"I've been in retail for 27 years," Sheil said, stooping over to pick out another shard of glass from the carpet of his store at Broad and Walnut Streets. "But this was over the top."
He ticked off the results - windows smashed, glass strewn everywhere, vandals in the store, merchandise tossed out the broken windows and stolen.
If the police had not responded so quickly, he said, more merchandise would be gone. As it is, Sheil said yesterday that he was not yet sure how much was missing.
"My vision was of them ransacking the store," he said.
Police advised him to take the PATCO High-Speed Line from his home in Haddon Heights because Center City streets were blocked. He arrived at the store at 1 a.m. and stood guard until 4 a.m., when repair crews finished barricading doors and windows.
Then, working alone, he began to clean up, joined later by the store's morning shift. The store opened as usual.
"It's a shame," Sheil said.
Next door, John Whiting watched the ruckus Wednesday night as he, his father and his brother stood in the doorway of their restaurant, Italian Bistro.
They had been serving drinks to a happy bunch that spilled out onto Broad Street to celebrate after the final strikeout.
The Whiting trio and a friend stationed themselves outside the door, partly to join the festivities on Broad Street, but mostly to keep out the unruly crowd.
Whiting could see a bus shelter on the corner being trashed. The vandals used parts of the shelter to smash in the windows at Robinson's.
Whiting pointed out where vandals had stripped the neon signs from his glassed-in sidewalk cafe and then climbed up on his glass roof.
He was petrified they would break through and fall on the tables below. "You can't tell them to get down," he said. "It was a mob mentality."
Whiting estimated that damage to his place would run between $8,000 and $12,000.
