experienced discrimination when he toured the country playing billiards, Davis opened a billiards parlor at Broad and Bainbridge Streets that was welcoming to players regardless of race or gender. He subsequently owned two other billiards parlors, one on Broad Street and one on South Street. Davis is commemorated as a billiards player and businessman by a mural located in the 1400 block of South Street. Created in 2006 by artist John Lewis, the mural depicts Davis and Willie Mosconi, whom he played in 1940

Places to Play

By the 1930s billiards was so popular in Philadelphia that there were a great many billiards parlors (as distinct from taverns or bars with a single billiards table) throughout the city. The 1920 City Directory has 230 listings under billiards and pocket billiards. Although many were located in downtown Philadelphia, there were also well-known billiards parlors in Kensington, along Roosevelt Boulevard, in Germantown, and in South Philadelphia. The best-known billiards parlor was Allinger’s, founded around 1889 and located at Thirteenth and Market Streets from 1911 to the 1971. It initially contained three floors with over 100 tables. One floor had a special glass-enclosed area for top players so they could be seen performing without being bothered. “Rack girls” were available to rack your pool balls for a small tip. All the top national players played at Allinger’s at some point in their careers.

Other well-known downtown billiard parlors were Frankie Mason’s at Seventeenth and South Streets, one owned by world champion Jimmy Caras on Chestnut Street, Harry Robbin’s at Fifteenth and Market Streets, and the Fox, at Sixteenth and Market Streets. In his autobiography, Rudolf Wanderone Jr. (1913-96), popularly known as Minnesota Fats, lists many pool halls around City Hall where he played and, in a deposition for a lawsuit in the 1940s, Ralph Greenleaf listed nine places in Philadelphia where he regularly played or gave exhibitions. Later venues included the Cue and Cushion at Fifteenth and Walnut Streets and Newby’s at Eleventh and Chestnut Streets, owned by Earl Newby, a former Philadelphia police detective who started the first billiards magazine, Billiards News, in 1960.

Longo’s Society Hill Billiards, which opened at Fifth and South Streets in 1932, was as prominent a billiards venue as Allinger’s. Phil Longo (1902-88) and his wife Mamie (1901-84) were both excellent players who won state and city championships. All the national champions played at Longo’s. Mosconi won a regional tournament there in 1933 that qualified him for the world championships. Local Philadelphians also frequented Longo’s, including George Kelly (a relative of Grace Kelly and a champion billiards player), mob boss Angel Bruno, and police sergeant (later police commissioner and mayor of Philadelphia) Frank Rizzo.

In an interview in 1974, Phil Longo lamented the decline of billiards over the course of his life, noting that of the 200 billiard parlors that existed in Philadelphia in the 1930s, only 70 remained. Using the definition of billiards parlor Longo would have used, there were virtually none remaining in the city in 2015. The last true billiards parlor, Tacony Billiards, closed in 2013. Many of the top Filipino players of the late twentieth century practiced there each August for many years, including Efren Reyes (b. 1954), considered to be the greatest contemporary billiards player.  Several traditional billiards parlors remain in the suburbs, including Drexeline Billiards in Drexel Hill, started by Bob Maidof, and Fusco’s The Spot in Trevose, owned by Pete Fusco—a fine billiards player in his own right and cousin of Jimmy Fusco (b. 1948) of Philadelphia. Known as “the Philadelphia Flash,” Jimmy Fusco is considered to be one of the great one-pocket billiards players.

Billiards in the Movies

The combination of the popularity generated by the movie The Hustler and the introduction of coin-operated tables in the 1960s created a temporary boom in public interest. The popular form of billiards—by this time more commonly called pool—became 8 ball, first begun around 1900 but not really popular until the 1950s, partially as a result of the distribution of 15,000 billiards tables by the Army in the 1940s. While Newman’s second pool film, The Color of Money (1986), with Tom Cruise, gave a boost to upscale billiards parlors, bar pool remained the most popular and most prevalent form of the game.

