Washington, D.C

RIP RFK Stadium, Where A Dirtball Came Of Age | Defector

Published

2 weeks ago

May 8, 2024

RIP RFK Stadium, Where A Dirtball Came Of Age | Defector

No building means more to an old guy than a stadium. I’ve thought about this a lot since news broke that the demolition of RFK Stadium in D.C. is imminent. Mentions of that place get me at least as emotional as any school or bar or restaurant from my past. Only my boyhood home comes close. Happy tears, always. I decided I shouldn’t be alone here. So let’s relive.

RFK opened in October 1961, less than a month after I was born (though it was originally called “D.C. Stadium” since there weren’t yet dead Kennedys to honor). The then-modern multi-use coliseum made an immediate mark in the sporting world when the federal government, which owned the land it sits on, told Washington owner George Preston Marshall he could either integrate his squad or be evicted. Members of the American Nazi Party marched on the site urging the racist tenant to fight the government mandate, but Marshall caved and traded for Bobby Mitchell.

But, just being honest, if I’m thinking about RFK it’s less likely to be about the stadium’s place in the culture than about my personal relationship with the place. I mean, that’s where I saw my first baseball game. I was in second grade. I’m not clear right now on who the Senators played that night (I believe it was the Detroit Tigers) and my dad’s no longer around to tell me. But I sure recall being awed by the first sight of stadium lights driving down East Capitol Street and the green grass field as we walked in. Childhood sights that bonded lots of us. We lost our Senators in 1971 and the only baseball we had for 34 years was exhibition ball. But I’d take what I could get. I saw the biggest dick in the Hall of Fame in the locker room after an old-timers’ game in the mid-1980s. In 1999 I was on the field as working media for another exhibition when Mark McGwire hit two balls onto the roof during batting practice, something neither I nor anybody else in the stadium had ever seen before.

RFK got another baseball team in 2005 when the Montreal Expos came to D.C. as the Washington Nationals and used the stadium as their temporary home. I got to see Barry Bonds hit his 706th home run at RFK near the end of that first season, a time when his chase of Babe Ruth was the biggest story in baseball. And, speaking of bonds, I took my eldest son to his own first baseball game there a year later.

The city’s football team, thanks to the racist owner’s caving, made lots of memories for me at RFK, though most of the good ones came via television; tickets for games were impossible to get throughout my youth. My first live WFT game was the 1983 NFC Championship, Washington vs. San Francisco. I showed up early in the morning and worked the parking lot until around kickoff when I found a guy selling a ticket for $25. WFT won 24-21 on a last-minute field goal. I was just happy to be there.

In December 1986, an owner of the company I worked for making organizational charts of so-called “Beltway Bandit” defense contractors gave me two tickets to the Giants game at RFK. I gave the other one to my buddy Louie. Both teams were 11-2, making this the biggest game of the season, and in the parking lot a ticketless fan offered us $250 apiece, which was more than I would make in a week on the job. We turned it down. The first play we saw when we got to our seats was Lawrence Taylor smashing Jay Schroeder, causing a fumble and setting the tone for the game, which the Giants won. But Louie and I still talk about that day and always agree we made the right call keeping the tickets. We saw Lawrence Taylor in his prime, for chrissakes.

I only have a couple physical keepsakes in the basement from my days in the stadium. There’s a Christmas ornament I made myself out of grass I collected myself after the last WFT game at RFK, a stomping of the Dallas Cowboys in December 1996, as thousands of us grieved the end of that wondrous era by storming the field and doing vandalism. I put the turf inside transparent plastic ornaments, and it has decomposed into stems and dirt through the years and now looks like cheap weed did back in high school. But I know what it is and think about where it came from every holiday season.

There’s also a set of coach’s headphones that I, um, found in a coaches’ box right above our upper deck seats after a 1983 Washington Federals–Philadelphia Stars USFL game. They have a weird two-prong input chord that makes them unusable for consumer-grade hifi purposes but I’ve kept them around nonetheless.

RFK, being from the multi-purpose realm, also gave me lots of memories beyond football and baseball. My first unsupervised rock concert was there: Ted Nugent, Nazareth, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith in May 1976. I still have the ticket stub, though the ink has faded so much you need to take my word that I paid only $9.50 to be among the horde of dirtballs inside the stadium that glorious day. I also saw the Rolling Stones and U2 a few times each at RFK, so I got to see Bono dislocate his shoulder falling down a wet ramp in 1987. I saw The Who during what I believe was their first final tour 36 years ago (they’re still touring). I remember briefly watching Jewel play a rock festival there in the mid-1990s when she got hit by a frisbee only a few minutes into her set and fled in a huff.

