While the spectators watched in amazement, high winds ripped away a 50-by-100-foot section of the Spectrum's roof and sent it crashing to the ground outside. The building's fortunes soon followed: Three years later, the arena - built for the city by Wolman's group at a cost of $12 million - was operating under the protection of federal bankruptcy court.
"The Spectrum wasn't a very valuable property back then," Snider recalled. "The roof had made it a national laughingstock."
No one is laughing now.
In one of the bigger gambles in the city's commercial history, Snider - owner of the fledgling Philadelphia Flyers - stepped forward to pull the Spectrum out of bankruptcy court in January 1972 with an offer to pay its more than $8 million in debt.
He received in return a 50-year lease to operate the city-owned arena at a minimal rent - $1,250 per month - and without the burden of real estate taxes. In addition, he was guaranteed the lion's share of profits from an adjacent city parking lot. Example: The lot generated revenues of $1.2 million last year, according to city officials, and $757,550.02 of it went to Snider.
To say that Snider won his gamble is gross understatement. In 1974, seven years after he started the team with a $2 million investment, Snider's Flyers galvanized the city with the first of their two Stanley Cups. Driven by the popularity of the Flyers, the Spectrum's turnstiles spun at a rate that made it, by most accounts, the most profitable arena in the nation for its size.
And those successes in turn begat Prism, the regional pay-television network that Snider started in 1976 in a joint venture with Twentieth Century- Fox. By 1983, when Snider sold his interest in Prism, it had become the nation's most successful regional network with 355,000 subscribers on 87 cable systems. The sale price was never revealed, but some observers placed Snider's share in the tens of millions.
