Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium Site

Moments That Made History

Over its 62 seasons, the ballpark witnessed 47 million fans pass through its turnstiles and an extraordinary catalog of baseball feats. The Philadelphia Athletics won seven pennants and five World Series titles here, including the legendary 1929 squad that rallied from 8-0 down with a 10-run eighth inning in the World Series — still the biggest comeback in Series history. On June 3, 1932, Lou Gehrig became the first 20th-century player to hit four home runs in a single game on this field. On September 28, 1941, Ted Williams went 6-for-8 in a doubleheader to become the last player of the century to finish a season above .400.↗↗

The park also hosted three Negro League World Series, with Philadelphia's own Hilldale Club featuring in two of them. The 1943 All-Star Game was the first ever played under lights. In 1947, 41,660 fans — nearly 9,000 above capacity — packed in to see Jackie Robinson make his Philadelphia debut. The 1948 NFL Championship was won here too, when the Eagles beat the Chicago Cardinals 7-0 in driving snow.↗

The Spite Fence and the Neighborhood

One of the ballpark's most famous features was not a design choice at all — it was born from a dispute. Because the playing field sat so close to the surrounding residential blocks, homeowners on 20th Street could watch games for free from their windows and rooftops. Some even built bleacher stands on their roofs and sold tickets to neighbors. In the winter of 1934-35, Connie Mack's partners responded by raising the right-field wall to a staggering 50 feet with a corrugated metal extension that blocked the rooftops from view. The infamous spite fence became one of baseball's most debated structures, inspiring lawsuits and fury from both neighbors and outfielders, whose hits caromed unpredictably off its rippled surface.↗↗

The row houses that once hosted rooftop spectators still line North 20th Street today, minus the fence. Walking past them, visitors can still appreciate how tightly the ballpark was embedded in a working-class neighborhood — a relationship that made Shibe Park beloved but also contributed to its eventual decline when neighbors grew tired of the noise, traffic, and lights.↗↗

A Wild Ending

The final game at Connie Mack Stadium was played on October 1, 1970. The Phillies beat the Montreal Expos 2-1 in ten innings, but the result barely mattered. Souvenir hunters armed with hammers, wrenches, and saws began dismantling the ballpark while the game was still in progress. Fans ripped up seat slats, tore off railings and billboards, stripped the wooden left-field wall, scooped up clumps of infield dirt, and carried out urinals. The Inquirer ran the headline, quoting 31,822 in attendance as the Wrecking Crew. The planned postgame ceremony was canceled. A helicopter meant to carry home plate to Veterans Stadium was called off, though staff managed to save the plate.↗↗

The fire that gutted the abandoned stadium came not long after. Five years later, a demolition crew finally razed what remained of Ben Shibe's enduring monument in 1976, erasing the physical structure but not the memory.↗↗

What You Will Find Today

The Deliverance Evangelistic Church now occupies the ballpark footprint, its 5,100-seat sanctuary dedicated in 1992 on ground where more than 47 million fans once gathered. The church is a working congregation, so visitors should view it from the exterior rather than enter uninvited. In a fitting connection between eras, Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts — the last Phillie to take the mound at Connie Mack Stadium — once walked into the church grounds and was led to the area where the pitcher's mound once stood.↗↗

On West Lehigh Avenue, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected a marker in 1997 that summarizes the park's story: opened 1909, renamed 1953, home to the Athletics (1909-1954) and Phillies (1938-1970), site of three Negro League World Series and five A's World Series victories, razed 1976. The marker is wheelchair accessible and stands at the intersection where the ballpark's domed entrance tower once greeted arriving fans.↗↗

Making the Pilgrimage

This is not a museum or a preserved structure — it is a quiet corner of a residential neighborhood where imagination does most of the work. The marker, the church, the surrounding row houses, and the block's proportions (the field was famously asymmetrical, with right field at just 340 feet and an enormous center-field gap reaching 515 feet) all help a visitor reconstruct what once stood here.↗↗

Nearby points of interest include the Baker Bowl site, home of the National League Phillies before they moved here, just 0.6 miles to the south. The Church of the Advocate, a celebrated Episcopal church with a famous Picasso mural, is less than a mile away. Any baseball history fan combining a Citizens Bank Park visit with a Philadelphia sports heritage tour will find this stop — despite its modest physical remains — one of the most emotionally resonant on the map.↗

The Connie Mack statue that once stood in a plaza across Lehigh Avenue from the ballpark has been relocated over the decades and now greets fans outside Citizens Bank Park in South Philadelphia, completing an unexpected circular journey for Mr. Baseball himself.↗↗