page_title: John F. Kennedy Stadium (Philadelphia)
section_title: Football
hierarchical_section_title: John F. Kennedy Stadium (Philadelphia) / Football
caption_attribution_description: English: Mass Transportation (Army-Navy Game), Griffith Teller's illustration for the 1955 Pennsylvania Railroad calendar. Beginning in 1936 when the game moved to Municipal Stadium, the Pennsylvania Railroad operated special game-day service with around 40 trains serving as many as 30,000 of the attendees. To do this, the PRR modified their Delaware Extension and West Philadelphia Elevated Branch freight lines and installed massive temporary platforms at Greenwich Yard.
context_page_description: John F. Kennedy Stadium was an open-air stadium in Philadelphia that stood from 1926 to 1992. The South Philadelphia stadium was on the east side of the far southern end of Broad Street at a location now part of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex. Designed by the architectural firm of Simon & Simon in a classic 1920s style with a horseshoe seating design that surrounded a track and football field, at its peak the facility seated in excess of 102,000 people. Bleachers were later added at the open end.
  Each section of the main portion of the stadium contained its own entrance, which displayed the letters of each section above the entrance, in a nod to ancient Roman stadia. Section designators were divided at the south end of the stadium between West and East, starting with Sections WA and EA and proceeding north. The north bleachers started with Section NA.
  It was built of concrete, stone, and brick on a 13.5-acre tract.
context_section_description: The stadium's first tenants (in 1926) were the Philadelphia Quakers of the first American Football League, whose Saturday afternoon home games were a popular mainstay of the Exposition. The Quakers won the league championship but the league folded after one year.
  The Frankford Yellow Jackets also played here intermittently until the team's demise in 1931. Two years later the National Football League awarded another team to the city, the Philadelphia Eagles.  The Eagles had a four-season stint as tenants of the stadium before moving to Shibe Park for the 1940 season, although the team did play at Municipal in 1941. The Eagles also used the stadium for practices in the 1970s and 1980s, even locating their first practice bubble there before moving it to the Veterans Stadium parking lot following the stadium's condemnation.
  The stadium became known chiefly as the "neutral" venue for a total of 41 annual Army–Navy Games played there between 1936 and 1979. The streak was briefly broken during World War II, when travel restrictions forced three games to be held on campus and one game to be played in Baltimore. From 1960 to 1970 it served as Navy's home field when they played Notre Dame. It also hosted the Notre Dame-Army game in 1957, marking the only time the Cadets have hosted the Fighting Irish outside of New York or New Jersey. The Pennsylvania Railroad and its successors, Penn Central and Conrail, offered game-day service to all Army-Navy games, using a sprawling temporary station constructed each year on the railroad's nearby Greenwich freight yard. The service, with 40-odd trains serving as many as 30,000 attendees, was the single largest concentrated passenger rail movement in the country.
  A.F. "Bud" Dudley, a former Villanova University athletic-director, created the Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia in 1959. The game was played at Municipal Stadium and was the only cold-weather bowl game of its time. It was plagued by poor attendance; the 1963 game between Mississippi State and NC State drew less than 10,000 fans and absorbed a loss in excess of $40,000. The Liberty Bowl's best game was its first in 1959, when 38,000 fans watched Penn State beat Alabama 7–0. However, even that crowd was swallowed up in the environment. Atlantic City convinced Dudley to move his game from Philadelphia to Atlantic City's Convention Hall for 1964. 6,059 fans saw Utah rout West Virginia in the first indoor bowl game. Dudley moved the game to Memphis in 1965 where it has been played since.
  The stadium hosted Philadelphia's City Title high school football championship game in 1939 and 1978. St. Joe's Prep defeated Northeast, 27-6, in 1939. Frankford beat Archbishop Wood, 27-7, in heavy rain in 1978.
  On September 16, 1950, the Cleveland Browns, playing their first season in the NFL after dominating the defunct All-America Football Conference (winning all four league titles), played their first NFL game against the two-time defending NFL Champion Philadelphia Eagles. Philadelphia was the center of the professional football universe at the time; not only did the city host the defending NFL Champions, but the league offices were also in town, headed up by NFL commissioner (and Philadelphia native) Bert Bell. To accommodate the anticipated ticket demand, the game was moved from Shibe Park; this proved to be a wise decision, as the contest drew a then NFL-record 71,237—nearly doubling the Eagles' prior attendance mark of 38,230. Many thought Bell had scheduled this game of defending league champions to teach the upstarts from the AAFC a lesson. Instead, the Browns shredded the Eagles' vaunted defense in a 35-10 rout, and went on to win the NFL Championship that first year in the league.
  In 1958, some 15,000 fans attended a CFL game between the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Ottawa Rough Riders with proceeds from ticket sales going to local charities. (Hamilton won, 24-18, in what remains the only regular-season CFL game played between two Canadian teams outside of Canada.)
  The stadium was home to the Philadelphia Bell of the World Football League in 1974
caption: Pennsylvania Railroad trains lined up at a temporary station outside the stadium after the 1955 Army-Navy game
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