We still don’t know what we’re going to do with it.
Doesn’t look a day over 59
In the winter of 2018, Ed Emmett thought he found the perfect plan to save the Astrodome and make it useful for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo — the organization that was one of the biggest proponents of tearing the building down.
Emmett, who was the Harris County judge, immediately called the Rodeo’s CEO Joel Cowley to explain his proposal. They’d raise the floor of the building to ground level, open the sides where they could place a food court, a petting zoo or some children’s rides, and build a parking garage below.
It would cost $105 million and didn’t require a bond vote. Cowley agreed to the idea, Emmett said, as did the rest of the county commissioners’ court. It was the closest Harris County had come to figuring out a solution to one of its biggest conundrums of the past decade.
But the plan never happened.
And seven years later — 17 years after the Houston Fire Department first declared the Astrodome unsafe and closed its doors to the public — the Eighth Wonder of the World still remains vacant with no solution in sight.
The abandoned building, plastered with “Do not enter” signs and secured with locks and chains, is now used as a de facto storage unit. For more than two decades after its last tenant left, politicians and other community leaders have grappled with the same question of what to do with the Astrodome: Invest money in its restoration, let it sit idle, or pay to demolish perhaps the city’s most iconic landmark.
The county, which owns NRG Park, ultimately has the power to decide the Astrodome’s fate. But that could change in a few years, as the county and its two tenants at NRG Park — the Houston Texans and the Rodeo, two of the most influential private entities in Harris County — negotiate a new lease agreement that likely will give both more control of the Park, its buildings and the events that go on there.
How the Astrodome reached this point — where it would sit dormant for two decades — is a story of politics, money, influence and a little nostalgia.
“No elected official wants the Astrodome’s blood on their hands,” said Beth Wiedower Jackson, the executive director of the Astrodome Conservancy, a non-profit whose mission is to save the building. “But the flip side of that coin is nobody wants to piss off the Rodeo or the Texans.
“It’s still very fresh in everyone’s memory — Bud Adams and the (Houston) Oilers leaving town.”
Jackson, who has been the executive director of the Astrodome Conservancy since 2018 and a board member since 2013, has long advocated for the Dome’s restoration.
I’ll stop there because this is a long story – which you should read – and you can see what the Conservancy’s latest proposal is here. The problems they face are that Harris County doesn’t want to spend its own money on it and doesn’t want to ask the voters to float a bond for it, and the Rodeo and the Texans don’t want anything to do with it. Still, their idea of putting a replacement for the also-run-down Reliant Arena inside the Dome has some merit and might be cheaper than other alternatives. Good luck convincing them of it. See also this Chron story for a peek inside the Dome.