History

The stretch of 69th Street in Upper Darby anchored the residential and commercial growth of the western Philadelphia suburbs in the early twentieth century. The 69th Street Transportation Center—where the Market-Frankford elevated line met trolley and bus routes to Chester County—drew enough foot traffic to support a major entertainment venue. The Tower, designed in the Moorish atmospheric style popularized by architect John Eberson through the 1920s, opened in 1927 as a movie palace serving the suburban audience that lived west of Philadelphia proper.

The atmospheric interior—plaster walls imitating Moorish stonework, a domed ceiling painted to suggest a star-filled sky with cloud formations moving across it, and side walls carved to evoke an open-air courtyard—provided the escapist environment that the atmospheric theater formula promised. The Tower ran first-run Hollywood films through the studio era, with vaudeville acts supplementing the bill in its earliest seasons.

The transition from cinema to rock concert venue in the late 1960s and 1970s preserved the building when urban movie houses across the Philadelphia area closed. The Tower’s size—large enough for major acts, intimate enough for excellent sightlines—and its transit access made it a preferred Philadelphia-area venue. David Bowie recorded “David Live” there in 1974; The Who recorded a live album at the Tower in 1973; Bruce Springsteen’s performances there became part of his early-career legend. The rock programming established the Tower’s identity for subsequent decades and funded the maintenance that kept the atmospheric interior alive.