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They were some
of the biggest names in South Florida: Burdines. The Hollywood Sportatorium. Eastern Air Lines. WCIX TV. And although they're gone, they haven't been forgotten. Fans
and former employees of these brands pay homage to them and reminisce through online alumni groups on Facebook, blogs and
other websites. In a place like South Florida, where old buildings are razed to make way for gleaming skyscrapers andshopping
centers, these online communities stand out for their ongoing connections to local icons of the past. Suzzy Hald, who worked security at the former Hollywood
Sportatorium, launched hollywoodsportatorium.com in 2012 to give fans of the concert venue a place to share memories.
Browse through the website and you'll see old stage passes, posters and ticket stubs. There's a link with photos of
acts like Kiss, Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac, as well as a place to leave comments. Hald
also helps run an accompanying Facebook page called "Remember the Sportatorium," which has more than 2,800 likes. "There is such nostalgia and love for the place," said Hald, 55, of the venue fondly referred
to as "The Sporto." The 15,500-seat hangar was situated on 500 acres
of undeveloped Pines Boulevard from 1970 until it closed in 1988. "Everybody
will tell you that the best times of their lives was at the Sportatorium for rock 'n' roll," added Hald, who
now lives in Austin, Texas. Like Hald, Jeff Lemlich also is a former employee who runs both a website and a Facebook
page dedicated to the now-defunct independent TV news station WCIX. He worked there for 19 years in various roles, from a
graphics character generator and news producer to senior writer. "It was
a huge part of my life," he said of the station, which later became the CBS-owned and -operated WFOR-TV-Ch. 4. "I
started [both] as a way to reconnect with old friends, and share some really good memories." WCIX was known for its 10 p.m. newscasts, "Tom and Jerry'' after-school cartoons and reruns of
shows like "Maude" and "Barney Miller." "We had low expectations
and even lower ratings, but we had more fun than anyone else in town,'' said Lemlich, 58. On Saysix.blogspot.com — so named as a nod to
the station's jingle, "Say Six for South Florida, Say Six!" — viewers share videos of newscasts and discuss
former anchors and the station's "Night Owl Movies" show. There also are photosof the station's home, a
round five-story building that was on Brickell Avenue in downtown Miami. "Nostalgia
is a powerful thing," said Ken McAdams, one of almost 250 members of the "Say Six!" WCIX Facebook group. The
Weston resident worked as a studio camera operator and an assistant director at the station. He is now a director at WTVJ-Ch.
6 in Miramar. "For a lot of us, it was our first job in television. I remember
coming in as an intern and being blown away at the chance to work the teleprompter for [host] Chuck Zink," added McAdams.
"I visit this page to remember those days and see the familiar names and faces I started my career with."
A new company, the Miami-based Eastern Air Lines Group Inc.,
bought the intellectual properties of the former airline brand and is in the process of resurrecting it. Yet people continue
to post vintage photos and videos of the former fleet's white, silver and blue planes departing or landing. The Facebook page also features ads that harken back to when airline travel was seen as more luxurious. "Point your toes south, come fly with Eastern," a narrator says in one black-and-white
1960s commercial about Eastern flights to Miami on the Facebook page. "Burdines Friends" is a Facebook group made up of more than 100 former
employees and fans of what was once called "The Florida Store." The 109-year-old Burdines name was dropped in 2005
when parent company Federated Department Stores Inc. folded the chain under the Macy's brand. "Everybody started to float away and go to different jobs and having this group brought us back together,"
said former Burdines employee Shawna Serig Kelsch. "It's wonderful. It's another way for all of us to re-engage
with each other." Posts reminisce about the department store chain's
well-known Royal Palm Restaurants, tea rooms and vintage ads. "There is so
much history to record,'' commented Maria Enza Finamore on the "Burdines Friends" Facebook page. The Hollywood
resident is a former Burdines employee. "We were and are a family." Indeed,
the Internet is like a graveyard of former South Florida businesses with active community groups. Search on Facebook alone
and you find pages related to the Miami Pop Festival, Pan American Airways, and nightclubs including Button South in Hallandale
Beach and The Copa in Fort Lauderdale. "Social media just makes it so much
easier to find others who share a similar fondness for something from the past, or to build that community of people with
a shared interest," said Kimberly Taylor, an associate marketing professor at Florida International University. "As
we become disconnected from people in person, these sorts of groups do give a sense of connectedness — both to the remembered
place and to other people." Staff researcher Barbara Hijek contributed to this report. johnnydiaz@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4939
