How the Astrodome was saved
In the 1970s and ’80s, Courtney Tardy went to the Astrodome to watch baseball games. “I remember the original scoreboard and displays,” she wrote in an email, “and the excitement of being in that amazing space.”
Maybe it’s no accident that Tardy grew up to become an architectural historian.
When NRG Stadium was being built next door, Tardy was working with Ramona Davis at the nonprofit now called Preservation Houston and was getting questions about the future of the Astrodome. “We both considered it to be one of, if not the, most significant building in Houston,” she writes. So she undertook what might be considered the first step in saving it. She wrote a letter. Written with the Texas Historical Commission and submitted in 2001, that letter, she says, declared that the Harris County Domed Stadium was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. The stadium was envisioned by Judge Roy Hofheinz, designed by Lloyd and Morgan and Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, made structurally feasible by Walter P Moore and opened to the public in 1965.
Now, as the city has come together for a “Domecoming” to celebrate a turning point from a past when demolition seemed imminent to a future of usefulness that no one can predict, Tardy deserves at least some of the credit for getting us here. (Disclosure: Tardy was a former colleague of mine at the Rice Design Alliance.) Though Harris County Judge Ed Emmett is the public official most closely tied to the salvation of the Astrodome, many private citizens have played important roles, too.
Without their many letters, petitions, documents and road trips — the tools of architectural preservation — Houston might have lost its most iconic building.
Fearing the end
In 2007, Emmett took office. At that time, Joe Stinebaker, a spokesman for Emmett, said Emmett’s position was that “the thing was sitting there in the middle of terrific county property. It was going to waste.”
“Do we tear it down? Do we redevelop it?” Stinebaker asked.
Madeleine Hamm, a former Chronicle writer, was in favor of the latter. She was then serving on the board of Preservation Houston.
As Emmett settled into his role, Hamm remembers her husband telling her that all the talk on local sports radio was about tearing down the Astrodome. “We thought we’d like to do something,” she said. “We came up with the ‘Save Our Astrodome’ campaign,” an online petition that attracted 3,000 signatures.
The following year, though, the Astrodome was declared unfit for occupancy, and its future was as uncertain as ever. Emmett, Stinebaker said, never had “any great emotional attachment to (the Astrodome). But (he believed) it would be the height of irresponsibility to leave a major county building sitting out there rotting when it could be relatively easily converted to a revenue-generator.”
What could be done? A few years later, in 2013, another advocacy campaign, led by Preservation Houston with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, went viral, rallying the city to #SaveTheDome — there were limited-edition cupcakes, cocktails and brightorange billboards all over the city — in advance of the $217 million bond referendum that would have paid to convert the Astrodome into convention space.
But when voters rejected that referendum, some feared it was the end. Commissioner Jack Morman said “that should be the death knell for the Dome.”
Cynthia Neely and Ted Powell saw it differently, though. They were working as private citizens around the same time, mired in the bureaucratic process required to protect the Astrodome once and for all.
“I’m a big fan of the building,” Neely said. “It was the first thing I wanted to see when I moved to Houston in 1980.”
But the debate about its future, she says, “sounded like a bunch of babies fighting from the playpen. Why doesn’t somebody just get (the Astrodome) registered and recognized for its historical significance?”
That was something Powell knew how to do. An engineer at ExxonMobil for 28 years, Powell was heavily involved in the communities where he lived, serving on the parks board in El Lago before moving to La Porte. It was there he first noticed that the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, a Harris County building designed by Greacen & Brogniez and completed in 1953, was at risk of demolition.
Mostly on his own, Powell navigated the process of writing and filing the paperwork with the Texas Historical Commission to get the building designated a National Historic Landmark and State Antiquities Landmark. Neely says Powell “went through hell” to protect that pavilion.
One day, she called him and wondered whether the same could be done for the Astrodome. And over the next year, they did, filing what Neely calls “extremely complicated and technical documents” with the THC.
It all came to a head in October 2013, when they drove from Houston to Weatherford to attend a THC board meeting. Powell said, “We were the only two who showed up to advocate for the support of (the Astrodome) being listed.”
‘None of it is sexy’
And so it was. In 2014, the Astrodome became a National Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places. Three years later, it became a State Antiquities Landmark. “These are the historical designations the building deserves,” Powell said.
With these protections, nothing can be done to the Astrodome without a permit from the THC, and nothing can be done that can’t be reversed.
“None of it is sexy,” David Bush wrote in an email. He’s the executive director of Preservation Houston, and no one knows better than he does what it takes. “It’s a lot of preservation law and bureaucracy, but it shows what can be realmost quired to save a building.”
So where does this saved building go from here? This year, the county commissioners have approved a $105 million plan to install two levels of underground parking and restore the Astrodome’s certificate of occupancy, improve restrooms, lighting and more, Stinebaker said. (Though some have questioned whether that money should be spent on flood control, Stinebaker stressed that the county is prohibited by law from spending it on anything but “tourism and economic development.”) This plan will create nine acres of “column-free space,” Stinebaker said, that can be used for all kinds of events. And that is a lot of space — Discovery Green, for comparison, is 12 acres.
Now, he said, “we pass the baton to the conservancy.”
That’s the Astrodome Conservancy, led by experienced preservationists Phoebe Tudor, Minnette Boesel and Judy Nyquist, one part of the publicprivate partnership formed with Harris County to “steward” the Astrodome into the future. They’re busy raising money and thinking up events such as the “Domecoming.”
The pragmatic Powell says that he thinks the Astrodome is in good hands — even if it might take 10 or 20 years to come back “in some very optimal use.”
Neely is a touch more philosophical. “We’re all going to die. We’re all going to be gone,” she said, her bright laugh ringing out. “But now I guaran-damn-tee you that the Astrodome is going to be here awhile.”