Inside the Palestra, the most magical arena in all of college hoops

May 2024 · 9 minute read

In basketball parlance, Charles Zeller Klauder was a diaper dandy, a precocious designer who at the age of 15, waltzed into the prominent Philadelphia architectural firm T.P. Chandler and got to work. Known for his deft hand and love for the Gothic style, Klauder would win numerous awards for his designs that dot college campuses across the country, including Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning, the second tallest university building in the world.

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He also designed another famous cathedral. He just didn’t know it would become a place of worship. The Palestra, named by a Greek studies professor at Penn, has welcomed the basketball devout and inspired songs of praise, poetry and puffery (I’ll take credit for at least 10,000 myself) for 93 years now. The building didn’t create the great basketball, of course. That came from the generations of hoops gods, from Wilt to Oscar to Kobe to LeBron, who stood on its court, and the fact that said court has hosted more college games than any other existing venue in the country.

But the building creates the magic. “It’s one of those things, if you try to explain it to someone from far away, you can’t,’’ says Iowa coach, Philly native and Penn graduate Fran McCaffery, essentially adding an IYKYK hashtag to the conversation. Which is part of it. Outsiders tend to roll their eyes when Philadelphians wax eloquent about the Palestra, unable to grasp how an old gym could possibly merit such effusiveness. Except that’s just it. The Palestra has never been just a gym.

With a growing concentration on athletics nearly 100 years ago, Penn administrators called in Klauder. He already had helped design Franklin Field, the school’s football field renowned for its arches. Now they were looking for more space — specifically, a building to house a swimming pool and gymnasium, as well as an “indoor stadium.’’ Hutchinson Gymnasium is the gym; the Palestra is the stadium. It was always meant to be special, and Klauder ensured it would be.

He used steel beams to span the court, eliminating the pillars then used in such buildings, the ones that created obstructed views. It made the place seem vast and open, especially when the sunlight splashed in from the overhead windows, shooting sunbeams across the court.

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It took workers just seven months to build the entire thing, the Palestra debuting on Jan. 1, 1927. The home team beat Yale, 26-15, with 10,000 fans on hand. That in and of itself made the Palestra special. Dr. Naismith had tossed a ball into a peach basket only 36 years earlier, so the very idea of so many people gathering to watch this fairly new game made the Palestra an instant success story.

But the real beauty of the place has revealed itself over time, in its quirks, its nooks and crannies, and even its hidden secrets.

Ask any Philadelphia basketball fan of a certain age and odds are he or she has a story about sneaking into the Palestra. If the tales were all true, the place would have to hold 20,000. There were ways in, and no doubt they were exploited. Daring folks learned to scale the back wall and pop through a window in the upper deck unnoticed, but smarter folks used the route that Klauber included in his original design.

The Palestra, the stadium, sits right next to the gym. Officially there is no interior passage to connect the two, or so says the university’s facilities website. It ought to include an asterisk — *there is no interior passage to connect the two anymore. The two buildings both go well below ground level. In fact years ago, after discovering that the famed archway structures at Franklin Field go a good 20 to 30 feet beneath ground level, the university realized Hutchinson once housed a below-ground rifle range, spent shell casings found on the floor. Anyway for those in the know, the old Hutchinson weight room once included a door that led to a storage area. Opposite the door were a pair of wooden steps that led to a tunnel beneath the Palestra and, around the corner, yet another door. That one opened directly onto court level, just off to the side of one of the baskets. It’s all closed off now, of course, but served as an ingenious gateway for clever fans who knew the intricacies of the Palestra well.

Penn takes on Princeton back in the 1940s. (H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock via Getty)

Dan Harrell showed me that secret entrance years ago on a private tour only he could lead. After being let go by General Electric, Harrell got a job at Penn, working first in the Wharton School’s housekeeping. Not long after, the Teamsters Union relocated him, giving him the janitor’s gig at the Palestra. He wound up as the unofficial curator and caretaker of the place, so beloved the school created a Harrell bobblehead. He worked his way toward a Penn degree during his tenure, before retiring in 2012. Harrell knew which sections of the place would be lit up by the sunlight at what time of day, and he took me to the laundry room, tucked behind the equipment manager’s office, to show me the original court floor. It didn’t appear terribly unusual to me at first, just honey blonde wood, and then Harrell pointed out how it ran — horizontally and not vertically, the same way it did on the court.

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The floor revealed another quirk in 2008, when administrators finally pulled it up for replacement. As Brendan Quinn discovered, it came up 30 inches shy of regulation, a fact plenty of people apparently knew, but no one wanted to talk about.