Sex, drugs and the Sportatorium Twenty-five years after its final concert, the Hollywood Sportatorium rocks on in the minds that were blown there By Jake Cline, SouthFlorida.com Sun Sentinel jcline@southflorida.com 3:14 p.m. EDT, October 11, 2013 At the Willie Nelson concert, they searched my brother Josh for drugs. They frisked him, lifted his cowboy hat from his head, ran a finger around the band, and ruffled his hair, as if he were hiding quaaludes within his corn-blond locks. Lucky for Josh, he wasn't holding that night. He was 8 years old. The year was 1982, and my parents had decided to take me, Josh and my youngest brother, Joe, to our first arena concert. It was a big deal. In our house, god had red pigtails, hailed from Texas, was best friends with Waylon Jennings and smoked a tremendous amount of marijuana. But to me, the man who was playing that night was only slightly more important than the venue: the Hollywood Sportatorium, a concrete hangar on 500 acres of a then-undeveloped stretch of Pines Boulevard. With its churchy roof, prisonlike walls and highway-motel landscaping, the place looked as if it had been designed on a cocktail napkin by an architect who'd lost a bar bet. A lyric little bandbox of a concert venue it was not. But no one went to the Hollywood Sportatorium to admire its architecture, and even at 10 years old, I'd already heard enough sordid, shocking tales about the place for it to have acquired near-mythological status. Twenty-five years after the last guitar chord was struck, the last parking-lot punch was thrown and the last joint was extinguished at the 15,500-seat Sportatorium — the Sporto, as it was affectionately known; the Vomitorium, as it was not — the place remains almost too bad to be true. "Bad" not in the awful sense — though many awful things certainly transpired there — but "bad" meaning "tough," "dangerous" and "cool." Led Zeppelin played there. So did Pink Floyd, Thin Lizzy, the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, Rush, AC/DC, the Police and, six months before he died, Elvis Presley (a show my parents attended sans kids). The stories I'd heard from my teenage uncle and my stoner schoolmates made the Sportatorium sound like a modern-day Colosseum, where the gladiators were groupies, the chariots were El Caminos and the emperors went by the names David Lee Roth, Robert Plant and Geddy Lee. And, as security informed my family the night of the Willie Nelson concert, adults routinely used children to smuggle drugs into the venue. The final concert took place at the Sportatorium on Oct. 21, 1988, and for a venue known for hosting the most louche rock 'n' roll acts of the age, it went out not with the bang of Alex Van Halen's gong, but with the high-lonesome whimper of the Desert Rose Band, a post-Byrds country act led by the singer-guitarist Chris Hillman. Bulldozers and wrecking balls finished it off five years later. "It was the best place to be, and it was the worst place to be," says Scott Benarde, the Sun Sentinel's rock critic from 1982 to 1987. "There was something about the nature of that place — its location, its vibe — that made it a great place for rock 'n' roll. But at the same time, it was lawless. I mean, even the security guards were getting stoned." Benarde, now communications director for the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, was on hand for some of the Sportatorium's most-notorious concerts. He was there on June 30, 1985, when rain poured through the venue's long-deteriorating roof, forcing Robert Plant to cancel that evening's concert and giving him cause to quip at the makeup show: "This is the first gig I've ever done that was rained out inside the building." Benarde saw Madonna deliver a "terrible" performance on May 11, 1985. His review said the show featured "enough smoke to cure a ton of salmon for a year." Worse than the Madonna episode, worse even than the Def Leppard concert in 1987 that another music critic described as "nothing but a big joke," was what happened to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on Feb. 20, 1981. Touring to promote "The River" album, Springsteen was four songs into his set when the Sportatorium audience revealed itself to him in all its glory. "He's playing 'Independence Day,' " Benarde recalls. "It's not about the Fourth of July. It's about a relationship with his family. This is a very quiet ballad, a quiet, thoughtful, reflective song. Suddenly, there are these firecrackers going off. Springsteen stops the show and says, 'I want whoever did that to go to the box office, get their money back and never again come to one of my shows.' " Springsteen probably wishes he'd left with the guy. Before the night was over, several fans pulled off the simultaneously repulsive and impressive act of urinating on the stage from the front row. Springsteen kept his promise to never play the Sportatorium again. Tony Landa, a Hialeah-based musician and photographer who operates the concert-news website Dig Under Rock, ticks off the shows he saw at the Sportatorium like a mountain climber enumerating peaks he's summited: "I saw [Iron] Maiden three times. Judas Priest three times. I saw David Lee Roth a couple of times. I saw Van Halen. ZZ Top twice." Landa, 44, wishes he could have seen more. "It wasn't just an event — it was a major event to go to a show there," he says. "You didn't want to miss a show. [With] the big rock shows, you'd go, 'Oh, damn it. I can't believe I'm going to miss that.' " One show his friends saw but he didn't was the Rush concert on Nov. 28, 