Houston’s
mighty Astrodome opened 50 years ago next month. In Major League
Baseball’s first domed stadium — Billy Graham called it the eighth
wonder of the world — 47,879 spectators watched the (just renamed from
the Colt .45s to honor the city’s NASA spaceflight center) defeat the
Yankees, 2-1, in an exhibition game.
On
that Friday evening, April 9, 1965, lounging in a plush gold velour
swivel chair and devouring bowls of chocolate ice cream, Lyndon B.
Johnson — the first (and, to this day, still only) lifelong Texan to
become president of the United States — watched the scoreboard of the
Astrodome (officially, the Harris County Domed Stadium) light up with
his profile.
The
president and his wife, Lady Bird, also toured the stadium’s palatial
duplex presidential suite, along with the Astros owner Roy Hofheinz, the
swaggering, steamroller former county judge, Houston mayor and old
Johnson political crony, who had earned the nickname Kublai Khan for his
role in developing the publicly funded Astrodome.
To
adorn his presidential suite, Hofheinz had chosen what The Associated
Press called “a bizarre mixture of old, new and in-between” — French
reproduction furniture, Asian art and rugs, and a marble statue of Joan
of Arc.
Hofheinz
told reporters that if the Astrodome had turned out to look “like a
tobacco-spitting venture,” it would have failed; he said that no one who
saw his stadium could ever again dismiss Houston as merely “Indian
Territory.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram called the park “a glorious victory” for “all of Texas.”
With
its Jetsons-like design, the Astrodome was a gargantuan symbol of the
glittering possibilities of American technology, crowned by the biggest
clear-span dome on earth (642 feet in diameter), with 4,596 Lucite
skylights. (Hofheinz claimed he had decided on the general design while
visiting Rome’s Colosseum, where the Emperor Vespasian had protected
spectators from the sun with a movable shade.)
Mickey
Mantle, who recorded the first hit and the first home run in the
Astrodome, thought the place looked like “a flying saucer.”
Sealed
off against Houston’s heat, humidity, wind and mosquitoes, the park was
climate-controlled to remain about 72 degrees and billed as the world’s
largest air-conditioned space.
Even
New York sportswriters were impressed. Arthur Daley of The New York
Times said that “the Astrodome leaves the mind stunned and the senses
reeling.” The Daily News’s Joe Trimble called it “the Taj Mahal of
sport.”
Houston’s
monument quickly became one of America’s biggest tourist magnets. Among
attractions built by human beings, it was outranked in 1966 only by the
Golden Gate Bridge and the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
The
Astrodome had an abiding impact on baseball architecture. Today six
Major League Baseball stadiums have retractable roofs, and luxurious,
profitable skyboxes are a staple.
But
from the start, there were jarring reminders that technology could not
do everything. When the Astros played in daytime, the sunlight streaming
through Houston’s new dome was so harsh that many players could not see
the ball. The Yankees’ Duke Carmel called it “the worst place I
ever played in my life,” recalling, “You had to wear a helmet in the
outfield because you were afraid of getting hit in the head.”
The Astros’ general manager, Paul Richards, said, “I’ve seen fly balls dropped before, but this is ridiculous.”
Portions
of the roof were painted over to reduce the glare, but the ensuing lack
of sunlight helped kill much of the stadium’s Bermuda grass.
In
1966, responding to an S.O.S. from Judge Hofheinz, Monsanto carpeted
the field with its newly patented artificial grass, and capitalized on
the publicity by changing the product’s name from ChemGrass to
AstroTurf.
The
popularity of fake grass spread from ball fields to doormats and other
uses. As the biographer Richard Norton Smith has recounted, the
four-term New York governor and philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller once
tried to cut costs for a new Metropolitan Museum of Art wing by
suggesting, “Why don’t we use AstroTurf?”
The
Astrodome was ballyhooed as “the stadium of the future,” but, as it
turned out, its namesake Astros played there for only 35 years. By the
mid-1990s, local authorities had let their onetime pride and joy
deteriorate, and although they made improvements, they balked at some
demands for expensive renovations to make the park competitive with
newer stadiums. Houston’s football Oilers (now the Tennessee Titans),
who had played in the Astrodome since 1968, made good on their threat to
leave town unless their team got a new home.
Under
a similar ultimatum from the Astros, Minute Maid Park (originally Enron
Field) was opened in 2000. By then, with Baltimore’s Camden Yards
(opened in 1992) and other solutions that resembled classic ball parks
like Fenway in Boston and Chicago’s Wrigley Field, many baseball
architects were rejecting the Astrodome notion of removing the players
and fans so completely from nature and seating them inside what amounted
to a giant color television studio. By contrast, Minute Maid Park
boasts a retractable roof.
In
September 2005, the Astrodome sheltered thousands of people evacuated
from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after . Now, deemed unsafe for
public use, amid various proposals to use it as a mammoth parking
garage, sports museum, center for special events or indoor urban green
space with hiking trails, the old eighth wonder of the world stands
silent and forlorn, like an aging, broken, jilted lover.
More
than a few Houstonians want the Astrodome torn down immediately; they
note that the 2017 Super Bowl will be staged at the NRG Stadium, home of
the Houston Texans, across the street. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to
Houston and its dignity — some ask — if out-of-town fans, emerging from
the big game, were forced to look at some obsolete vestige of the
mid-1960
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