Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

The first radio broadcast of a college football game, the first stadium scoreboard, the first two-tiered stadium in America - and it is still hosting games 131 years on. Franklin Field, at 235 South 33rd Street on the University of Pennsylvania campus, was dedicated on 20 April 1895 for the first running of the Penn Relays, and the NCAA recognises it as the nation's oldest stadium still used for college football. The original 100,000-dollar wooden stands gave way in 1922 to the brick U-shaped lower bowl, with the upper deck added in 1925 - creating the country's first double-decker stadium, then its largest at 78,000-plus seats. The horseshoe hosted Army-Navy games, Red Grange's pro debut crowds and, from 1936 to 1980-era memory, decades when it ranked among American sport's great cathedrals. The Philadelphia Eagles called Franklin Field home from 1958 to 1970, winning the 1960 NFL Championship here over Vince Lombardi's Packers - Lombardi's only playoff defeat - and the stadium's crowds invented some of the franchise's enduring folklore. College football's first radio broadcast went out from here in 1922, and the first televised game followed in 1940. Its beating heart remains the Penn Relays, the world's oldest and largest relay carnival, which has filled the stadium every April since 1895 with tens of thousands of athletes from high schoolers to Olympians - Jamaica's sprint faithful giving the meet a Caribbean carnival atmosphere. Penn Quakers football, track and lacrosse fill the rest of the calendar, with capacity now 52,593. The stadium sits in the middle of University City: SEPTA's Penn Medicine station is effectively at the gate, 30th Street Station is a ten-minute walk, and Locust Walk's campus life spills around the brick arcades. Walk the upper deck for the skyline view - a century-old vantage the new stadiums cannot copy.