1981, when, after the Sportatorium failed to open on time, the Canadian trio's fans went berserk. "The Rush incident is probably the most famous of all Sportatorium moments, the riot," Landa says. "Apparently, [Rush drummer] Neil Peart was late because he was watching a baseball game. They wouldn't open the doors, so people were jumping over the walls." By the time it was over, Hollywood police reportedly had tear-gassed the crowd, the concertgoers had returned fire with rocks and bottles, and 11 officers had been injured. It wasn't the arena's first riot: A year earlier, a melee at a Ted Nugent show involved nearly 500 people and sent one police deputy to the hospital. To be fair to the Sportatorium, South Florida was lousy with deplorable venues in the '70s and '80s. The Sunrise Musical Theatre— a 3,900-seat hall that from 1976 to 2002 hosted U2, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Soundgarden, the Clash and Barry Manilow (thankfully not together) — provided an intimate forum for abysmal behavior. During another Cline family outing, I had the good fortune to watch Waylon Jennings give the bird to a group of heckling teenagers, drop his guitar to the floor and stomp off the Sunrise stage, only to return to it awhile later drunker than he'd left it. "I saw a lot of crazy [stuff] at Sunrise," Landa says, "but it was a smaller venue. I think the thing about the Sportatorium, besides that it was the ['80s], was the fact that it was so much bigger. But I also think the fact that it was kind of in the middle of nowhere, it made people a little more free." While that freedom may have brought out the worst in some concertgoers, the performers often absorbed that energy and redirected it. Benarde still describes a U2 concert he saw at the arena in near-spiritual terms, and Landa talks about Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" and Judas Priest's "Defenders of the Faith" tours as if they were formative experiences. The celebratory Hall and Oates concert I saw at the Sporto in 1985 — listen, I was nowhere near as cool as Benarde or Landa — partly inspired me to become a music journalist. Billy Joel's cathartic, marathon set the year before almost makes me wonder why I can't stand his music today. It would be an act of charity to say the Sportatorium was acoustically challenged. Sound ricocheted off its walls like gunfire, and the vocals were unintelligible to the point that you couldn't tell if David Lee Roth was running with the devil or rutting on an anvil. But like the air of danger that hung over the place, the obstructed-view seating, the precipitation that fell from the rafters and the Lake of Urine that formed in the post-show parking lot, the crummy dynamics were part of the Sportatorium's wicked charm. The Sporto was special not simply because it was there, and not just because there was nowhere. For many South Floridians, the Sportatorium was the site of a first concert, a first beer, a first night out alone. For others, it was where they landed their first kiss, their first punch or their first arrest. Money woes, mismanagement and malfeasance chipped away at the Sportatorium's lifespan almost since the day it opened in 1970 as a low-rent sports arena for fans of rodeo, boxing, motocross and professional wrestling. Developers coveted the property for years, and public officials went to bed at night praying for its demolition. The opening of the larger, more-modern Miami Arena on July 13, 1988, signaled the end for the Sportatorium, and touring acts — Robert Plant not the least among them — relished the opportunity to play a South Florida venue where fans, and Mother Nature, were less likely to pee on them. "[The Sportatorium] is an eyesore, an antiquated, ugly, obsolete building whose time came and went a long time ago. Most people who have memories of that place probably want to forget those memories," developer Walter Hollander told the Sun Sentinel in 1992, speaking like a man who never saw Bruce Springsteen lose his cool, who never heard Motley Crue shout at the devil, who never stood on the shores of the Lake of Urine, and whose 8-year-old brother was never profiled as a drug mule. Twenty-five years gone, the Sportatorium still rules. Copyright @ 2015 SouthFlorida.com TheRockFile March 16, 2011 "local Rock Audiences Need Etiquette Lesson" "Concert audiences are getting out of hand again. It's time for South Florida concertgoers to reflect a bit about concert etiquette if there is such a term for rock n' roll shows. One thing is certain, rock concerts, no matter what the variety - heavy metal, rap, punk, pop, reggae or other - are not two-hour havens for anarchy and rudeness to fellow spectators, performers or even the (Hollywood Sportatorium) concert hall." - South Florida Sun Sentinel, March 13, 1987 The Hollywood Sportatorium was South Florida's Rowdy Rock Palace in the 1970s and 80s. Every band that mattered blew through its decrepit old doorways and concrete hallways. Built in 1969 out on the edge of nowhere, the Sporto was the best place to run wild on a Saturday night in South Florida. Get a little wasted, catch your favorite band and let the weekday fade into the swampy lowlands of the untamed Florida night. As late as 1985, the Sportatorium was the largest indoor concert venue in the state, with a full house holding 15,500. It was located on the outer banks of dusty old Pembroke Pines, with only a two-lane dirt road in