The longtime association of billiards and pool halls with gambling and as places for young men to hang out has often given billiards and pool a poor reputation. This was humorously presented in Meredith Wilson’s 1957 musical, The Music Man. One of its most popular songs, We Got Trouble, is about the dangers of playing pool and includes the line, “That game with the fifteen numbered balls is a devil’s tool.”  This impression led to zoning laws restricting the location of pool halls. Even in 2015, Philadelphia’s zoning code classifies pool halls with multiple tables in the same category as adult bookstores and adult movie theaters and precludes their location within 500 feet of a residential property, unlike bars with one pool table that can be almost anywhere.

In recognition of both the interest in and the primary location of billiards tables, the American Poolplayers Association was formed in 1979 and grew to 270,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Japan. The Philadelphia Chapter was founded in 1990 and in 2015 boasted 1,500 members playing on over 175 teams in bars throughout the Philadelphia area, testifying to the continuing attraction of billiards in the twenty-first century.

John Andrew Gallery is an avid billiards player. He is a member of the American Poolplayers Association, plays on an APA team in Philadelphia, and has participated in Las Vegas, Chicago, Cleveland, and Cologne, Germany. He was the first director of the City’s Office of Housing and Community Development and executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia from 2002 to 2013. He is the author of several guidebooks on Philadelphia architecture, including Philadelphia Architecture,  A Guide to the City (Third Edition, 2009). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark that reflects the city’s fusion of sport, culture, and history. The boathouses, built in the second half of the nineteenth-century, line the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River just north of the Fairmount Waterworks. Lit at night with thousands of glowing bulbs, they form a welcoming beacon to travelers entering Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River on Interstate 76.

The circumstances that led to the distinctive row of boathouses on the Schuylkill date to the early nineteenth century when Philadelphia, a commercial and cultural center of the early American Republic, became one of most historically rich and lively rowing cities in the United States. In 1821, the construction of the Fairmount Waterworks’ dam created favorable conditions for rowing on the Schuylkill and set an aesthetic that helped determine the style of the earliest boathouses. Temporary boathouse structures probably existed as the popularity of rowing grew, but construction of more permanent boathouses began in the 1850s under the auspices of the Schuylkill Navy of Philadelphia and later with increasing involvement from the Fairmount Park Commission (formed in 1867). The Schuylkill Navy, founded in 1858, served as a membership organization for the city’s amateur rowing clubs and oversaw activity on the river. Surviving into the twenty-first century, it became one of the nation’s oldest amateur sports associations.

The first small boathouse built by the Undine Barge Club was little more than a shack, but the original structure was renovated in the 1880s by the prominent architectural firm of Furness & Evans. The boathouse architecture of from the 1870s onward reflected the impulse of the Fairmount Park Commission to impose order on the riverfront landscape by requiring stone construction. When additional boathouses were built in the 1890s and early twentieth century, architectural design aesthetics had changed, and architects incorporated brick and other materials in their designs. However, each structure still reflected the utilitarian goals of protecting and storing rowing shells as well as providing a gathering place for participants.

Boating as Art

The Schuylkill’s boating history was captured on canvas by the well-known late-nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). A rower himself, Eakins found inspiration in the bodies of oarsmen as they glided along the river near the boathouses. Unfortunately, rowing’s popularity declined in the first half of the twentieth century as membership in rowing clubs dropped during the two world wars and the Great Depression; by the second half of the twentieth century many of the boathouses fell into disrepair. To celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976 and revive the boathouses, lights were hung outlining the frames of each structure, and after several repairs, in 2005 the lights were replaced with LEDs.

