The sunlight wasn't fabulous when I ventured out yesterday, but I still took a pretty complete set of photos along First Street between I and N. With 909 New Jersey now peeking up above ground level, and Velocity racing upwards, the skyline is morphing yet again. And of course work continues on Onyx and 100 M (both due to be completed this summer). As I've mentioned a few times lately, the streetscape improvements to First Street have made the stretch from I Street southward pretty much unrecognizable from what it was a year or so ago (or even three months ago).

While you can look at the complete set of photos I took yesterday, I'd suggest taking a little extra time and looking at these new shots by intersection, where you can see the photos paired with their "befores": check out First and I, First and K, First and L, First and M, and First and N (above); and there's also some updates at Half and N by the ballpark Center Field Gate and New Jersey and I thrown in as well. Click on the wherever you see it to see the photos between the Before and the After (or, more precisely, the "During").

Soon I'll post some additional photos from yesterday of portions of The Yards, which is now more accessible thanks to the new parking lots. And if the sun ever comes out again, I'll venture along Half Street and other locations that need updating.

Quoth Stan: "After careful review of the experience of the first weekend, the team is pleased to make available yet another amenity for fans, daily parking spaces at various price levels." After some lots were pretty empty on Opening Night, this offer isn't surprising.

And note, again, that single-game parking in these lots is available only online--you have to buy it before you go to the game, because it won't be available by just driving to the lot. This presumably is being done with an eye toward mitigating the congestion that would arise when people wander around looking for parking. We'll see if they were *too* successful on Opening Night, and some people who dutifully took Metro or the Nats Express from RFK and saw few traffic problems and empty lots decide to now arrive by car, reversing the initial success.

If I were to offer advice, I'd say that buying a parking pass isn't a bad idea for weekend games, but I'd still counsel caution at the idea of driving to Near Southeast during a weeknight rush hour.

UPDATE: The Post writes about the new parking options, and also about Monday night's game being the next big test for getting fans to and from the ballpark.

* Tonight's ballpark Open House has been cancelled, but you can still go on Saturday (read how to sign up). And there may still be time to sign up for those singing auditions!

* Until then, we can take one more look back at what went right over the inaugural weekend via WTOP with Mark Seagraves's column: "The fact is very few people thought this past weekend would happen in the almost flawless fashion that it did. District officials built a state-of-the-art stadium, the first sports stadium to certified environmentally friendly, and they did it in only 22 months." He mentions that the ballpark construction itself was on budget (arguments can continue until the end of time about land acquisition costs and other "soft" costs); I'd add that three other pretty big ballpark-related projects were also completed on time over the past two years: the upgrading of the Navy Yard station west entrance (remember the wailing a few weeks back about how it wasn't done yet?), the streetscape upgrades to Potomac, First, and I (remember what I Street looked like about three days before Opening Day?), and the summer 2007 Douglass Bridge Extreme Makeover and accompanying improvements to South Capitol Street.

I must say that I'd been dreading this week for about three years now, imagining the gallons of ink and millions of electrons that were going to be spilled complaining about the ballpark not being finished, or detailing the massive cost overruns, or the traffic meltdown, or the transit catastrophe, or any combination therein. In fact, I've hardly known what to do with myself over the past few days since there's been so little news (which I'm sure is equally true for the media on the ballpark beat who no doubt expected to be writing all those stories).

I think the era of four or five new posts a day at JDLand is over, which hopefully most people won't see as a bad thing. But be prepared that there might not be new posts every day anymore, if there's nothing to report. There will still be photo updates every few weeks, though!