A‘GENUINE’ HOST
DESPITE A FEW HICCUPS, VISITORS GIVE HOUSTON HIGH MARKS FOR HOSPITALITY
THREEyears ago, the Hollier twins were trying to navigate 13 blocks on a cold and chaotic Broadway in New York. Crowd control was a mess, they said, with people cutting in lines at will for Super Bowl Boulevard, a precursor to this year’s Super Bowl Live at Discovery Green.
Transportation was a debacle. About 33,000 people — twice what planners expected — flooded a single rail station after the game, creating enormous lines and forcing people to wait as long as three hours inside MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., while others stood stranded in a tight mob on the rail platform. Less than two weeks later, the head of New Jersey Transit resigned.
“I was scared for my safety and my brother’s safety,” said Ron Katz, who rode the train that night in 2014.
Katz, of Denver, and the Hollier brothers, Kester and Corbett, of New Orleans, each have traveled to nine Super Bowl host cities during game week. “NewYork was by far the worst,” Kester said. When they got to Houston, they found it warm and sunny, surprisingly free of major traffic snarls, and teeming with friendly people.
“You know when people have a forced smile, like they’re just doing their job?” Katz said. “This is genuine. It’s real joy.”
Each said they would place Houston among what they consider the top three or four host cities, alongside Miami, New Orleans and San Francisco.
Assessments such as theirs come as vindi-
cation and relief for the thousands of Houston ambassadors — politicians, business people, volunteers, Uber drivers, waiters, police officers and firefighters — who on Sunday will see four years of work come to fruition. Hundreds of thousands of visitors and millions of viewers will have put Houston to the test: Were we ready for the spotlight? Could we shatter old stereotypes? Would yet another torrential rain swell the bayous and whisk the team buses into the Gulf of Mexico?
There were some hiccups. Canceled events
ESPN was forced to abandon plans to install its Super Bowl headquarters at Midtown Park, a sixacre expanse that would have put the broadcaster square in the middle of the area’s night life. Midtown Houston didn’t finish construction on time, but still managed to host a block party there through the weekend.
City officials worked into the night Wednesday to ensure the 9,000-person capacity pop-up nightclub, Club Nomadic, could open, awarding permits just hours before a string of shows that culminated Saturday night with Taylor Swift. The club enforced a strict dress code, to the chagrin of some visitors who found out, too late, that sports jerseys and athletic shoes couldn’t be worn for a Super Bowl week event.
“You had no idea when purchasing (tickets) that it came with these conditions,” Katz said.
Some fans who traveled here for the Players Party, a four-day event at Sam Houston Race Park with multiple bands and appearances by several NFL legends, had their hopes dashed when the promoter canceled it at the last minute. The promoter, REG Live, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Any Falcons fans planning an all-night bash at ClubAtlanta in the Galleria area were out of luck after the Harris County Attorney’s Office secured a court order barring alcohol sales at the business, which had been promoting midnight-to-9 a.m. hours for the weekend. It didn’t have the necessary state permits, officials said.
But at the center of the action, Discovery Green, visitors were giving high marks to the sanctioned events. Katz said the free attraction Future Flight, which got rave reviews on social media, was among the best activities he’d seen at any Super Bowl. It’s a virtual reality trip to Mars with a 90-foot drop at the end.
Not everyone was blown away by their surroundings in Houston. Bob and Carol Hannon, of Plymouth, Mass., wore the blue and silver of the New England Patriots. Bob, 77, had visited once, maybe 30 years ago, and Carol had never been to Houston.
“I’m not that impressed with the city,” Carol, 76, said.
With all the new construction, the city feels fake, unlike Boston or other cities on the East Coast that do more to preserve their roots, she said.
“You don’t have any of that here,” Bob said.
They also ran into one of several protests around town. A throng near the Galleria shouted and waved anti-Trump slogans. Most visitors seemed to ignore them. Carol told them to get a job. Downtown, a man in a pickup rolled down his window to yell at protesters that “he is your president and will be for the next eight years!” A Houston police officer quickly jumped in the middle of the confrontation and was shaking hands by the end of it. Getting around
Despite the bumps, Katz and the Holliers, with their vast Super Bowl week experience, said Houston has done what other cities could not: manage its sprawl. They found movement within downtown, and between downtown and uptown, to be simple. Dennis and Julie Jasper of Iowa were commuting each day from a hotel in League City and found it “not nearly as bad as we thought it would be,” even flirting with rush hour.
