Cite Sprint >^o w a Rodeo carnival. Astrodome, 1990. DIAMOND IN THE ROUND The Astrodome Turns 25 When its turnstiles opened "Not since the seven wonders of the world cal rallies, bullfights, basketball games being Texans, the problem was keeping il has man allowed his imagination lo soar. (though not bridge or chess matches). all from blowing away until they had it for business in the spring to conceive and lo construe) such won- and two feature-length movies - Robert all tacked down. They told everyone in der," trumpeted the official press pam- Altaian's Brewster McClnud (an Icarus- town to shul up for a day or two until this of 1965, the Astrodome phlet, which then went on to equate the under-glass fable) and The Bad News was accomplished." Astrodome with Ihe Tomb of Mausolus, Bears in Breaking Training (the world seemed like a shrine to all ihe Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Little League championship, with fences For a city seeking to plant itself in the Colossus of Rhodes. A commemorative pulled way in). And all of them taking national consciousness, nothing seems those Texas jokes founded booklet sold to the public on opening day place in a nearly perfect thermal environ- to work so well as acquiring a major- put it in the form of a more complicated ment In the spirit of the air-conditioning league sports team. A cily's participation on outrageous hyperbole metaphor, calling the Dome "the Taj mania of the sixties, when places were in professional sports portrays something Mahal of all stadia." Anxious letter writers being defined in terms of the amount of about the city as a social formation in and insufferable boasting. lo ihe local papers, inquiring how ihe chilled air pumped into them on a hot day. much ihe same way a picture postcard Dome fared when compared with, say, the the Astrodome was the biggest place in of the cily's monuments or most splendid Hearing its promoters tell it, Colosseum or Piazza San Pietro in Rome town. It also was a curiously appropriate views represents the city as a place. Re- (or some other large structure, past or symbol of ihe city of Houston and its ported on national television and radio the Dome was like nothing present, in another city), were reassured, location in the steamy, semilropical Gulf and covered on a daily basis in ihe news- usually by the use of ihe reader's example Coast. In the words of Jim Murray, a papers, a sports team - how it deports else on earth; to find suit- as a kind of measuring slick lo explain sports writer for the Los Angeles Times. itself, what it calls itself, where it plays just how much space would be lel'l over ihe Dome was a "moinimenl lo the its games, the peculiarities of its fans - able comparisons you had if il were placed inside the Dome. unlivcability of East Texas." But maybe presents a distil led picture of the city it Texas's climate wasn't an error in the represents to the world. In extreme to travel to the ancient Almost overnight, a barely imaginable Grand Scheme of Creation; it was just situations - consider Green Bay, Wiscon- part of the country took on recognizable a bigger challenge lo human ingenuity. sin - a sports team may be the only thing world, recalling the great form as (he Dome quickly became the most people associate with a city. nation's number three man-made tourist The Dome was like some chimerical (or most colossal) monu- attraction behind ihe Golden Gale Bridge island plopped down in a vast field on the It is probably one of ihe great American and Mount Ritshmore National Memorial, far south edge of the city, offering a tan- myths that there is anything even ap- ments from antiquity. according to a U.S. Department of Com- talizing glimpse of the brave new world proaching fealty between a sports learn merce poll of travel agents. And unlike Houstonians were creating for themselves. and ils city. But at some point in their some of its rivals - Walt Disney World Although a downtown site had been development, most cities seem to feel an (number six) and the Gateway Arch in investigated, il was bypassed in favor of acute need for professional sports and St. Louis (number seven) - the Dome the open prairie (leaving to New Orleans set out to do something aboul it. How else was a practical idea, loriy-cighl thousand the distinction of being Ihe first American to explain the way Jacksonville. Florida, people could sil inside on comfortable, ciiy to install such an extraierresirial collectively prostrated itself at ihe feet of theater-style seats to watch a baseball presence alongside downtown). In that Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams in a game. In a little less than three hours, first year, the most spirited contest enacted