Downtown traffic has snarled, as crews scurry to put up barriers, weld down manhole covers and even relocate traffic lights.
The National Gallery of Art has conducted vibration studies and put up protective panels around some of its outdoor sculptures, while other nearby Smithsonian museums prepared to reduce public access.
Airlines have rerouted flights, as the closest airport braces for a temporary shutdown. And at least one school within the exclusion zone has had to go fully remote.
Even before the first engine has revved in Washington’s first Grand Prix this weekend, the effects of turning a warren of museums and historic landmarks at the seat of government into a 1.7-mile IndyCar racecourse have rippled across the capital. And for some residents and commuters, the resulting disruptions are wearing thin in a summer that has been full of them.
“It’s putting additional stress on a stressful situation,” Jason Cummins, who commutes regularly from Baltimore to Washington, said on Friday as he walked near the race perimeter back to his parked car. His drive into the city, normally about an hour, had taken twice as long that morning, he said.
“I understand that this is the nation’s capital,” he said, “but there’s a lot of things that happen here.”
The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is the final major event in downtown Washington to mark the United States’ 250th anniversary, punctuating a summer that also featured a state fair exhibition, an Ultimate Fighting Championship match and a marathon Independence Day parade, concert and fireworks display. Many of those events also involved military flyovers, making them sonically inescapable for nearby residents.
And all of them have been heavily promoted by President Trump, in a city already wary of his attempts to leave his imprint on it.
For the race, Trump administration has planned a two-day extravaganza, complete with more flyovers, fireworks and an honorary presidential lap of the course. The main event will feature 25 drivers zipping around for 147 laps, crisscrossing the National Mall and making tight turns around some of the nation’s most iconic buildings.
Race organizers have handed out about 140,000 tickets to spectators, which is also being broadcast on Fox Sports. And Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has recorded a number of promotional videos to hype the event, repeating what has become its patriotic catchphrase: “Freedom doesn’t ring — it revs.”
While the race is expected to draw crowds, it is also expected to hamper other activities in and around the city, such as the National Book Festival, which is taking place a few blocks north of the race perimeter on Saturday, and travel in and out of Ronald Reagan National Airport, which announced a three-hour shutdown to coincide with the prerace festivities on Sunday.
Yet organizers, federal officials and the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, have said they would be open to the race becoming a tradition.
“It’s not just fun and games for our city. These are events that draw tens of thousands of people to our city,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. “Those visitors stay in our hotels, go to our restaurants, they visit our neighborhoods. For D.C., that means more good-paying jobs and more opportunity for our workers and businesses.”
Representatives of the race organizers did not respond to a request for comment.
A day before the race festivities were set to begin, the streets around downtown Washington were eerily quiet, even for a summer Friday. Residents and commuters, it appeared, had heeded city leaders’ exhortations to use the Metro, or simply stay home.
But for those whom public transportation was not a viable option, the many street closures, which extended for blocks beyond the racecourse itself, had given the city a labyrinthine feel.
“I was down there, and I thought, I’m never going to get an Uber here,” said Richelle Smith, walking away from the race perimeter to find a ride home to Chevy Chase, a nearby Maryland suburb. “I’m trying to walk to where I can even catch one.”
“Why they doing a race downtown, I don’t even know,” one driver of a blue S.U.V. fumed audibly through rolled-down windows, as he pulled up to a stoplight on the edge of the race perimeter, and made a sharp right turn to detour.
Staging an IndyCar race in a city does not mean just throwing up barricades. City streets must also be turned into flat track. That means manhole covers must be shaved down, or built up with special epoxy until they are level with the street, and welded shut, so they do not turn into inadvertent projectiles as cars pass over them at speeds upward of 180 miles per hour.
More than 200 manhole covers were welded down along the course, Doug Boles, the IndyCar president, said during an interview on Newsmax this week, in which he also noted that several traffic lights had been removed.
A spokesman for the transportation department said that IndyCar was covering the cost of all such preparations, and that the Trump administration would work with city leaders to address any post-race impacts to the roads.
Washington also presents a denser urban environment than some other host cities for racecars to navigate. The course snakes around buildings, in places forcing drivers to make quick, successive turns at high speeds, and raising the risk of collisions.
“It’s going to be hard to pass here,” Mr. Boles said in the interview, noting that five of the course’s seven turns were at right angles. “Could be a little bit of carnage in this place.”
But while the promise of collisions may be part of the allure for some racing fans, they have only heightened the concerns of critics.
“For an event of this magnitude in such a symbolic, densely packed area in terms of historic sites and rare collections, an undertaking like this should not have been rushed,” Mary Okin, the assistant director of Living New Deal, a group dedicated to documenting and preserving public works projects from around the time of the Great Depression, said in an interview.
Last month, Ms. Okin sent a letter to the National Park Service, asking officials to take steps to protect the murals in Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which sits on Independence Avenue along the racecourse, from potential damage. She suggested that the federal government monitor the murals, install temporary sound barriers and conduct pre- and post-race damage assessments.
But the Park Service informed her that “vibration monitoring is beyond the role of the N.P.S. for this event,” directing her to address concerns to the people responsible for managing the individual structures.
Representatives for the Park Service, as well as several museums and government buildings along the route, did not respond to requests for comment.
Across the National Mall from the Cohen building, vibration studies were carried out at the National Gallery of Art, said Chris Abanavas, a spokesman for the museum, who added that it had put in place “measures to ensure the safety of our staff, visitors, collection and facilities during the race.”
While Mr. Abanavas did not specify the measures, plywood structures were seen earlier this week around some of the outdoor sculptures and features, darkening I.M. Pei’s glass atrium skylight that erupts onto the museum’s grounds.
