In a Haverford sports den, Philly fandom and family memories collide

When David and Lecia Markowitz first touched down at their Haverford home, they knew the basement would be David’s domain.

The plan: turn it into a sports den to house memorabilia from the Philadelphia-area minor and major leagues and defunct hockey teams that David has collected over his 55 years.

Since moving into the house in 2008 — less than a week after the Phillies won the World Series, David said — he has amassed a collection so large that empty wall or shelf space is hard to come by. After years of prowling eBay with search terms like “vintage Philadelphia sports memorabilia,” the room is layered in original photos of Flyers and Sixers players once on display in the Spectrum, a photo of John Madden at the Eagles training camp in 1958 (though he never played on the team), and dozens of team portraits of the likes of the United States Football League team the Philadelphia Stars and the North American Soccer League team the Philadelphia Fury.

It’s a true paradise for this Philadelphia sports history enthusiast, a place for David to reconnect with the teams that meant so much to him growing up in Wynnewood.

“I’m a very nostalgic person,” he said. “Everything down here has a story to it and means something to me. It all reminds me of something in my childhood.”

Take the still-packaged, stand-up cardboard cutouts of the 1975 Flyers, which he stashes next to the open ones he played with as a kid, or the five 1980 collectors glasses from McDonald’s with Eagles players on them.

David’s sports memorabilia bug was borne out of card collecting across all sports as a kid. He still has many of those cards, displayed in poster frames that rest against a wall covered in autographed pictures of defunct hockey teams, like the 1971 California Golden Seals and the 1975 Kansas City Scouts.

“Almost everything down here is old,” he said, adding that a lot of his collection doesn’t hold much monetary value.

Funny enough, he said, one of the most valuable things he owns is tucked into a corner — out of sight because it’s not Philly-centric. It’s an autographed, framed picture of Joe DiMaggio, a gift from one of David’s orthodontics patients. His offices in Blue Bell and Lower Merion, he joked, are overflow display space for what can’t fit in his basement.

David’s three sons, all fans of the Eagles and Sixers, aren’t quite as into memorabilia as he is, David admitted. Still, they’ve made their mark on the collection.

One of David’s favorite items in the den is the Eagles-tailgate-themed bar the couple commissioned for their youngest son’s bar mitzvah in 2018, built from cardboard to look like a midnight green truck. Now split into multiple pieces, it has prominent placement in the basement: a side panel of the truck greets guests at the bottom of the stairs and the front of the truck stands alongside the TV.

The Eagles-themed bar mitzvah was held right after the Eagles clinched their Super Bowl LII win against the New England Patriots. Part of David’s bit at the party was dressing up as Jason Kelce in his Victory Parade Mummers costume to deliver a speech to his son in front of his family and friends.

“It ended up really being David’s party,” Lecia joked.

From that Super Bowl, David’s collection features a small case with a football signed by quarterbacks Nick Foles and Carson Wentz, pieces of the confetti that dropped on the stadium after the team’s win, and the Markowitz family’s tickets. (The whole family flew to Minneapolis for the game and watched the team win together.)

From a farther-back moment in Philly sports history, David’s den holds two red stadium chairs from the Spectrum before it was demolished in 2011.

“I can picture myself sitting in them, and they feel the same as when I was a kid,” David said.

But the artifacts he seeks from another Philly stadium of old have eluded his search so far: A few blue seats from Veterans Stadium. They come up on eBay from time to time but are always far away or can’t be shipped, he said.

In the few spare minutes he uses to search for memorabilia between running a business and being with family, it’s those seats, he said, that will be his next score.

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