A recent addition, Lloyd Hall, built in 1999, is the only public structure among the boathouses. After demolition of the former public boathouse, Plaisted Hall, the new construction created controversy because its many amenities did not include room for storing or launching rowing shells. In 2002, St. Joseph’s University and St. Joseph’s Prep built a boathouse upriver, near the Strawberry Mansion bridge, but this modern structure along with the now condemned East Park Canoe House, the former home to Temple University’s team, are not traditionally considered part of Boathouse Row. Temple University also proposed construction of a new, multimillion-dollar boathouse but withdrew its proposal in 2013 because an Open Lands Protection ordinance enacted in 2011 required such projects to be offset by the purchase or transfer of comparable park land.

Despite these controversies, the twenty-first-century Boathouse Row serves as a landmark and gathering place for athletes from around the country, from novices to Olympic-caliber rowers.  Many of the associations that built the first boathouses survive and continue to support thriving club programs while also serving as venues for high school and collegiate rowers. One of the most celebrated races every spring, the Dad Vail Regatta, welcomes oarsmen and women from collegiate programs and features a novice race for corporate sponsors, a fund-raising tool that fuses Philadelphia’s rich history of rowing with its future.

Brenna O’Rourke Holland earned her Ph.D. in history at Temple University.  Her dissertation, “Free Market Family: Gender, Capitalism, and the Life of Stephen Girard,” is a cultural biography of Philadelphia merchant-turned-banker Stephen Girard that interrogates the transition to capitalism in the early American Republic. As an undergraduate at Colgate University, she was a coxswain for the Men’s Varsity Rowing team, and she enjoys cheering on her alma mater at races along the Schuylkill. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The greater Philadelphia area embraced the sport of boxing as far back as the days of bare-knuckle boxing, with great fighters becoming champions of their neighborhoods. In 1876, two Philadelphia bare-knuckle fighters, “Philadelphia” Jimmy Weeden (1846-77) and Billy Walker (1857-76), fought before a crowd of gamblers on a barge near Pennsville, New Jersey. Walker lost the fight and died from injuries sustained in the contest. Weeden was arrested for his participation in the bout and died one year later in a Trenton prison. Public and legal outrage from this bout resulted in the establishment of the Philadelphia Rules for boxing. This regulation, created by Philadelphia City Councils in cooperation with the county sheriff’s office, included new rules on the location and duration of fights in the city. Boxing matches were required to take place within the city limits and contests could last no longer than four rounds, a restriction that was later changed to six rounds for scoring purposes.

Weeden and Walker were only two of the bare-knuckle boxers from Philadelphia who had lasting impacts on the sport. John Clark (1849-1922) and Arthur Chambers (1846-1923), both of whom immigrated to the United States from the British Isles, opened boxing schools (early boxing gyms) in the late nineteenth century and developed local talent in Philadelphia. As the twentieth century approached, Philadelphia began to emerge as a leading world fight center.  Throughout the early 1900s, the sport of boxing was especially popular with poor immigrant groups from Europe. Members of the city’s African American population, which jumped from 34,000 to 480,000 between 1850 and 1950, also played important roles in developing the sport and its popularity. In the later decades of the twentieth century, the sport of boxing became a fixture in the city’s Hispanic communities, which more than doubled between 1990 and 2010.

Boxing Hall of Famers Jack Dempsey (1895-1983) and Gene Tunney (1897-1978) fought the first of their two world heavyweight title bouts at Sesquicentennial Stadium in South Philadelphia on September 23, 1926. Tunney defeated the Manassa Mauler in ten rounds via unanimous decision in front of a crowd of over 120,000 fans in one of the best-known fights of the 1920s, a decade when boxing was considered the king of sports. The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce estimated that spectators brought in an additional $3 million in revenue to the city around the time of this bout.

1940s: Eight Championship Matches

Philadelphia hosted eight championship boxing matches in the 1940s, more than in any other decade in city history. Leading up to this decade, black fighters with few exceptions were typically denied entry into mainstream bouts. Those who were able to fight on boxing’s main stage were often confronted with racism and had little control over their careers. Despite being confronted with social and racial obstacles, black boxers performed with distinction during the period. Black lightweight champions Ike Williams (1923-94) of Trenton and Bob Montgomery (1919-98) of Philadelphia both fought several times. On December 5, 1947, Homesteadville, New Jersey, native Arnold Cream (1914-1994), better known as Jersey Joe Walcott, squared off against heavyweight champion Joe Louis (1914-81) at Madison Square Garden. The final decision from the judges was two-to-one in favor of Louis over underdog Walcott, a result considered by many historians to be one of the most controversial decisions in boxing history.