The greatest show I didn’t see was also at RFK: Bob Dylan with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead in July of 1986. My buddy Tim was the holder of our tickets but when he came home early from his construction job that afternoon he left them at the site, and by the time we realized the fuck-up it was hellishly hot and we were too wasted to make another trip. It looks real bad on paper to have missed that bill, but even hardcore Dylan and Dead fans have told me over the years that the RFK show was memorable only for everybody being miserable.

RFK is where I got to see Johan Cruyff in the flesh for a couple seasons when the Dutchman, regarded by many as the greatest soccer player of his generation, played for the Washington Diplomats of the NASL. The mother of a pal worked with a Dips cheerleader and got us free tickets whenever we wanted, so I caught a lot of Cruyff games. My greatest soccer memory from that era, however, is my friend John getting in a fistfight with the Diplomaniac, the team’s mascot. Seeing John rolling on the gravel and trading big right hands with a guy wearing a soccer ball–shaped pillow the size of a beanbag chair on his head still hits me harder than anything I saw Cruyff do in D.C.

The stadium has been largely vacant since the Nats moved to the Navy Yard in 2007 and the city immediately let RFK go to hell. Several astroturf fields popped up on the parking lots outside the stadium some years ago to give the site some relevance. In 2020, when COVID caused the cancellation of all local scholastic sports, my son’s heroic high school football coach organized practices there for players from all local schools, thereby giving my kid and so many others an athletic outlet when very few others were available (D.C. was the only “state” in the country to not have any scholastic sports for an entire year during the pandemic). During those workouts, I’d sit in the parking lot and get sad whenever my gaze turned toward the decayed stadium. The demolition will be a mercy killing.

The stadium came up in conversation when I was staying at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in January 2017. A gang of old-as-dirt dirtballs was sitting next to me in the courtyard one morning, and I knew some sort of “rock legends” cruise was launching nearby so I asked if they were one of the featured bands. Indeed.

“We’re Nazareth,” one of the men said. Oh wow. I immediately began waxing emotional about them being part of my first rock concert in May 1976 at RFK and how important that day was to me and how I still think about that show all the time. I meant every word, then I noticed the looks of pain on band members’ faces. None of them even faked being happy to hear a chunky old guy prattle on about his youth or showed any desire to travel back four decades with me to that place and time. I went from being on the verge of tears to giggling at how uncomfortable I made this geezer gaggle of ingrate cruise-ship legends while trying to be nice. Nowadays I wish I’d crooned a few bars of “Love Hurts” in the key of off to off-put them further. But, man, that was funny. If it wasn’t for the nearly and dearly departed stadium, I never would have had that moment. Or any of the others. What a place.

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Washington, D.C

Muriel Bowser Faces Scrutiny After Trips To Masters, Las Vegas

Published

3 hours ago

May 19, 2024

Press Room

Muriel Bowser Faces Scrutiny After Trips To Masters, Las Vegas

by Daniel Johnson

May 19, 2024

The mayor’s trips to the council of shopping centers have received scrutiny since at least 2017.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser faced criticism over a pair of trips that are alleged to have taken place using taxpayer money during the month of May. Earlier in May, Bowser took a trip to The Masters that appeared on her public calendar of events as a “sports and economic development visit.” According to the mayor’s spokesperson, the mayor and her team were invited to the event by two women who are chairing a Gallery Place/Chinatown Task Force.

As Fox 5 reports, one of those chairs is a CEO for EDENS, Jodie McLean. EDENS does millions of dollars in business in Washington, D.C. When Fox 5 reporter Stephanie Ramirez asked Bowser for additional clarification, she bristled, telling Ramirez, “We tried to be transparent, so I don’t know what questions you have that remain. We disclosed – I don’t know what questions you have that remain; we expect an invoice if it hasn’t – we haven’t received it yet from EDENS… I believe that the estimated costs were in the range of $5-$6,000 and that’s for air travel … per person.”

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was questioned today by @RamirezReports about a trip to The Masters in Georgia last month. She’s set to take a business trip to Las Vegas this weekend. “We expect an invoice… I believe that the estimated costs were in the range of $5-$6k… per person.” pic.twitter.com/KFOndlqJz4
— DMV News Live (@DCNewsLive) May 11, 2024

Bowser continued, defending her trip to Augusta National Golf Course, “Listen, voters have placed their trust in me to make the best decisions for the District for the last 15 years, including three elections as mayor. We made no secret about the fact that we make sports investments. We are the sports capital, and we are going to promote the District in every corner of the world, and that has been my experience as mayor.”

When Fox 5 asked about why the trip had so much secrecy around it, Bowser replied, “You know the reason why you know about the trip? Because it was on my public schedule. That’s not a secret.”

According to the Mayor’s public calendar, the next trip is described as an “economic mission” to the International Council of Shopping Centers in Las Vegas, which is being held from May 19-21. “On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, Mayor Bowser will attend the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) LAS VEGAS to attract retail to the District of Columbia. This economic mission is coordinated by the Washington, DC Economic Partnership, which has organized the District’s presence at ICSC since 2001.”

