Construction crews hoisted the final steel beam into place at Etihad Park in Willets Point Wednesday morning, marking a milestone for what will become the first soccer-specific stadium in New York City history.

The topping-out ceremony came 15 months after New York City FC broke ground at the site in December 2024, and almost exactly two years after the City Council approved the broader Willets Point development plan in April 2024. The stadium sits across the street from the Citi Field bullpen in Queens, and club officials say it remains on schedule to open in August 2027 for the start of the 2027-28 MLS season.

Chief operating officer Jen O’Sullivan called Wednesday’s ceremony a “monumental occasion,” and said the project stayed on track despite what she described as an “extraordinarily harsh winter.” That the steel topped out on schedule, given the conditions crews faced over the past several months, signals that the club’s construction timeline has held firm.

NYCFC co-Vice Chairman Marty Edelman used his remarks Wednesday to salute the union workers who built the structure rising from what was, not long ago, a vacant and contaminated stretch of Queens industrial land.

“We made a commitment that this stadium would be union-built and union-operated,” Edelman said. “Today is quite living proof that that promise is in action.”

That commitment drew praise from elected officials who gathered for the ceremony, including Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Council Member Shanel Thomas-Henry, and Assembly Member Larinda Hooks. Former Council Member Francisco Moya, the political architect of the Willets Point redevelopment who pushed the stadium plan through the City Council, also attended. Maya Handa, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s World Cup Czar, was there as well.

Moya, who represented the area before Thomas-Henry succeeded him in the 21st Council District earlier this year, addressed the workers directly.

“None of this is done with you,” Moya said. “The steel in the sky, the strength you can feel, a structure that did not exist until union’s hands made it real.”

Thomas-Henry framed the moment as a fulfillment of a long-standing promise to the community.

“Today is an amazing day,” she said. “For too long, there wasn’t much happening here. As a kid that grew up in this community, I’m now excited that my kids and the kids throughout District 21 have a place to dream.”

She also argued the stadium represents “the promise of what happens when we build with purpose,” pointing to the opportunities it could generate for families and small businesses along what she described as the new community’s “bustling corridors.”

The stadium is only one piece of what the City Council approved two years ago. The broader Willets Point plan includes a 2,500-unit affordable housing complex, a 650-seat elementary school, a 250-room hotel, retail space, and 40,000 square feet of public open space. That combination of uses, neighborhood infrastructure alongside a major sports venue, set this project apart from the typical stadium deal that gets pushed through on the promise of economic spillover that rarely reaches working families.

Whether Willets Point delivers on that fuller vision is a question that will play out over years. But Wednesday’s ceremony offered at least a physical answer to the skeptics who doubted the stadium would ever get built. The beam went up. The crews showed up through a brutal winter. And the neighborhood that for decades was synonymous with neglect now has a skyline that looks different than it did a year ago.

New York has been promised soccer stadiums before. This one, at least, is starting to look real.