Although Walcott lost to Louis in a controversial decision, his participation in this bout proved to have a deeper impact on race, sports, and society as the first time a black boxer broke the color line. Prior to this bout, boxing promoters and writers were at times skeptical of the willingness of white fans to pay to see a black man fight. Ticket sales at the Louis-Walcott fight proved that white boxing fans were willing to attend a bout featuring a black champion defend his title against a black challenger. Ticket sales of $216,477 broke a record that had stood for twenty years at the Garden. Furthermore, when Walcott returned to Camden he was given a hero’s welcome by a crowd of over 100,000 South Jersey fans, of all social classes and ethnicities. Camden Mayor George Brunner (1896-1975) called Walcott’s welcome home gathering the “greatest single event in Camden’s history.”

Also in 1947, members of the Philadelphia Police Department founded the nonprofit Police Athletic League (PAL) to provide North Philadelphia’s youth with after-school sports, a refuge to escape the dangers of the streets, and educational and cultural programs. The Twenty-Third District PAL boxing program, located in a traditionally high crime area of North Philadelphia, served as the training grounds for numerous professional boxers including Joe Frazier (1944-2011) and Bennie Briscoe (1943-2010).

In Philadelphia, rivalries from the streets often came into the gyms. Neighborhood rivalries could become violent sparring sessions known as “gym wars.” Considered by many fighters to be far rougher than the bouts they were training for, these sparring sessions caused some champion fighters and their trainers to refuse to train for bouts in the area.

The Hollywood film Rocky, released in 1976, captured the sense of pride and the power to overcome adversity that emanated from those hardscrabble neighborhoods, many of which were burdened by high levels of poverty and crime. The fictional character Rocky Balboa was a tough fighter from an Italian immigrant family who rose from the streets of Philadelphia to capture the World Light Heavyweight championship. Fighters from the Greater Philadelphia region often came from poor or working-class neighborhoods.

Joe Frazier’s Gym

Joe Frazier provided a real-life parallel to the Rocky story. In 1975 he purchased the gym on North Broad Street that he had used since the 1960s from an investment group and reopened it to the public as Joe Frazier’s Gym, where he trained future generations of Philadelphia fighters. Frazier’s facility served as a safe haven from the dangers and distractions of the streets for the city’s inner-city youth. Frazier dominated the Philadelphia boxing scene throughout the 1970s, holding the World Heavyweight Title from 1970-73. He became best remembered for his trilogy of fights against Muhammad Ali in 1971, 1974, and 1975, including his victory over Ali (1942-2016) in 1971 at Madison Square Garden.

In 1961, the legendary Blue Horizon opened its doors to professional boxing shows on North Broad Street in North Philadelphia. For most Philadelphia boxing fans who packed the hall, the former Moose Hall was Mecca. Fight fans sitting in the balcony of the Blue Horizon were right on top of the action.

In 1976, after gambling was legalized in Atlantic City, casinos became prime boxing locations, often at Philadelphia’s expense. The city’s Boardwalk Hall had been available for sports events from the time it opened in 1929, but the presence of the casinos attracted numerous title fights to the oceanfront city from the 1980s to the 2000s. Among them were Undisputed Heavyweight Champion title defenses in Boardwalk Hall by Mike Tyson (b. 1966) and Evander Holyfield (b. 1962).

In Philadelphia, locations such as Joe Hand Gym in Northern Liberties continued to play an important role in the community in the 1990s. Founded in 1995 by promoter Joe Hand Sr. (b. 1936), this gym provided local children and teens with a place to not only train in boxing, but also to train in academics. The gym provided members with access to a computer lab and stressed the importance of brains and brawn.

