Once again, Lew accepted.
“They told me the job would be a ‘slam dunk,’” he laughs, “but what they didn’t say was that the schedule required getting the RFK job done by the opening of baseball season. It was close to Christmas 2004 before the City Council approved the legislation, but the schedule hadn’t changed. None of the contracts were in place yet—not with the builders or the architects, or the project management team—and, in fact, the deal with Major League Baseball hadn’t even been negotiated. That meant working around the clock to get it done. But we did it.”
Lew’s academic background, B.S. and B.A. degrees from New York City College of Architecture and an M.S. in architecture and urban design from Columbia University, and his experience—his biggest oversight project before coming to Washington was the Javits Center in New York City—have made getting it done a way of life, especially when “it” involves a huge gathering place. If the task at hand merges business, architecture, design, oversight and a challenging schedule, Lew is interested—and able.
Some people in Lew’s business might have considered Washington’s baseball requirements a mission impossible. Lew—who is now CEO of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, an independent agency of the D.C. government—had to resolve a roster of issues for the new ballpark (from choosing the architects and construction teams to meeting the requirements of Major League Baseball), while simultaneously renovating an iconic, if outdated, park built in the 1960s. Unlike its earlier use for baseball and football, RFK would house a baseball and a soccer team (D.C. United), which just happen to share the same season.
“We convert the field 20 times a season,” explains Lew, a reconfiguration that involves moving the leftfield seating section to the outfield and making the pitcher’s mound disappear. “But now,” he says with a smile, “we can make the change faster because we have a hydraulic mechanism to lift or lower the mound. We’ve brought the park up to 21st-century standards.”
Proud as he is of all the updates to the old stadium, Lew gets most enthusiastic when he talks about the 41,000-seat, multi-tier ballpark that is rising from the site of a former garbage transfer station along the Anacostia River.
“A much more intimate design than any of the parks of the past, it’s going to have fantastic views. You’ll see the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument. Behind you is the river, and from certain locations you’ll be able to see the Pentagon, the memorials, and [Reagan] National Airport—the whole Washington skyline. Ironically, the least expensive seats have the greatest views.”
According to Lew, the as-yet-unnamed stadium is going to be very fan-friendly. “You can see right into the ballpark from any point in the concourse, so when you go out to get a beer or a hot dog, you won’t miss the game. You’ll still see it and hear it.” And the total baseball experience will begin even before fans reach the park. “With the Metro station only half a block away—literally walking distance—you’ll see right into the ballpark as you’re approaching it. It’ll be a pretty phenomenal view.”
Unlike Camden Yards—home of Washington’s MLB neighbor to the north, the Baltimore Orioles—the District’s new park will not have what its builders (Clark/Hunt/Smoot, a joint venture whose three firms have built 11 of the past 16 big-league ballparks in the country) or its architect (HOK Sport/Devrouax & Purnell) call a “retro” look. Lew points out that “retro,” which uses brick for both design and aesthetics—think Baltimore’s and San Francisco’s stadiums—is appropriate in cities that have a substantial industrial base. But for Washington, “we wanted the architecture of the Nationals’ ballpark to have a look that is appropriate for D.C., so the design, as it evolved, became a more contemporary design—concrete, steel, stone and glass. Some of the inspiration came from the I.M. Pei design of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, which sits next to buildings of classical design but somehow, 30 years later, continues to look like it belongs there.”
Most of the memorable public buildings in Washington, Lew says, were built by the federal government, not, as in the case of the new baseball stadium, by the District of Columbia. “But this one,” says the head of the city’s sports agency, “ranks with the best of the federal projects ever built in this town.”
The ballpark will hardly be the only attraction of the revitalized Anacostia waterfront. A dispute between the two major groups originally involved in planning the development had delayed a major land transfer central to the area’s continued redevelopment, but that appears to have been settled, and various groups are moving ahead with big plans.
Lew says, “Monument Realty is building right now. There’s going to be a retail and entertainment area on Half Street and N Street, and along First Street we’ll have retail on our side, and on the other side there’s been talk that the city will put retail in there. And Florida Rock [a Florida-based gravel and concrete company with a development arm that owns property next to the ballpark] is looking to build a mixed-use development in the area just south of us—hotels, restaurants, retail and condos.”
The linchpin for this big-league bet on a potentially dynamic new area of the nation’s capital is Lew, the man who left Manhattan in 1996 expecting to be a glorified visitor to Washington, but who now has called D.C. home for more than a decade. If all of the disparate parts of this job—which Lew says is on time and on budget—are to come together by Opening Day 2008, he will have performed a feat equal to that of building the Washington Convention Center, a job on which Lew says he eventually checked off 22,068 punch-list items without claims, liens or lawsuits.
“We’re going to stay on schedule and we’re going to get it done on time, and if the stadium serves its purpose as part of a larger economic development initiative, it will anchor the Anacostia waterfront area and act as a catalyst to accelerate its redevelopment. And that’s already happening—you can see cranes not just on our site but near our site. It will also be the anchor for that gateway into the city, which is so beautiful.”
Lew loves the challenge of putting together the finance-design-construction package. “I see my job as similar to the conductor of an orchestra—being able to take lots of diverse talent and somehow convert it into a symphony. And the test of the final product is not whether the conductor likes it, but whether the public likes it.”