Opening in , RFK Stadium became the first multipurpose stadiums ever built. By the mid s city leaders decided to build a multipurpose stadium that could host both football and baseball. Construction on the stadium began in near the Anacostia River. Completed in just over two years, the facility was originally known as D.
The Washington Redskins played their first game at D. The large lower deck, consisting of three sections of orange seats extended from the right field foul pole to behind homeplate and to the left field foul pole. No lower level seating existed behind the outfield wall.
A small section of white seats circled the field below the upper deck and the upper deck enclosed the entire field. Beyond the outfield fence were the bullpens, the Nationals behind the left field wall and the visiting team behind the right field wall. Missing from the Senators days at RFK Stadium was the large manual scoreboard that was located behind the right field fence. In its place was a large Washington Nationals clock. The stadium was home to the DC United soccer team from to Today the stadium is vacant.
However, because the stadium had not been fully reconfigured, it was just ft to the left-field foul pole, far shorter than normal. Slugger Frank Howard, a six-foot-seven-inch tall, pound left fielder, hit a number of tape-measure home runs in his career, a few of which landed in the center field area of the upper deck.
The seats Howard hit with his home runs are painted white, rather than the gold of the rest of the upper deck. Howard also hit the last home run in the park's original tenure, on September 30, With one out remaining in the game, a fan riot turned a 7—5 Senators lead over the New York Yankees into a 9—0 forfeit loss.
However, in its tenure as the Nationals' home field, RFK has been known as a pitchers' park. While Howard hit at least 44 home runs for three straight seasons —70 , the Nationals had only one hitter with more than 15 home runs, Jose Guillen with The stadium's design was nearly circular, attempting to facilitate both football and baseball.
It was the first to use the so-called "cookie-cutter" concept, an approach also used by Philadelphia , New York , Houston , Atlanta , St.
Louis , San Diego , Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. However, as would become the case with every other stadium where this was tried, the design was not ideal for either sport due to the different shapes and sizes of the playing fields. As the playing field dimensions for football and baseball vary greatly, seating had to accommodate the larger playing surface. In the case of RFK Stadium, this resulted in the first ten rows of the football configuration being nearly at field level, making it difficult to see over the players.
As a baseball park, RFK was a particular target of scorn from baseball purists, largely because it had no lower-deck seats in the outfield.
The only outfield seats are in the upper deck, above a high wall. It was said that RFK was "the first ballpark built that had only an upper deck. The lower-to-upper proportion improved for the Redskins, with end-zone seats filling in some of the gaps.
Later facilities were designed so the seating configuration could be changed much more quickly and at a lower cost. The conversion was only required several times per year during the Senators' joint tenancy with the Redskins, but became much more frequent while the Nationals and D. United shared the stadium during the mostly-concurrent MLB and MLS seasons; in , the conversion was made more than 20 times. Originally the seats located behind the stadium's third-base dugout would be removed for baseball games and put back in place when the stadium was converted to the football and later soccer configuration.
When these sections were in place, RFK seated approximately 56, fans. Following the Washington Nationals' move to RFK in , this particular segment of the stands was permanently removed to facilitate the switch between the baseball and soccer configurations.
These seats were not restored following the Nationals' move to Nationals Park, leaving the stadium's seating capacity at approximately 46, United do not normally make the tickets for the majority of the upper-level seating available for purchase, and the stadium's reduced capacity thus is not normally problematic for the club.
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