A Pilgrimage to The Palestra

The Palestra

I made my first visit to The Palestra Monday night to see Penn play Princeton in one of college basketball’s oldest rivalries. I arrived at both the venue and the rivalry as a distinct outsider: I did not attend either school, nor do I have a geographic affiliation with either (I was raised in North Jersey, far away from Princeton, and I am only living in Philadelphia now for about nine months). So if I don’t understand the complete backstory to a tradition or quirk, please forgive me.

Opened on Jan. 1, 1927, The Palestra is Ivy League library on the outside and modified airplane hangar on the inside. Everything about the place is old, but I mean it in a good way. It is fabled, it is history. Walking the three blocks from my apartment on this cold winter night, I felt I was gravitating toward the arena with hundreds, maybe thousands of others wearing winter coats with the collars turned up. I felt a little bit as if I had stepped into one of John Tunis’s unforgettable books that described a 1930s Ivy League education, Iron Duke and The Duke Decides, except I was at Penn to watch basketball rather than at Harvard to watch track.