Boxing Persists in Philadelphia

Although once one of the most popular sports in the United States, along with baseball and horse-racing, boxing by the twenty-first century had been surpassed by other sports including football, basketball, ice hockey, and auto racing. Even as interest in boxing declined nationally, however, it maintained a hold in the Philadelphia area. Twenty-eight-year-old Juniata Park native Danny Garcia (b. 1988) captured his first world championship in 2012 in Houston and was celebrated as the city’s first Hispanic world champion. When Garcia was just ten years old, his ex-convict father, Angel, introduced him to Juniata Park’s Harrowgate Boxing Club, a reservoir of boxing tradition for the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood. Green shamrocks over the gym’s entrance served as a reminder of working-class, Irish-American fighters who called the neighborhood home before the late 1980s. In the Philadelphia fashion, Garcia opened a gym in his neighborhood in 2013 to give back to his community and mentor fighters in the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican population.

Philadelphia rarely attracted major fights in the twenty-first century due to the continued popularity and lure of nearby Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and numerous Native American-run casinos around the country. In April 2008, the legendary gym and staple of North Philadelphia, Joe Frazier’s Gym, closed due to Frazier’s health issues, unmanageable debt, and back taxes.  Philadelphia’s popular boxing venue the Blue Horizon closed in 2010 because of the deterioration of the building, tax issues, and the decline of the surrounding neighborhood. The loss of the Blue Horizon also caused numerous local boxing promoters to move their cards to Atlantic City venues.

Still, other Philadelphia boxing landmarks survived the challenges of the twenty-first-century. Since the 1950s, boxers, including numerous world champions, trained in Front Street Gym on the border between largely white, working-class Port Richmond and primarily Hispanic Kensington. The gym was featured in the sixth installment of the Rocky series, Creed (2015), which co-starred Gabriel Rosado (b. 1986), a popular fighter of Puerto Rican descent from North Philadelphia. Owner Frank Kubach and his staff spent over twenty-five years motivating youth from the surrounding areas to not only be better boxers, but also better citizens. He refused to collect dues from members under the age of eighteen to ensure that they had a place to train. The gym’s role in the community and its presence in the film instilled a renewed sense pride in the neighborhood for area residents and continued Philadelphia’s boxing tradition.

Matthew Ward is a graduate student in History at Rutgers University—Camden. He graduated from Arizona State University in 2007, with a B.A. in History and Culture. He has worked in financial services for over seven years and serves as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. He is also an Army veteran who served in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2010 to 2011. He grew up on the Jersey Shore and resides in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. He runs a blog and monthly podcast called The Matt Ward History Experience. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Greater Philadelphia Area’s Boxing Champions

Danny Dougherty (1876-1931), Philadelphia: World Bantamweight Champion.

Philadelphia Jack O’Brien (1878-1942), Philadelphia: Light Heavyweight Champion.

Harry Lewis (1886-1956), Philadelphia: World Welterweight Champion.

Battling Levinsky (1891-1949), Philadelphia: Light Heavyweight Champion.

Benny Bass (1903-75), Philadelphia: World Featherweight and World Junior Lightweight Champion.

Tommy Loughran (1902-82), Philadelphia: World Light Heavyweight Champion.

Midget Wolgast (1910-55), Philadelphia: New York World Flyweight Champion.

Johnny Jadick (1908-70), Philadelphia: World Junior Welterweight Champion.

Ike Williams (1923-94), Trenton: NBA World Lightweight Champion.

Bob Montgomery (1919-98), Philadelphia: New York World Lightweight Champion.

Jersey Joe Walcott (1914-94), Camden: National Boxing Association (NBA) World Heavyweight Champion.

Percy Bassett (1930-93), Philadelphia: Interim World Featherweight Champion.