The mayor’s trips to the council of shopping centers have received scrutiny since at least 2017. At the time, D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) defended the trip, telling the Washington Post, “It’s great. D.C. has changed, and we can make a different pitch than we could make years ago. It used to be that we had to tell them about the vision of what D.C. could become. Now, everybody wants to come open a store in the District. Frankly, if we weren’t here, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.”

Others, like Monica Kamen, then the co-director of the DC Fair Budget Commission, believed there was a better way for taxpayer money to be allocated, given the gentrification concerns in the District. Kamen told the Post, “There’s been a lot of development in D.C. that has led to massive gentrification and a rise in the cost of living, and we need to be looking at how we continue development without further displacing people. A week before the budget vote, I would hope that that is where most of their focus was — on how to maximize spending for those in need . . . not in Las Vegas talking about giving away too many tax dollars to retailers.”

RELATED CONTENT: Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser: America is ‘Descending Into A Race War’

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Washington, D.C

Over 1,000 Attend Washington, D.C. Eucharistic Procession Despite Rain

Published

10 hours ago

May 19, 2024

Press Room

Over 1,000 Attend Washington, D.C. Eucharistic Procession Despite Rain

Throughout the procession, attendees said prayers, including the rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet.

A crowd of more than 1,000 Catholics processed with the Eucharist through the streets of downtown Washington, D.C. to celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph on Saturday morning in spite of scattered rainfall throughout the event.

The Catholic Information Center’s (CIC) second annual Eucharistic procession — which took place just blocks from the White House — drew participation from priests, nuns and lay people from the area. The May 18 procession was nearly twice the size of last year’s procession on May 20.

More than 1,000 Catholics attend Eucharistic Procession in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph. Tyler Arnold

“People have shown their love for the Eucharist [by] showing up in this rainy weather,” Father Charles Trullols, the director of CIC, told CNA after the procession.

Father Trullols said he “wasn’t certain” whether the weather would reduce attendance, but surpassing last year’s turnout was “even more incredible because of the rain.” He added that bystanders who saw the procession appeared “so impressed” with the “beauty of the procession” and “the reverence of everyone praying.”

“[This procession] impacted so many souls,” Father Trullols added.

The event began with Mass inside CIC’s chapel, although a large portion of attendees viewed the Mass on a video displayed on a truck outside of the building as the whole crowd was not able to fit inside.

Massgoers at the Eucharistic Procession in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph, on May 18, 2024. Christina Herrera

This was followed by the exposition of the Most Blessed Sacrament on K Street and a recitation of the Litany of St. Joseph before the procession began down the road.

The Blessed Sacrament is seen at the Eucharistic Procession in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph on May 18, 2024. Christina Herrera

At the lead of the procession were the cross bearer and candle bearers, followed by religious sisters. After the sisters were children who have recently received their First Communion, and then the Blessed Sacrament itself inside of a monstrance and under a processional canopy. Behind the Eucharist were the priests, the choir and the lay faithful.

Throughout the procession, attendees said prayers, including the rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet. The faithful also sang various hymns and stopped at three stations to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament where Trullols would read from the Gospel.

One of the attendees — Joseph Duncan from McLean, Virginia — told CNA the procession was “amazing” and noted the importance of a procession near the White House during an election year: “[It can] bring a lot of grace to the country.”

The faithful kneel during the Eucharistic Procession in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph on May 18, 2024. Christina Herrera

Brittany Baldwin, from Houston, Texas, told CNA the procession was “incredibly moving” and that she “choked up” during the procession and “watching people’s reactions was equally moving.”

Baldwin, who said she also attended CIC’s procession last year, noted the growth in attendees and added: “I’m sure there would have been a lot more if it wasn’t for the rain.”

The CIC offers daily Mass on weekdays and regularly hosts informational events on Catholic theology and other Catholic issues. The organization also has a bookstore.

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Washington, D.C

Woke DC mayor takes her 14-strong entourage 2,500 miles on taxpayer-funded ‘mission’ to LAS VEGAS just weeks after blowing thousands of the public’s cash on lavish golf trip… so do YOU think these business trips are justified?

Published

17 hours ago

May 19, 2024

Press Room

Woke DC mayor takes her 14-strong entourage 2,500 miles on taxpayer-funded ‘mission’ to LAS VEGAS just weeks after blowing thousands of the public’s cash on lavish golf trip… so do YOU think these business trips are justified?

Washington DC’s woke Mayor Muriel Bowser will travel on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to Las Vegas with her team just hours from now.

It comes just weeks after the Democrat faced backlash for attending the lavish Masters golf tournament that cost $5,000 per person, Bowser personally revealed.

