For over a decade Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke threatened to move his team out of Washington, DC. On July 9th, 1992 Cooke made the announcement here at Potomac Yard that the Redskins would be moving to Northern Virginia. The announcement was a media extravaganza. Local television carried the event live. There was a large model of the 78,500-seat stadium on display, as well as signs declaring this site the new home of "Jack Kent Cooke Stadium at Potomac Yard." He made the announcement with NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, Redskins coach, Joe Gibbs, and Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder that he was going to have Potomac Yard stadium open it for business in 1994.
Three months later on October 14th it was announced that the Redskins would not be moving to Alexandria. The dream of "Jack Kent Cooke Stadium at Potomac Yard" came to an end after Cooke would not go along with new concessions outlined by Gov. Wilder. The revamped proposal was designed to reduce the state's cost by about $40 million. The two men secretly negotiated a different price in the spring and that was widely criticized as a bad risk for taxpayers.
The announcement was cause for celebration in Alexandria, where many city residents and virtually all city officials had bitterly opposed the stadium. Citizens Against the Stadium, a community group that led the fight, said the plan's failure "is a powerful example of ordinary citizens prevailing over the powerful and greedy."
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