Harold Johnson (1928-2015), Philadelphia. NBA World Light Heavyweight and World Light Heavyweight Champion.

Sonny Liston (1932-70), Philadelphia. World Heavyweight Champion.

Joey Giardello (1930-2008), Philadelphia: World Middleweight Champion.

Joe Frazier (1944-2011), Philadelphia: New York World Heavyweight and World Heavyweight Champion.

Bennie Briscoe (1943-2010), Philadelphia: North American Boxing Federation (NABF) Middleweight Champion.

Larry Holmes (b. 1949), Easton: World Boxing Council (WBC) World Heavyweight and IBF World Heavyweight Champion.

Mike Rossman (b. 1955), Philadelphia: WBA World Light Heavyweight Champion.

Matthew Saad Muhammad (1954-2014), Philadelphia: WBC World Light Heavyweight Champion.

Jeff Chandler (b. 1956), Philadelphia: World Boxing Association (WBA) World Bantamweight Champion.

Dwight Muhammad Qawi (b. 1953), Camden: WBC World Light Heavyweight, WBA World Cruiserweight, WBC Continental Americas Cruiserweight Champion.

Charlie “Choo-Choo” Brown (b. 1958), Philadelphia: IBF World Lightweight Champion.

David Bey (b. 1957), Philadelphia: United States Boxing Association (USBA) Heavyweight Champion.

Tim Witherspoon (b. 1957), Philadelphia: WBA World Heavyweight Champion.

Calvin Grove (b. 1962), Coatesville: USBA Featherweight and IBF World Featherweight Champion.

Tyrone Crawley (b. 1958), Philadelphia: NABF Lightweight Champion.

Gary Hinton (b. 1956), Philadelphia: USBA Super Lightweight, WBC Continental Americas Super Lightweight, IBF World Junior Welterweight Champion.

Buster Drayton (b. 1954), Philadelphia: International Boxing Federation (IBF) World Junior Middleweight Champion.

Robert Hines (b. 1961), Philadelphia: USBA Super Welterweight and IBF World Junior Middleweight Champion.

Bert Cooper (b. 1966), Sharon Hill: NABF Cruiserweight and World Boxing Federation World Heavyweight Champion.

Fred Pendleton (b. 1963), Philadelphia: USBA Lightweight and IBF World Lightweight Champion.

Meldrick Taylor (b. 1966), Philadelphia: IBF World Junior Welterweight and WBA World Welterweight Champion.

Nate Miller (b. 1963), Philadelphia: NABF Cruiserweight and WBA World Cruiserweight Champion.

Ivan Robinson (b. 1971), Philadelphia: USBA Lightweight and NABF Lightweight Champion.

Bernard Hopkins (b. 1965), Philadelphia: IBF World Middleweight, WBC World Middleweight, Linear World Light Heavyweight, WBC Light Heavyweight, IBF Light Heavyweight, and WBA Light Heavyweight Champion.

Bruce Seldon (b. 1967), Atlantic City: IBF Inter-Continental Heavyweight and WBA World Heavyweight Champion.

Leavander Johnson (1969-2005), Atlantic City: NABF Lightweight, USBA Lightweight, and IBF World Lightweight Champion.

Charles Brewer (b. 1969), Philadelphia: IBF World Super Middleweight Champion.

David Reid (b. 1973), Philadelphia: WBA World Junior Middleweight Champion.

Jackie Frazier-Lyde (b. 1961), Philadelphia: WIBA World Light Heavyweight and WIBF World Super Middleweight Champion.

Zahir Raheem (b. 1976), Philadelphia: WBA-NABA Featherweight, WBC International Lightweight, and WBO-NABO Super Lightweight Champion.

Terrance Cauthen (b. 1976), Trenton: NABF Super Lightweight, WBA-NABA Super Lightweight, IBU World Super Welterweight, USBA Super Welterweight Champion.

Yusaf Mack (b. 1980), Philadelphia: USBA Super Middleweight, WBA-NABA Light Heavyweight, NABF Light Heavyweight, and USBA Light Heavyweight Champion.