Some believed the misdirected planks and short court were intentional, designed to give the home team an advantage. Former Penn athletic director Steve Bilsky, who also was a star guard for the Quakers, chuckles. “It was the 1920s,’’ he says. “So I don’t think so.’’ The AD admits that in some instances it did help to know the layout of the place. Accessing the court in the southwest corner, for example, requires a walk down a fairly steep cement-floored ramp that feels slippery no matter what shoes you choose. There’s a railing, but it’s in the middle of the wall, so more than a few people, including visiting players, hug the wall as they head down. Except the ramp turns toward the bottom, and at the curve, the ceiling slopes. “If you’re like 6-4, you can whack your head,’’ Bilsky says.

As a player, Bilsky also learned not to work too hard in pregame warmups. What the wooden bleachers lacked in comfort they made up for in cheek-to-cheek spacing, fans spilling almost into the aisles. Longtime Associated Press reporter Jack Scheuer used to look to the upper deck before a big game, checking to see if the fans in the uppermost bleacher of one section spilled into the next. “We’ve got corners,’’ he’d say. Or, as Bilsky translated, “over capacity.’’ There are plans to add air conditioning to the place this year, but you can imagine what it felt like otherwise. Just last season, in fact, when Penn State hosted Iowa on an unusually mild January day, facilities crews positioned huge box fans next to the benches, trying to keep the slippery floor dry. In the upper decks, fans shunned their sweatshirts in favor of T-shirts. “So as a player, it was like a horse,’’ Bilsky says. “You had to make sure you didn’t wash yourself out. You’re excited, it’s hot, you’re sweating. You absolutely did not use all 20 minutes to warm up.’’

If the heat didn’t overwhelm you, the noise did. Those steel beams and high ceilings made for a perfect cacophony, if not an ideal sound system. With dueling pep bands parked in opposite top corners, the noise reverberated off the ceiling and bounced around the place. “I think the coolest thing, you heard the saying, ‘hanging from the rafters?’ ’’ McCaffery says. “Well, that place actually had rafters, and the sound was like no place else.’’

Before WiFi and ethernet, reporters used couplers attached to phones to send in their finished stories. More than a few cursed through missed deadlines, the noise rendering the couplers useless.

Before he retired, Harrell heard the sound of a crowbar meeting wood and nearly cried. For years the main entrance included the original mahogany ticket booth. “The kind where you had to crawl in a little hole at the bottom, no door,’’ Harrell says. “If you got a little chunky, you’d have a hard time getting in there.’’ Progress has come to the Palestra, inevitably. Some of it is, frankly, magnificent. In 2000, the school spent $1.9 million on the refurbishment (or about two times more than it cost to build the place), turning the concourse into a museum. Smart fans know two things — don’t eat at the Palestra; the concession stands are few, the options standard — and arrive early to enjoy a stroll through history. Display cases run the entire circumference of the concourse, featuring each of the Big 5 schools, the great players to compete there, even the media.

But change is hard, especially at a place so beautifully stuck in the past. “They’ve ruined some of the uniqueness of the place,’’ Harrell says. “There’s nothing wrong with being unique.’’ Bilsky walked that fine line for 10 years, while he served as the athletic director at his alma mater. He felt the push-pull of progress, the need to upgrade and improve running headlong into the desire to preserve, as well as the reverence, all these years later, for Klauber. Even decisions as simple as a new paint job frequently were met with resistance. “The university architects always would talk about the original vision, and I’d understand but I’d also say, ‘But it’s dark in here,’ ’’ Bilsky says. “I understood it, but we didn’t want it to become such a relic nobody wanted to come.’’ He oversaw the changes along the concourse, the redoing of the court floor and the addition of new HD scoreboards. Back when the Palestra hosted the Atlantic 10 tournament in the 1990s, the old ones required someone to shimmy up between the fans and replace the team names by hand.

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Two years ago the school announced the most controversial change: It sold naming rights to the court. Officially it’s now known as Macquarie Court at the Palestra, named for a global financial services company. That decision prompted Bilsky to write an op-ed for the student newspaper, voicing his displeasure with the decision. He admits now he was slightly reluctant to do so, not wanting to step on the toes of his successor, but “certain things are sacred. I was furious.’’

Technically it’s just a flourish of paint, nothing more, but it looks wrong. Worse, it feels wrong, kind of how Charlie Brown felt watching Snoopy string together a neon celebration of the commercialization of Christmas. Like someone desecrated a cathedral.

(Top photo: Nicole Fridling / Icon Sportswire via Getty)

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