Concert History | Veterans Stadium — Cameras Became Part of the Three-Story Choreography

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When David Bowie brought the Glass Spider production to Veterans Stadium on Thursday, July 30, 1987, the Philadelphia Inquirer identified the night as the tour's opening at the stadium and described a three-story spider above a stage built for dancers, scaffolding, projected imagery, and flight effects. Local band Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers played first; Squeeze was the official opener: https://web.archive.org/web/20131029185313/http://articles.philly.com/1987-07-31/news/26199387_1_glass-spider-david-bowie-ropes

The session's place-based mechanism was the camera system. Inquirer critic John Milward noted that it did more than magnify the action for distant seats: the cameras followed the production's rigid choreography, cutting among dramatic angles with the grammar of a music video. In a large open bowl, blocking for the stage and blocking for the screen had become one coordinated performance.

Live Design's production history independently identifies Christine Strand as video director, Mark Ravitz as set designer, and Allen Branton as lighting designer. It describes the spider as 40 feet in diameter with a 15-foot inflatable body, multiple scaffold levels, 20,000 feet of colour-changing rope light, and Flying by Foy rigging: https://www.livedesignonline.com/projects/david-bowie-glass-spider-1987-top-concert-tour-design-all-time. These details explain why the cameras mattered at Veterans Stadium: they translated a vertically layered theatre piece into readable close views without pretending that the stadium itself was an intimate room.

Coordinate method: the pin at 39.906667, -75.171111 marks the center of the former Veterans Stadium bowl, not a surviving stage. Wikidata gives 39°54′24″N, 75°10′16″W: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1545870. The U.S. Census TIGER geocoder places the former 3501 South Broad Street address at 39.907879, -75.172784: https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/locations/onelineaddress?address=3501%20S%20Broad%20St%2C%20Philadelphia%2C%20PA%2019148&benchmark=Public_AR_Current&format=json. A 230-metre precision radius covers the roughly 200-metre address-to-center offset and the demolished stadium footprint.

Cover image: Squelle, “Mike Schmidt HR vs. Cincinnati Reds at Veterans Stadium July 20, 1987,” photographed July 20, 1987, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mike_Schmidt_HR_vs._Cincinnati_Reds_at_Veterans_Stadium_July_20,_1987.jpg. Caption: Veterans Stadium during an unrelated Phillies–Reds baseball game ten days before the Bowie concert. The image shows the 1987 bowl, not Bowie, the Glass Spider stage, or this session. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/