The D.C. Council will take its final vote Wednesday to approve the deal to bring the Washington Commanders back to the District and build a new stadium on the site of the old RFK Stadium.
If you’ve driven by RFK recently, you know work is well underway to bring the old stadium down.
Crews have been hard at work deconstructing RFK Stadium section by section, bit by bit. What remains is a skeleton of what it once was when football fans shook the ground . Now it’s cranes and bulldozers shaking the ground.
Last year, crews began removing the seats and what historic artifacts still remained. Now, it’s just steel and concrete left to come down.
“By fall of 2026, it will be all gone,” Events DC Executive Vice President Steven Johnson said.
: the actual structure the, foundation, you know, we’re going to do the back field, the site work; it will be all done,”
Johnson, who is overseeing the project for Events DC, says it would have been easier to simply implode the stadium, which is what’s often done with hotels that come down in Las Vegas. However, due to environmental concerns, the city opted to deconstruct it instead.
“We opted not to do an implosion because of the dust levels, and also it’s a building that was built in 1959,” Johnson said. “So all the various materials and particles that’s a part of the structure will be in the air. It would impact the residents.”
Crew have installed dust monitors around the perimeter. Those results will begin being posted next week.
Johnson said they also want to make sure the Anacostia River is protected.
“So we wanted to make sure all of those precautions were taken in place — that’s why we didn’t do an implosion — and it was a phase process that we continue to just take down the stadium, and we’re making significant progress,” he said.
Nina Alpert, D.C.’s deputy mayor for economic development, said the clock starts ticking on building the new stadium as soon as the D.C. Council takes the final vote Wednesday.
“It’s going to be very important for us to begin detailed planning right away, and this is really laying out the street grid, perfecting, you know, what the blocks are going to look like so that then the Commanders can get a shovel in the ground in 2027,” Alpert said.
“This coming year is going to be intense community engagement time,” Alpert said. “This is when the detailed planning will occur and when the community starts to provide more substantive feedback and input into what this project will look like — not just the stadium, but the mixed-use parcels around it.”
Events DC has a webcam where people can watch the progress in real time.
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