The Boss’ guide to Philadelphia

POSTPONED: Hours ahead of his first of two shows at Citizens Bank Park, Bruce Springsteen announced his two Philadelphia shows are postponed citing personal illness. Read more here.

He strode the “Streets of Philadelphia” in a hoodie and leather jacket. He got into a rumble on the promenade in “Atlantic City.” And he spent his mid-1970s salad days playing dozens of times at a coffeehouse on the Main Line.

These Philly-area places — along with several in New Jersey — map out Bruce Springsteen’s history in the region, whether they be referenced in song lyrics or key places he played on his way to becoming the Boss.

No venue outside Asbury Park is more important to Springsteen’s rise than the Main Point, the coffeehouse where he played 45 shows (in 24 nights) between January 1973 and February 1975.

That month, he played a concert broadcast on WMMR-FM (93.3) hosted by early supporter Ed Sciaky and widely bootlegged as You Can Trust Your Car to the Man Who Wears the Star. That set the stage for his breakout Born to Run later that year.

The cover photo of the 1998 rarities album Tracks of a pensive Springsteen stretched on a couch was taken by Phil Ceccola upstairs at the club. The pack of cigarettes on a table beside the Boss in the original photo was photoshopped out for the cover. — DD

“Streets of Philadelphia,” Springsteen’s powerful single written for Jonathan Demme’s 1993 movie Philadelphia remains his final top 10 hit. The music video filmed for the song, which shows a scruffy and battered Bruce walking through more than a half-dozen equally scruffy and battered Philly streetscapes, is just as iconic.

Springsteen covers a lot of ground in the video — recently mapped out by Peaches Goodrich, a Philly-based illustrator and filmmaker — including walking past Vare-Washington Elementary School and Jefferson Square in South Philly, a corner mural in Fairmount, and even the Delaware River waterfront in Camden.

The video, which also includes shots of Rittenhouse Square and the Liberty Bell, opens with Springsteen on North Hancock Street, strolling past a rubble-strewn, vacant lot near what is now the Piazza in Northern Liberties. —MN

Springsteen’s Philadelphia story is entwined with the South Philly showplace that was the longtime home to the Sixers and Flyers. Now, it’s a parking lot adjacent to the Wells Fargo Center.

In June of 1973, he played his first show within the Philly city limits there, opening for Chicago, where he reportedly was relentlessly booed. The show was cut short. Three years later he was back, this time on top of the bill, in his first time anywhere as an arena headliner.

It was there in December 1980 during “The River” tour that Springsteen and the E Street Band played on the night of Dec. 8, when John Lennon was killed in New York. The next night the legendary show closed with “Twist and Shout.”

In total, Springsteen performed at the intimate-by-arena-standards venue 42 times, including four nights in the run-up to the building closing in 2009. — DD

The Boss drove his newly purchased 1960 Corvette convertible to photographer Frank Stefanko’s house in Camden County for a shoot. What resulted were the photos that captured the brooding intensity of 1978′s Darkness on the Edge of Town. The leather jacket and V-neck undershirt images were captured beside the flowery wallpaper in Stefanko’s bedroom. Another shot, taken outside the house and called “Corvette, Winter,” was used for the cover of Springsteen’s 2016 Born to Run memoir. In the book, Springsteen wrote that Stefanko’s photos “captured the people I was writing about in my songs and showed me the part of me that was still one of them.” — DD

“Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night/And they blew up his house, too…”

Springsteen opens his haunting, spare song about life and death and mob violence in Atlantic City with a Philly murder. Mafia boss Phil “The Chicken Man” Testa was blown up on the steps of his Girard Estates home in March 1981, when a bomb exploded underneath his porch.

The killing of Testa, whose poetic moniker stemmed from his time working at a poultry shop, sparked a Philly mob war, just as the gangsters were consolidating control of the lucrative crime rackets connected to Atlantic City’s recently legalized gambling industry. “These songs were the opposite of the rock music I had been writing,” Springsteen wrote of the Nebraska album in Born to Run. “They were restrained, still on the surface, with a world of moral ambiguity and unease below.” — MN

As a boy, Springsteen traveled down Highway 9 to the beach resort 60 miles south of Asbury accompanying his mother to see Chubby Checker at the Steel Pier. In Born to Run, he said that, as an adult, when he went off his depression medication, “I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears.”

And “Atlantic City” is a centerpiece of his stark 1982 masterpiece Nebraska. The song’s protagonist catches a Coast City bus to the place where “there’s a rumble out on the promenade” and in his desperation, he imagines “the sands turning to gold.”

The black-and-white video — in which Springsteen doesn’t appear — is a forlorn snapshot of the early ‘80s Jersey Shore, with casino facades, saltwater taffy shops, and the implosion of the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel. Take a stroll down the boards in Atlantic City today and you’re hear the “Meet me tonight in Atlantic City” refrain played on speakers on an endless loop. — DD

The boardwalk town of Springsteen’s 1973 Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is a carny town full of hope, possibility, youthful hijinks, and heartache.

Later on, Springsteen’s writing about the city that gave him his start took a darker turn as Asbury suffered from urban blight and failed revitalization efforts, and became an all-but-abandoned Shore town despite its proximity to Philadelphia and New York.

“My City of Ruins” dates from 2000, just before Asbury’s current revival got going. But its gospel-fired call to “C’mon rise up!” took on new resonance after the Sept 11 terror attacks and the song’s inclusion on Springsteen’s 2002 album The Rising. For a song rooted in a specific place, it’s inspirational quality has traveled well: it also became an unofficial anthem in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the 2011 earthquake there. — DD

On the verge of stardom, Springsteen wrote this goodbye to his adopted hometown while living in a garage apartment with a girlfriend in nearby Bradley Beach. The song “‘[4th of July, Asbury Park] Sandy’ was a composite of some of the girls I’d known along the Shore,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography.

“I used the boardwalk and the closing down of the town as a metaphor for the end of a summer romance and the changes I was experiencing in my own life.” The song made an icon out of Marie Castello, a boardwalk fortune teller, also known as Madame Marie, who Springsteen sang was busted by the cops for telling fortunes “better than they do.” Castello was never actually busted, and her family runs the shop now.

Springsteen posted a tribute to Madam Marie on his website when she died at 93 in 2008. “I’d sit across from her on the metal guard rail bordering the beach, and watched as she led the day-trippers into the small back room where she would unlock a few of the mysteries of their future,” he wrote. “She always told me mine looked pretty good — she was right.” —MN

Springsteen’s first Philadelphia-area gig — and first ever in Pennsylvania — was as West Chester University in Chester County on Oct. 28, 1972.

It’s historic in other ways as well, as the debut of the core of what would later be named the E Street Band, with sax player Clarence Clemons, bassist Garry Tallent, keyboard player Danny Federici, and drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez.

The band was the third act on a bill topped by stoner comedy duo Cheech & Chong that also included The Persuasions, the a cappella group Springsteen frequently toured with. Legend has it that there was a backstage dispute with Cheech & Chong’s management, who were unaware an unknown act from Jersey had been added to the bill, and Springsteen’s set was cut short. —DD