Driving south toward Washington, D.C., on I-295, take the East Capitol Street off ramp at the Whitney Young Memorial Bridge over the Anacostia River. You’ll notice how, perhaps more than any other American city, D.C. has a characteristically European quality. Its grand boulevards, open greenspaces, and stone monuments saturate the landscape. But in crossing the river at this exit, a monument of another kind becomes visible.
The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium (RFK Stadium) was the first true multi-purpose facility in the United States, designed to host football and baseball, and even soccer. Early stadiums like the Polo Grounds hosted multiple events, but RFK was the first that was consciously designed to do so. It’s played host to the NFL, college football, major league baseball, the Olympics, and the World Cup.
But today, RFK rots. No team has called the stadium home since the soccer club D.C. United left in 2017. This once glorious monument to athletics sits vacant, and the drive into Washington, D.C. is a constant reminder of the complicated relationship that cities have with their sports teams. Historically considered local economic boons, sports teams have long bullied cities into generous tax breaks and public funding for their projects. These relations are placed under a finer microscope today as the economic data shows mixed results. What’s often ignored is that these once thought-to-be masterpieces of building and technological innovation have become blemishes of city planning. And RFK stands as the antithesis of modern urban design.
Let’s start with the land on which RFK sits: 190 acres of federal land run by the National Park Service that’s been leased to the District of Columbia through 2038. There’s a covenant on the lease that restricts the use for anything other than sports and recreation. This means that even if the owner demolished it, the property regulation complexities make it nearly impossible to build anything new, literally, without an act of Congress.
Dan Snyder, owner of D.C.’s NFL team the Commanders, has been trying to move back into the city for years, but scandals surrounding Snyder and the team made it easy for local politicians to refuse his advances. The result: RFK sits in isolation on a valuable swath of unused land, a massive portion of a small city now serving no productive purpose.
Stadiums like RFK were in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Large concrete masses, surrounded by vast stretches of blacktop—a far cry from the neighborhood-based ballparks that sprouted up in the early twentieth century. Think of Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. These structures are deeply sewn into the fabric of their respective communities because neighborhoods have developed around and because of them. Stadiums like RFK spurred a desire for more land, and projects like Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia or Giants Stadium in San Francisco exacerbated this move away from downtown. The draw was the game and nothing else.
The 1990s prompted a population shift back to city centers. Demographically, more people were choosing to live in cities, and teams were given better deals to relocate downtown—often under the guise of economic redevelopment. The prime example of this trend was Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland. While the concrete coliseums of the 1970s and 1980s may have clashed with their surroundings, Camden Yards sought to integrate the stadium with the neighborhood. Where most projects would’ve torn down the B&O Warehouse to make room for the field, the Orioles left the brick façade intact abutting right field, and it’s now become a trademark feature of the stadium. From the outside, the casual passerby may not know they’re even standing next to a ballpark. Its influence has been widespread, from Progressive Field in Cleveland, to Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and even to the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
Beyond the look and feel of the stadiums, each of these projects weaves together supplementary experiences with the sporting event itself. The famous urban design advocate, Jane Jacobs, stated that the best cities are able to “mingle [the] everyday diversity of uses.” While Jacobs may not have supported these large-scale stadium projects, the current emphasis on mixed-use space surrounding the stadiums marks an improvement over parking lots and bulldozed neighborhoods.
RFK Stadium continues to rot away, and it begs the question: Is there an ideal way to integrate something as invasive as a professional sports stadium naturally into a community?
One interesting example RFK can look to, for better or worse, sits a little more than a mile down the road. Nationals (or “Nats”) Park was part of an economic refurbishment effort in the Navy Yard neighborhood that completely altered the course of D.C.’s southeast quadrant. Since the ballpark’s arrival, development has skyrocketed. Construction cranes are as commonplace as cars, with new apartment complexes sprouting up almost daily. The spillover effects include new businesses, restaurants, bars, and other hallmarks of gentrification. But Nats Park also priced out large swaths of residents from their community. What’s more, this happened so quickly that it’s taken on an artificial aesthetic that Jacobs certainly wouldn’t have abided. Despite Navy Yard’s obvious urban design flaws, it’s a much better use of space than the empty lots and rotting corpse of RFK.
In New York City, the Barclays Center promised a similar economic rebirth to the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. But with its shiny, transparent new exterior came widespread displacement. The city used an aggressive form of eminent domain to uproot people from their neighborhoods. At the same time, Barclays has offered widespread mixed-use space, restaurants, and shops that have at least produced some form of economic benefit to the area, albeit one likely skewed along class and racial lines.
RFK Stadium continues to rot away, with no immediate plans to rebuild. And given the mixed results from recent stadium projects, it begs the question: Is there an ideal way to integrate something as invasive as a professional sports stadium naturally into a community?
While early twentieth century ballparks became a part of the fabric of a neighborhood organically, as the sport continued to mature and gain popularity, modern stadiums require far more support infrastructure (i.e., parking, public transportation, environmental considerations, and so on). This requires far more land to squeeze something so colossal into a city center. Still, much more thought goes into making these stadiums into community anchor institutions today than in previous generations.
At the same time, Jane Jacobs would probably argue that the very act of synthetically inserting something as obtrusive as a modern stadium into a city defeats the purpose of a neighborhood’s organic growth. The artificial nature of these mixed-use projects has led to the sort of gentrification that she would have distrusted.
So what to do with 190 acres of land in eastern Washington, D.C.? Surely, the best answer is genuine mixed-use housing to lower the city’s inflated rent costs. But if the Commanders move back to the city and want to develop the land, learning from the mistakes of past economic development projects will be key to ensure that a new stadium becomes part of the community and not an island unto itself.
This means ensuring that there’s mixed-use space that can draw people to the area at times during the other 357 days a year when there’s no football being played. It means building smaller townhomes and condo complexes that blend with the surrounding community and not gargantuan apartment buildings. It means building a stadium that fits with its surroundings, one that doesn’t stand alone in the view from the Whitney Young Memorial Bridge.