At tonight's
ANC 6D meeting (you all
owe me!), there was a presentation on the
new baseball stadium, by a group including the
DC Sports and Entertainment Commission,
Clark/Hunt/Smoot, and Marshall Purnell of
Devrouax and Purnell, the local architects working with
HOK Sport on the stadium design. Much of the time was spent going over the renderings (which of course you've already looked at a billion times
here on my site!), but there were some items of interest, including a construction timeline of sorts (this is from my notes, apologies if I get any construction-speak wrong):
· Official "construction" is scheduled to begin May 1. (Or within 5-6 days on either side.) Construction will begin at 1st and O, and will work clockwise around the stadium footprint. (The dates below are for when a phase is expected to begin at 1st and O, and then move clockwise around the site.)
· 300,000 cubic yards of soil will need to be removed.
· Pile driving is expected to begin in late May, with concrete work then following, expected to take 9 months in all.
· Structural steel work is expected to begin in early October, and the steel has already been purchased and ordered.
· Structural precast mumblemumblemumble (I'm a rotten secretary) is expected to begin in December, after which seats can begin to be installed, probably in January/February 2007.
· The structure would "top out" somewhere around June or July 2007.
· Construction cranes are to be out of the infield by August 2007, to have time to build the irrigation system and start growing the grass.
Other fun tidbits about the construction: there is a "jog" in the center field fence to echo a similar irregularity in the old Griffith Stadium (where the Senators played). And yes, they are going to try to make some of the lower-level seats "shakeable" like the bleachers at RFK (with perhaps some safety measures actually built in this time). As for concerns about the stadium's lighting, there are only two light towers (in the outfield); the rest of the lights are all on the underside of the stadium's canopy and so are not visible from outside the stadium. As for the current occupants of the site, the asphalt plant at 1st and O Street is being dismantled piece by piece so that it can be rebuilt at whatever location it eventually moves to. Also, they haven't yet managed to get WMATA to move its buses off the parking lot at 1st and O. There is to be a community meeting on April 19 at Friendship Baptist Church in Southwest to discuss the creation of an advisory committee; I'll post more about this when I get it.