Dave’s Midlife Blog

After our arrival home from Florida on Wednesday night, Thursday was a free day for me. I decided I’d go downtown into DC and take a look at Nationals Park.

Looking back at the archives of this blog, I am astounded to note that it has been a whole year since I was last down at the ballpark site with my camera. I have been following the progress of construction on the construction cam (to which I won’t link, since it might not be online for very much longer), but I haven’t seen it in person since March 17, 2007.

I expected it to be different–and it was. Where there were once deep pits in some blocks of the neighborhood, there are now high-rise buildings emerging.

The Navy Yard Metro station is accessible (right now) only at one end, the entrance by New Jersey Avenue. Even here, the view is quite different from one year ago.

The first place I stopped was at the new Starbucks Coffee shop in the Department of Transportation building on 3rd Street. This was under construction last year, and has now been open about a year. It’s about three blocks from the stadium.

The site about which many people are concerned is the Metro entrance closest to the ballpark. This is in a new building under construction by Monument Realty on Half Street. The building (with its retail and restaurants) will not be open this year, but the Metro station should be open next week, in time for Opening Day. The Metro entrance is in the corner of the building, at the left of this picture.

It’s the signs at the stadium that make the prospect of attending games so real. We are being guided to the places we need to go, as you can see here, at the corner of N and South Capitol Streets, the corner of the west parking garage.

The Nats, of course, hope we will spend many of our dollars at the team store, which is in the opposite corner of the west garage.

Here’s where most of us will enter the stadium: the centerfield gate at the base of Half Street. This is a short walk from the Metro station in that building under construction.

The Red Porch restaurant on the centerfield plaza is a unique feature of our ballpark. There are seats available in the Red Porch and the Red Loft, but most folks will just order food in the restaurant itself–which is open to the ticket-holding public.

I’ve heard that the HD video scoreboard is huge. Our seats are in the upper deck, directly opposite the scoreboard. This is what it will look like from the centerfield seats of section 102.

The Grand Staircase at Potomac and 1st will probably be the least-used entrance to the ballpark–at least until water taxi docks are available on the riverfront. The people arriving by boat will walk up these stairs. Nevertheless, the Grand Staircase is a strong feature of the architecture.

The banners of the Grand Staircase depict Nationals players. I’m very impressed at the fact that our new centerfielder, Lastings Milledge, is already depicted in action in a Nats uniform. This means that the team’s photographers have been very busy in Viera, Florida at spring training; and that the team staged some photos down there in regular white uniforms (not the blue uniforms worn during spring training).

The walkway up to the home plate gate has a number of important dates of Washington baseball history embedded in it. 1859, the first year seen, is the year organized baseball was first played in DC. Plaques explaining the meaning of the dates are next to the sidewalk.

The press and the general public in the Washington area seem to be freaking out because there won’t be suburban-style parking right next to this urban ballpark. (Eyes rolling in bemusement.) Well, if you aren’t a bigwig who gets to park in the garages, or a season-ticket holder who has paid up to $35 per game for parking in the neighborhood, or a Metro rider, then you can ride your bike to the stadium and lock it to a bike rack. There are about 250 of these bike racks on all four sides of the stadium.

Yes, the stadium is still under construction. This sign for the left field gate was not yet installed when I strolled the stadium neighborhood. Since I would never again have an opportunity to touch it, I laid my hands on it just before taking this photo. It was installed the very next day, above the entrance.

There are now eight days until the opening of the stadium. The exhibition game against the Baltimore Orioles is one week from now. This afternoon, George Washington and St. Joseph’s Universities played each other on the field, with a couple thousand people looking on from the lower seating bowl. Baseball is about to return to its own home in DC, and I’ll be there on Sunday, March 30.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under baseball, Washington DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.