Bloke claims to have spent years living in secret sports stadium apartment

A man has published a tell-all book making the sensational claim that he turned a disused concessions stand at one of the US's most famous baseball stadiums into a secret apartment.

Between 1971 to 2003 the Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium in Pennsylvania was home to a Major League baseball team, and the NFL team reputed to have the “most intimidating fanbase” in sporting history.

But the 65,000-seat stadium was also home to Tom Garvey. In his new book, The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, the Vietnam veteran claims that between 1979 and 1981 he lived in a secret apartment that he built inside an unused concession stand.

Garvey describes himself in the book as “off-the-wall South Philly version of the Phantom of the Opera.”

He didn’t just hide himself away in his secret lair.

In the book he describes how he would host halftime parties in his apartment and hung out with local sports celebrities such as Tug McGraw, Dick Vermeil, and Julius Erving. “I was like a kid with a Willy Wonka golden ticket,” he says.

Garvey built his secret stadium lair after getting a job from uncles, the Nilon Brothers, who ran the stadium’s concession stands – confessing that he only got the job through nepotism Garvey says that when he was given the job he was also handed a mysterious bunch of keys.

In 1979, His Holiness the Pope visited the US and celebrated a mass in the city’s Logan Circle park. The Veterans Stadium car parks were used for overflow parking and Garvey found himself making some last-minute arrangements the night before.

That night, a friend of Garvey’s casually remarked: “Oh man, could you imagine if you could just stay here all the time?”

“Once he said that I couldn’t wait till we got the people in the lot and I could get back there and start working on it,” Garvey told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I was driven.”

One former Philadelphia Eagles player, Bill Bradley, said 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.”

The 60-foot-by-30-foot concession stand featured all the comforts of home: a bed, sink, fridge, coffee-maker and hot plate. He managed to find some spare AstroTurf to use as a carpet..

While Garvey didn’t tell too many people about his secret apartment he made an exception for the players’ wives and girlfriends: “We’d put music on the stereo and have a drink,” he said. “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.”

He only left the apartment behind when his uncles lost the parking lot franchise in 1981.

The Veterans Stadium itself was demolished in 2004, but Garvey, now 78, will always have his memories of roller-skating around the deserted stadium late at night which he says was almost “like meditation.”

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