A marketing plan by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the city’s traffic plan, were playing out well. The Green and Purple rail lines set single-day ridership records Thursday and Friday. Altogether, MetroRail had nearly a half-million rider boardings for the seven days ending Friday, compared with 337,000 for the same week last February. That beat Metro’s expectations, transit agency spokesman Jerome Gray said. And Friday’s rail ridership was second only to March 16, 2016, family day at last year’s rodeo.
There was a 20-minute interruption of Green and Purple rail line service during the downtown protest Saturday, and the Red Line experienced delays Saturday night due to heavy traffic downtown. There were no major travel incidents related to the Super Bowl.
Even the crooks were relatively tame, said George Buenik, executive assistant Houston police chief.
Over eight days through Friday, the department tallied 50 arrests that could be directly connected with Super Bowl activity, including 15 for prostitution, seven for warrants, six for counterfeiting, five for public intoxication and five for assault. Officers rescued four human trafficking victims and recovered thousands of counterfeit NFL goods worth $700,000, Buenik said.
He is the chairman over public safety for the Houston Super Bowl Host Committee and also captained special operations for the Super Bowl here in 2004, when there were 189 arrests in four days.
The city’s traffic plans, a heavy police presence, large open venues that give crowds more room to shuffle, and family-friendly events that finished earlier at night are keeping things safer this year, Buenik said.
“It’s a completely different kind of way of throwing a party,” he said. “I give lot of credit to the planners and the host committee.”
The 2004 events around Main Street were centered around bars and clubs.
Past Super Bowl cities have opted to use the National Guard, leading to a police presence with long rifles and military gear. Houston relied on uniformed police, undercover officers, civilian patrols and private security. Buenik said his officers reported that many visitors were striking up conversations and posing for photos with officers. Katz took one, decked head to toe in orange Broncos gear.
Buenik was mindful that he still had a busy Sunday ahead.
But so far, Houston has been attracting a lot of the right kind of attention.
The Chicago Tribune declared Houston a winner, saying it defied stodgy oil-and-cow town stereotypes. It praised the “hip, burgeoning millennial citizenry, some of the best museums in the world, a phil- anthropic predilection that keeps the arts well fueled, and a no-zoning ordinance that gives the city a quirky architectural patchworkquilt feel.”
The haphazard development might need that extra spin, but the food scene doesn’t. Esquire deemed the city “worth the trip, Super Bowl or no.”
Restaurateur Bill Floyd said it’s the Super Bowl of restaurant weeks, too, not just any busy weekend. In 2004, he opened The Bank, a posh place inside Hotel Icon, just before the Super Bowl.
“We did more gross revenue that week than we did in the next four months,” he said. “It was totally insane.”
Houston was just then on the verge of becoming a culinary mecca, he said. “Now, I think we can hold our own for anybody.”
The food scene works in part because it embraces myriad cultures Houston has welcomed, especially in the past decade, Floyd said. Refugees involved, too
To that end, resettlement agencies in the area helped dozens of refugees find Super Bowl-related jobs that, although temporary, were critical to help the recent arrivals from Iraq, Iran and other countries jump-start their lives in America, said Sara Kauffman, area director for Refugee Services of Texas.
On a weekend when President Donald Trump sought to keep newcomers out of our country, Houston was trying to get them in on perhaps the most American event of all.
Even former president and unofficial Houston ambassador George H.W. Bush got in on the act, after his recent hospitalization for pneumonia, announcing that he’d mustered the strength to come out for the coin toss before kickoff of the Super Bowl on Sunday at NRG Stadium.
And the football gods were good, too, supplying a week of halfway decent weather, though the Boston Globe scoffed at Texans clad in coats in 60-degree temperatures. In this respect, Houston bested even its intrastate rival as a host city. An ice storm struck Dallas-Fort Worth for the Super Bowl in 2011, leaving travelers stranded between events spread across the Metroplex.
“They had nothing to get the roads open,” Corbett Hollier said. “We just pretty much waited around for it to melt.”