and out. From day one the Sporto was a crumbling mess. Surrounding the parking lot was a moat, which served as communal piss pot for concert goers. It was not uncommon for a car to off-road it straight into the water while a bunch of drunk rednecks relieved some beer as nature intended. Of course the Great Florida Southern Rock bands held court: The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Outlaws, Blackfoot. It was a right of passage for a young Southern Gentleman of a certain age and intention to get hip to the scene surrounding the Sporto. If you grew up in South Florida, Southern Rock was part of your bloodline, the defining soundtrack to your wasted youth and the Sportatorium was where you wen to commune with the brotherhood. I'm goin' back to the Gator Country where the wine and the women are free - Molly Hatchet South Florida in the 70s was Rough & Tumble, and the Sportatorium personified the wide-open,anything goes lifestyle of its duty inhabitants. Tailgates, fireworks and general Southern Style Mayhem were natural parts of the concert experience. The parking lot was where it all went down; pre-show brews, weed, fistfights, gate-crashing, drug busts. Just another Saturday night at the Molly Hatchet & Outlaws show. The Sporto always brought out the fringes of the longhair Muscle Car crowd. A distinctly Southern Man who rarely wore shirts, sported homemade tattoos and drank the cheapest beer possible out of some sense of Redneck American Pride. Can of Schlitz anyone? Raising some hell at the Sporto was an accepted part of the ritual: In 1980, a bunch of Ted Nugent fans rioted after cops busted some pot-smoking longhairs and threw them in a trailer. The rest of the crowd didn't think that was cool and an hour-long standoff ensued. A 1981 Rush concert erupted in a tear-gas dust-up as Broward County's Finest tried to fight off a gate-crashing crowd of about 500. Bienvenue Canadiens! Bruce Springsteen was so pissed at a 1981 show that he vowed never to return to the Sportatorium. Seems that some rough-necks had their own fireworks show...inside. "all right, whoever threw those can come down to the front of the stage. We'll give you your money back and throw you the fuck our of here." A little Ramble Tamble on the edges of the Redneck South never hurt anybody, did it? At age 13, I went to the Hollywood Sportatorium for the first time. My first Live Rock Concert, AC/DC on the 1983 "Flick of the Switch" Tour. Blistering loud, hell-fire blues rock from a bunch of hard-drinking bad asses from the other side of the planet. It scared me shitless, my young mind shredded by the sheer power coming off the stage. The songs were fast, the experience hot and violent. My small suburban existence was shattered and I would never be the same. Walking through the front gate felt like going to the rodeo, or the circus. The place reeked of stale beer, parking lot dust covered the floor. Concert T's were hanging to the left which ran about fifteen bucks. To the right was the beer stand. Schlitz on draft in a plastic cup. A South Florida delicacy. Through the tunnel to the seat. If your tickets were on the floor, you got a fold-out plastic chair that you stood on to get a better view of the stage. Once the concert started and the lights went down, the joints came out. In those days, they were passed the length of the row, back and forth, many times over. Poor ventilation meant a heavy fog of smoke throughout the venue and contact highs were easy to come by. I distinctly remember pieces of the ceiling falling from the rafters, hitting me on the head. AC/DC was shaking the foundation. Apparently Robert Plant had a similar problem on a 1986 tour. Speaking from the stage a night after postponing a gig because heavy storms wreaked havoc with the roof, Plant said incredulously "This is the first gig I've ever done that was rained out inside the building." AC/DC destroyed the Sporto and a lot of young minds that night in 1983. The show ended with a "For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)." Canons blasting from the stage. A deafening sound synced with a flood of scorching white lights blinding the audience. What could possibly be better than this? After that I was hooked. The hard rock indoctrination of a young South Florid boy was complete. I went to the Sportatorium every chance I could, catching shows by Genesis, Yes, DIO, Ozzy, The Firm and countless others. The show and spectacle that was Saturday Night at the Hollywood SPortatorium went on, but only for a few more years. The old metal barn shut its doors to concerts in 1988 and was razed to the ground in 1993. Today a supermarket stands in the footprints of one of the rowdiest concert halls ever to host a rock show. I wonder how much a six-pack of Schlitz goes for? SunSentinel LIFESTYLE
, December 4, 1993 The buzzards hover above this fallen monument, but their prey is
not dead - just relegated to memory. Though it closed in October 1988, the Hollywood Sportatorium, the boisterous home of
rock 'n' roll and sporting events, will never be forgotten. The seats were hard. The roof leaked. There were fights
out in the parking lot, and fights in the stands and sometimes on the way out, too. It was, admits one its most devoted fans,
"a dump." But the Sportatorium was where many of its former patrons made friendships, celebrated marriage, were
injured or arrested.
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