RFK Stadium going out in style?
By Eric Fisher
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
In about eight months, RFK Stadium again will resound with the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd for baseball. That is, if widely held assumptions of the relocation of the Montreal Expos to the District or Northern Virginia prove correct.
The probable return of baseball to the Washington area also will begin the final chapter of a long and often glorious history for the 43-year-old facility on East Capitol Street.
Accelerating plans to build a soccer-specific stadium for D.C. United and fast-changing market conditions in the concert industry have numbered the days for RFK Stadium.
Once a thriving and profitable multipurpose facility, it rarely plays host to a concert anymore. The Washington Freedom, the stadium's second primary tenant in 2002 and 2003, ceased operation last fall. Boxing events go elsewhere. The bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, which called for the construction of a large multi-event sports complex on the grounds of RFK, failed two years ago.
The D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission, which operates RFK and receives no city appropriations, posted an operating loss of $5.36 million in 2003, its fifth straight year in the red. That loss also includes operations at the D.C. Armory, auxiliary fields and RFK Stadium parking lots, but comes primarily from the stadium itself.
By 2008, the relocated and renamed Expos should be out of RFK and in their new ballpark, as should D.C. United. That's when serious consideration of demolishing or extensively renovating RFK likely will begin.
"Long term, this is definitely an issue we're going to have to deal with," said Mark Tuohey, sports commission chairman. "At the end of the next four or five years, we have to take a good, hard look at the stadium, confront the issue and see what our needs really are. We're beginning to think about it already."
When the Washington Redskins left in 1997 for what would become FedEx Field, many local pundits sounded the immediate death knell for RFK Stadium. But amid declining revenues, the aging facility showed some spunk, quickly becoming a premier American destination for soccer.
The stadium played host to not only United and the Freedom, but a litany of international exhibitions, World Cup qualifiers and Major League Soccer All-Star and championship games. MLS will stage its second All-Star Game in three years at RFK on Saturday. Seemingly every start-up sports league at least talked up the utility of the stadium, if not actually played there.
RFK also attracted a run of big-time concerts between 1997 and 2001. But the economics of stadium shows are no longer palatable for anything but large, multi-artist festivals.
One-time stadium mainstays such as U2, Bruce Springsteen and the Dave Matthews Band now focus more on arenas and amphitheaters, and the sports commission can reasonably count on one concert each year for RFK: the annual installment of the popular HFStival each May.
The sports commission and other city officials, however, are not lamenting the entry of RFK into its twilight years. Considering some arenas and stadiums are replaced in less than 20 years, RFK is still operating in its fifth decade, albeit unprofitably, marks something of an accomplishment.
RFK also has outlived each of the multi-use, "doughnut" parks it spawned in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the exception of St. Louis' Busch Stadium, which is now a baseball-only facility.
And after nearly losing D.C. United several times to the suburbs in a series of disputes over lease terms and field conditions, the District is now working on a deal with Anschutz Entertainment Group, operators of United, to build a soccer stadium at either Poplar Point along the Anacostia River waterfront or in RFK's parking lot No. 8. That facility would seat about 25,000 and be designed in a somewhat similar fashion to the much-lauded Home Depot Center in Los Angeles.
"We've been working hard, doing a lot of due diligence on the various options in play. I would anticipate we'll be talking about a specific deal with the city by the fall, a specific ask," said Kevin Payne, United president. "Once the stadium is built, we will certainly be trying to aggregate as many soccer events there as possible."
While the soccer discussions continue, the sports commission is also feverishly updating its plans to ready RFK for baseball. A four-to-six month renovation, slated to cost at least $13 million, will include the reconstruction of the visitor's dugout, the creation of the left field wall, a major upgrade to the clubhouses and a rather involved overhaul to utilities like electrical wiring and video cabling for TV monitors placed in and around the stadium.
If the Expos are located permanently in the District, the city would pay for the work as part of the public stadium financing package for a new ballpark. If Northern Virginia lands the club, the team owner would foot the bill for the RFK renovations, the first part of what is expected to be a tough and costly negotiation with the sports commission.
During the long-winding bid process for the Expos, District officials and prospective team owner Fred Malek considered renovating RFK into a permanent baseball facility. Mayor Anthony Williams' offer in April to fund fully a new stadium with public financing, however, eliminated the need for that idea. A site just north of existing RFK is still one of four options for a District ballpark in that Williams offer, and by far the cheapest and simplest to develop. But the focus of Tuohey and some other city leaders is to locate the new stadium downtown.
"There's a lot to do when the word comes down from [MLB], but four to six months absolutely is a workable timetable to get ready for April," said Bill Hall, chairman of the commission's baseball committee. "As for the future of RFK beyond that, if there's not so much a need for the stadium, it ideally would mean we had succeeded in our mission to get baseball and soccer into new facilities."
http://www.washtimes.com/sports/2004072 ... -8310r.htm
Boss, please move this thread to another forum if it doesn't belong here.
