MLB | The City That Lost Its Team Twice (RFK Stadium site, Washington)

Washington lost its baseball team twice in eleven years, went without for thirty-three, and then got Montreal's.

The first Senators had played in the city since 1901. Calvin Griffith took them to Bloomington, Minnesota after the 1960 season, where they became the Twins, and the ballpark they left behind on Georgia Avenue appears elsewhere in this collection. The American League immediately awarded Washington a replacement, also called the Senators, which played one season at Griffith Stadium and then moved into the new District of Columbia Stadium on the Anacostia in April 1962. President Kennedy threw out the first pitch and 44,383 people watched them beat Detroit 4-1.

The replacements lasted ten seasons. Bob Short took them to Arlington, Texas after 1971, where they became the Rangers. The last game was on 30 September 1971 in front of a thin crowd.

Then thirty-three years of nothing. The stadium, renamed in 1969 for Robert F. Kennedy, kept the football team until 1996 and a soccer club until 2017.

Baseball came back on 15 April 2005 in the form of the Montreal Expos, relocated and renamed the Nationals. They played three seasons at RFK while their own ballpark was built, and moved out after 2007. So Washington's current club is the one Montreal lost, which is the sort of thing that only reads as neat if you were not in Montreal.

The building itself was an experiment. It was the first stadium in the country designed from the start to hold both baseball and football on equal terms, with left-field bleachers that rolled on tracks between configurations. Everything cookie-cutter that followed in New York, St Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Atlanta copied the idea. The roof had no light towers because the site sits on a direct sightline to the Capitol and the Washington Monument, so the lights were hung from the roof edge instead.

A note on credit, since this collection has been careful about it before. The architect was George L. Dahl of Dallas. Osborn Engineering of Cleveland, which built League Park in 1910 and Yankee Stadium in 1923, did the structural work. Several ballpark references list Osborn as the architect outright, which is the same conflation this collection had to correct at Fenway Park. Even so, the coincidence stands: the firm that engineered the first generation of concrete-and-steel ballparks also engineered the one that ended the form.

Demolition began in 2023. The last vertical steel came down in May 2026 and the work is expected to finish this autumn. A new stadium for the city's football team is planned on the site.

Coordinates are the RFK campus, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: the exterior of D.C. Stadium, photographed by Marion S. Trikosko, 29 July 1963. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain. Second image: RFK Stadium from the air looking towards the Capitol, March 1988, photographed by MSgt Ken Hammond, US Department of Defense. Public domain.