The mayor will travel with a team of 14 on an ‘economic mission’ to the International Council of Shopping Centers at the Wynn Las Vegas on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, according to her public calendar.

‘Mayor Bowser will attend the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) to attract retail to the District of Columbia,’ the description states.

‘This economic mission is coordinated by the Washington, DC Economic Partnership, which has organized the District’s presence at ICSC since 2001,’ her office added in the event’s explanation.

Mayor Muriel Bowser will travel on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to Las Vegas with her team next week

The Democrat will attend the trip to the Wynn Las Vegas with a team of fourteen

In a separate press release, the mayor’s office said ‘we know that Washingtonians in every part of DC want access to fantastic amenities.

‘From the Lidl in Ward 7 to the Wegmans in Ward 3, those are conversations that started at ICSC.

The mayor’s team added, ‘Through programs like the Food Access Fund and the Neighborhood Prosperity Fund, we have made good progress in filling amenity gaps, but there is still more to do to ensure greater accessibility and equity – and filling those gaps and supporting the continued transformation of Downtown will be a focus of this trip.’

The traveling delegation’s aims for the trip are ‘expanding the Washington, D.C. brand’, ‘generating business leads for major development projects’, ‘fostering business relationships’ and ‘engaging with new prospects including retailers and brokers.’

Mayor Bowser faced intense scrutiny for using taxpayer money to fund a trip to one of the most exclusive sports events in the world, the US Masters in Augusta, Georgia, last week.

The mayor’s official schedule said that on Saturday April 13, she would be traveling to the Peach state ‘as part of a sports and economic development visit.’

The communications director for Bowser’s office, Susan Castillo, told DC NewsNow this week that the mayor was invited by two people who are ‘spearheading’ a plan to rejuvenate two areas of the city.

Bowser was invited by the Task Force to Shape Future of Gallery Place/Chinatown Neighborhood chairs Jodie McLean and Deborah Ratner Salzberg, Castillo told the website.

Bowser (pictured center) recently attended a lavish $5000 per person golf tournament

Bowser was there to see Scottie Scheffler win the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club

Castillo went on to say that Bowser was willing to travel to any city or any country in the world in order to further her administration’s interests.

WUSA reports that along for the ride with Bowser was senior advisor Beverly Perry and two other aides.

The station reports that the purpose of the trip was also to capitalize on sports opportunities for the city that already plays host to five professional sports teams.

Earlier this month, Bowser was roundly criticized after boasting that crime is down in D.C., compared to last year even though a recent string of violence has sent residents fleeing for Virginia and Maryland suburbs.

Despite an overall 13 percent dip this year January 1 through April 2 compared to the same time period last year, the District of Columbia is still experiencing a rise in crime compared to the norm in years prior to 2023.

It comes after 2023 was recorded as the deadliest year in more than two decades. D.C. also had the largest spike in violent crime out of any other major U.S. city.

Mayor Muriel Bowser faced backlash earlier this month for praising a decrease in crime from the second quarter in 2023 to 2024, but residents claim they do feel any safer and many are fleeing to Virginia and Maryland suburbs to escape the violence and threats

Overall violent crime is down but the MPD notes that the statistics for 2024 are ‘preliminary’ and subject to change throughout the year as more information becomes available

While some stats are down from 2023, there is still a general upwards trend from years prior. One of the largest crime statistics in D.C. are a result of carjackings, which reached an all-time-high in 2023 but is down 31% so far this year

From January 1 through April 2 last year to this year there was a 13% decrease in overall crime – after a record-high crime year in 2023 in Washington, D.C.

Tiffany Henyard, 40, of Dolton, Illinois, has repeatedly been dubbed America’s Worst Mayor

While data does reveal a decrease between the specific time period last year to this year, residents are sharing an overall sentiment that crime is on the rise and they are feeling increasingly less safe in D.C. neighborhoods.

As evident, a person was robbed at gunpoint just blocks from the Hart Senate Office Building in April by two individuals, at least one of which was armed with a gun.

Whilst frustrations may run high with DC’s mayor, it is Dalton, Illinois who claim to have ‘America’s worst mayor.’

Mayor Tiffany Henyard is under federal investigation, and was recently served federal subpoenas seeking records about trips taken by city officials and potential financial mismanagement.

A trip to Las Vegas in 2023 was allegedly one of several taxpayer funded jaunts Henyard took that totaled over $102,000.

Since her election in 2021, Henyard has faced allegations of corruption, fraud and financial mismanagement, including a lawsuit filed a month ago claiming she worked to cover-up a sexual assault on the trip to Las Vegas.

The 40-year-old municipal leader has developed a reputation for her confrontational antics, failure to do her job, alleged corruption and apparent disdain for her constituents, whom she has berated publicly and once with the assistance of a DJ.

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