I spent 2 years living in a football stadium after I built a secret flat… it was fully furnished with AstroTurf carpet | The Sun
A VETERAN built himself a secret apartment inside his favourite sports stadium – and even decked it out with AstroTurf carpet.
US veteran and author, Tom Garvey, published a tell-all book in which he sensationally revealed how he turned an unused concession stand into his home at the former Veterans Stadium.
The publication, titled “The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, A Surreal Memoir", details Tom's life events between 1979 and 1981.
Along with the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team and the Philadelphia Eagles football team, Tom called "The Vet" his home.
The 65,000-capacity venue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was eventually demolished by implosion in March 2004 but it will always hold special memories for Tom.
The fascinating sequence of events across those two years of Tom's residence began when he started working at the stadium as a parking lot supervisor.
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He built his secret stadium lair after getting a job from uncles, the Nilon Brothers, who ran the stadium’s concession stands.
But when he was given the job he was also handed a mysterious bunch of keys.
They allowed him to come across the empty container, where he began spending nights, before converting it into a fully furnished apartment.
Tom recalls it was about 60 feet long by 30 feet wide with a sloped roof.
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It became equipped with a bed, sink, refrigerator, coffee maker, stereo and more, while it was carpeted with leftover AstroTurf from the field.
The empty concession stand was located out by left field, in a low-traffic area by gate D on the 200 level.
To keep it out of view, Tom arranged the space so that if someone opened the door, all they would see was a wall of cardboard boxes.
At one end of the boxes was a corridor which opened up into the secret apartment.
Tom claims that he got away with his sneaky antics because he was “non-threatening and affable”.
But the frequency at which he worked meant he was able to “hide in plain sight” because no one questioned why he was still at work.
And with his job requiring him to spend a great deal of time on site, few noticed that he never went to an off-site home.
However, Tom never took photos of the apartment and was very selective with whom he allowed to visit for fear of getting caught.
But a select few rare visitors were able to confirm that the secret apartment did indeed exist.
This included his cousin, Ridley Park resident Terry Nilon, Philadelphia Eagles Hall of Famer Bill Bradley, and former Electric Factory General Manager Michael McNally.
One former Philadelphia Eagles player, Bill Bradley, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that once Garvey got his hideaway set up, it was “fantastic.”
He recalled: “You go in there and you think it’s just a root beer stand with a bunch of stocked-up boxes and then it opened up into a better apartment than I had in Center City.”
In his book, Tom even boasts hosting the wives of Eagles players after games so they didn’t have to wait in the parking lot for their husbands.
“We’d put music on the stereo and have a drink,” he said, as quoted by the Daily Local.
“The husbands would join their wives and have a beer, and then the [spectator] traffic would pull out and we’d get their cars and have dinner.”
Perhaps one of Tom's most stand-out recollections was roller skating around the concourse at night when he was by himself, which he says was almost "like meditation".
However, he left the apartment behind when his uncles lost the parking lot franchise in 1981.
He would go on to meet his current wife Margaret, whom he married in 1992, and enjoy a successful career in real estate.
Tom and Margaret currently reside in Ambler and he has five stepchildren, two grandchildren, and a dog, Mozie.
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