Demetrius Hopkins (b. 1980), Philadelphia: USBA Super Lightweight and USBA Super Welterweight Champion.

Lajuan Simon (b. 1979), Philadelphia: USBA Middleweight Champion.

Steve Cunningham (b. 1976), Philadelphia: IBF Cruiserweight Champion.

Mike Jones (b. 1983), Philadelphia: North American Boxing Association (NABA) Welterweight Champion and WBO-NABO Welterweight Champion.

Danny Garcia (b. 1988), Philadelphia: WBC Junior Welterweight, WBA and Ring Junior Welterweight, and WBC Welterweight Champion.

Teon Kennedy (b. 1986), Philadelphia: USBA Super Bantamweight and WBA-NABA Super Bantamweight Champion.

Hank Lundy (b. 1984), Philadelphia: WBO-NABO Lightweight, NABF Lightweight, and WBC Continental Americas Lightweight Champion.

Gabriel Rosado (b. 1986), Philadelphia: WBA-NABA Super Welterweight and WBO Inter-Continental Super Welterweight Champion.

Karl Dargan (b. 1985), Philadelphia: NABF Junior Lightweight Champion.

Julian Williams (b. 1990), Philadelphia, WBC Continental Americas Super Welterweight Champion.

Jason Sosa (b. 1988 ), Camden, WBA World Super Featherweight Champion.

Notable Bouts in the Greater Philadelphia Area

Jack Johnson (W) vs. Joe Butler (May 11, 1903), Washington Sports Club, Philadelphia.

Mickey Walker (W) vs. Lew Tendler for the National Boxing Association World Welterweight Title (June 2, 1924), Shibe Park, Philadelphia.

Jack Dempsey vs. Gene Tunney (W) for the National Boxing Association World Heavyweight Title (September 23, 1926), Sesquicentennial Stadium, Philadelphia.

Joe Louis (W) vs. Gus Dorazio for the World Heavyweight Title (February 17, 1941), Convention Hall, Philadelphia.

Ike Williams (W) vs. Beau Jack for the World Lightweight Title (July 12, 1948), Shibe Park, Philadelphia.

Sugar Ray Robinson (W) vs. Kid Gavilan for the World Welterweight Title (July 11, 1949), Municipal Stadium, Philadelphia.

Kid Gavilan (W) vs. Gil Turner for the World Welterweight Title (July 7, 1952), Municipal Stadium, Philadelphia.

Jersey Joe Walcott (W) vs. Rocky Marciano for the World Heavyweight Title (September 23, 1952), Municipal Stadium, Philadelphia.

Joey Giardello (W) vs. Rubin Carter for the WBC World Middleweight and WBA World Middleweight Titles (December 14, 1964), Convention Hall, Philadelphia.

Joe Frazier (W) vs. Oscar Bonavena for the New York World Heavyweight Title (December 10, 1968), Spectrum, Philadelphia.

Dwight Muhammad Qawi (W) vs. Matthew Saad Muhammad WBC World Light Heavyweight Title (December 19, 1981), Playboy Hotel and Casino, Atlantic City.

Dwight Muhammad Qawi (W) vs. Matthew Saad Muhammad for the WBC World Light Heavyweight Title (August 7, 1982), Spectrum, Philadelphia.

Mike Tyson (W) vs. Tyrell Biggs for the WBC World Heavyweight, WBA World Heavyweight, and the IBF World Heavyweight Titles (October 16, 1987), Convention Hall, Atlantic City.

Mike Tyson (W) vs. Larry Holmes for the WBC World Heavyweight, WBA World Heavyweight, and the IBF World Heavyweight Titles (January 22, 1988), Convention Hall, Atlantic City.

Aaron Davis vs. Meldrick Taylor (W) for the WBA World Welterweight Title (January 19, 1991), Convention Center, Atlantic City.

