Spectrum to come down slowly, painfully in November

This was in the Fly By this morning, but it's big so it deserves a little more of a spotlight.

Anthony SanFilippo has the exclusive news this morning: according to Peter Luukko, the Spectrum will be razed beginning in November. By December, when the guts of the building are all gone, a wrecking ball will attack and that'll be all she wrote.

The Spectrum will be gone. Philly Live! will be on its way.

In the article linked, Luukko explains why it won't just be a regular implosion like the one we saw with Veterans Stadium back in early 2004.

The Vet took 62 seconds, the Spectrum will take a little more than a month.

"You can’t just implode it like you did the Vet because of the way it’s built," Luukko said.

"The Vet had all those columns, so all you had to do for that was strap some dynamite to each column and watch it collapse on itself.

"The Spectrum would have to be blown up in pieces, and that doesn’t make any sense, so we’re going to just take a wrecking ball to it."

That’s not to say there won’t be anything ceremonial.

"We’ll start by gutting it from the inside," Luukko said. "Then, sometime in December, when it’s just a shell, we’ll have a little ceremony and we’ll take down the exterior with the wrecking ball."

The demolition won't be as laughably slow as that of Shea Stadium in New York back in 2008 and 2009, but it won't be like ripping off a band aid, either. As we head to South Philly this fall and early winter for games at the Wells Fargo Center, we'll be forced to gaze across the parking lot at the building that's slowly dying. By spring, we probably won't be able to tell there was ever a building there.

According to SanFilippo's report, Philly Live! will -- finally -- break ground "shortly after" the Spectrum demolition is complete.