bidding war with the Houston Sports a simple realignment of the lower stands there was a war of lexical attrition Association, the prize being a perennially (which rotate 35 degrees on motorized between visiiing sports scribes from mediocre NFL franchise'.' But a city steel rails) could reset the stadium for around the country trying lo ouldo one seeking a franchise faces a chicken and- 53,000 football fans. There would also be another in lavishing figures of speech. egg dilemma: the baseball establishment rodeos, concerts, religious rallies (Billy There was also some journalistic debunk- says. "Gel a first-class stadium and we'll Graham's ten-day crusade in 1965 attrac- ing by out-of-town writers who'd had talk about a team"; the city says, "Give ted a flock of 380.194). demolition their fill of hearing about the Dome. Jim us a team and then we'll build a stadium." derbies, molocross events, tractor pulls. MurTay continued to be unimpressed, Take the case of St. Petersburg. Florida, soccer games, circuses, tennis matches even by the sheer engineering of the which is putting the finishing touches on (Billy Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs Dome: "Hoisting a roof is a theoretical a new, tilted-dome stadium wilh no tenant in "The Battle of the Sexes" in 1973). problem well within the reach of the but with which the city hopes to lure a Bruce C. Webb daredevil exhibitions, prizefights, politi- average Purdue sophomore. But Texans major-league basehall team down from 8 Cite Spring 1990 W TB *»*• -ikWrsm-A • »l ( I K BiMinllicijuc Vmnii.il. Puns Etienne-Louis Boullee, project for the Astrodome, 1960-65, general plan, Lloyd Houston Astros baseball club logo, Adie Paris Opera, 1 7 8 1 , perspective and and Morgan and Wilson, Morris, Crain, Marks, Gulf State Advertising, December general plan. and Anderson, architects. 1964. the north; or San Antonio, which is strange to modem Houstonians, who seek 1965, llie\ were Healed m ,i whole new outside of consciousness, returning when, engaged in an equally speculative ma- to purify their city by building instead. scenario: the female ushers were now for example, the pall of cigarette smoke neuver involving the construction of a What the Houston Sports Association and "Spaceltes" and outfitted in gold lame that buill up inside before the city banned domed stadium on its east side, its visionary leader, former mayor and miniskirts and blue space boots. "Blast smoking would gather in the upper county judge Roy Hofheinz, had in mind Off Girls" worked the counter at the reaches, then slowly descend, creating at- Houston in the late 1950s was feeling was to build a sports stadium so novel and "Countdown Cafe." and the groundskeep- mospheric conditions like Pittsburgh in similarly deprived and in need of the re- so audacious it would make people forget ers, wearing specially designed astronaut the 1940s. Or when a well-hit high fly ball assuring presence of a professional there ever was an old Houston. (The old suits and bubble helmets, were called would direct the spectators' view upward baseball team. When the city made its Houston had partaken of baseball in Buf- "Earthmen." and set them to wondering if it would hit pilch to the National League's board of falo Stadium, a 12,0(X)-seat ouiposi of the lattice framework or that frightening directors in 196(1, a mode! of a proposed the St. Louis Cardinals on the east side of The landscape inside the Dome was a little bridge thai crawled along the inner covered stadium was brought along to town.) Hofheinz's sources were practical circus world, fusing elements of shop- surface of the Dome, connecting to the propitiate those skeptics who questioned ones: he formulated the idea for a covered ping-center kitsch with modern rational- gondola high above the ccnler of ihe field. the feasibility of playing in the mosquito- stadium from his experience trying to get ism. Around the playing field, tiers of infested heat and humidity of a rainy an enclosed shopping mall buill in 1959 seals in five vivid colors terraced up from It was also called to mind during that Gulf Coast summer. When the National on a site at Weslayan and Bissonnet, field level to upper deck under a lattice- agonizing first year when it became League awarded Houston one of two coupled with his recollections of a visit to and-Lucite sky. In the topmost reaches of apparent that putting the Dome up was expansion franchises for the 1962 season the Colosseum in Rome, which he later the stadium Hofheinz had his designers a simpler engineering feat than solving - the other going to the New York Metro- discovered had had ;i velarium, oi canopy, create a girdle of private Sky Boxes for some of the problems it created.