Evander Holyfield (W) vs. George Foreman for the WBC World Heavyweight, WBA World Heavyweight, and the IBF World Heavyweight Titles (April 19, 1991), Convention Hall, Atlantic City.

Bernard Hopkins (W) vs. Wayne Powell for the vacant USBA Middleweight Title (December 4, 1992), Merv Griffin’s Resorts, Atlantic City.

Arturo Gatti (W) vs. Mickey Ward – 2003 Ring Magazine Fight of the Year (June 7, 2003), Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City.

Jermain Taylor vs. Kelly Pavlik (W) for the WBC World Middleweight and WBO World Middleweight Titles (September 29, 2007), Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City.

Bernard Hopkins (W) vs. Karo Murat for the IBF World Light Heavyweight Title (October 26, 2013), Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City.

The Philadelphia Flyers, formed as a National Hockey League expansion team in 1967, became known as the Broad Street Bullies for their aggressively physical play during the 1972-73 season. As the Flyers racked up penalty minutes at a record pace, Philadelphia’s press corps tried to create a colorful nickname for the team. Jack Chevalier and Pete Cafone of the Philadelphia Bulletin called them the “Broad Street Bullies” following a brawling 3-1 victory over the Atlanta Flames, and the nickname stuck to the team also known for winning two Stanley Cup championships and for renditions of “God Bless America” by Kate Smith (1907-86) at home games.

The Flyers acquired the band of tough players via the 1967 Expansion Draft, amateur drafts, free agency, and trades. The team took Gary Dornhoefer (b. 1943), Bernie Parent (b. 1945), and Ed Van Impe (b. 1940) in the 1967 Expansion Draft. Bobby Clarke (b. 1949), Don Saleski (b. 1949), Dave Schultz (b. 1949), and Bill Barber (b. 1952) came through the amateur draft, and Rick MacLeish (1950-2016) arrived from Toronto in a trade that sent Parent to the Maple Leafs. Clarke became the team’s leader, winning awards for sportsmanship and the NHL’s Most Valuable Player in 1973, 1975, and 1976. Schultz (also known as “The Hammer”) was the most physical of the Flyers, setting the NHL record for penalty minutes in the 1974-75 season.

Traditionally, the Flyers played a recorded version of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” before the game, but she performed it live for the 1973 season opener. It proved to be a good omen, as the team finished with a 50-16-12 record. The Flyers defeated the Atlanta Flames, New York Rangers, and Boston Bruins to win the Stanley Cup in 1974, with Parent (who returned to the Flyers in 1972) winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP and the Vezina Trophy as the top goalie. Coach Fred Shero (1925-90) won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. The Flyers became the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup, and two million people turned out for the parade down Broad Street to celebrate the victory.

The following season, the Flyers finished with a 51-18-11 record, winning the division again. The Flyers defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs, New York Islanders, and Buffalo Sabres in the playoffs, as they secured their second Stanley Cup. This time, nearly 2½ million people turned out for the parade on Broad Street. Parent again won the Conn Smythe and Vezina Trophies, while Clarke won the Hart Trophy (MVP). The Flyers returned to the playoffs each of the next four years, but they failed to win the Cup, losing in the finals in 1976. After Dave Schultz was traded to the Los Angeles Kings in 1976 and coach Fred Shero left to become head coach and general manager of the New York Rangers in 1978, the Flyers were no longer the dominant intimidating team of the mid-1970s. The Flyers subsequently reached the Stanley Cup finals in 1980, 1985, 1987, 1997, and 2010.

The exploits of the 1972-73 Flyers became the subject of the 2010 HBO documentary Broad Street Bullies, narrated by Liev Schreiber (b. 1967). Goalie Bernie Parent (1984), forward Bobby Clarke (1987), left wing Bill Barber (1990), and head coach Fred Shero (2013) have been enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Karen Guenther is Professor of History at Mansfield University and author of Sports in Pennsylvania (2007), published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association. (Author information current at time of publication.)