The Pecan Park Eagle

Seven Days Ain’t Bad. For better, worse, or same difference, I’m back. After seven days on the 15-game DL, I’ve been given permission to return to my Pecan Park Eagle blog about Houston, baseball, and the general culture of the muses. I’m 70% of the way through an antibiotic script that’s been juicing my defenses against what turned out to be a crude and rude bacterial invasion, but that war is being won, even as I continue to take all the medications, all the way out, no matter how much better I feel this early. Lesson learned from the past:  Never quit punching on a bacteria until you know for sure that the thing is completely cold cocked and dead out on the canvas, gone.

Besides, I couldn’t let this modest response to the self-aggrandizing Commissioner Roger Godell of the National Football League fly unfired upon from my arsenal of concern about how we take care of history in Houston in the 21st century. Some are of the impression that we Houstonians can still be bought out for the right price on anything, if the right sized orange carrot is dropped in front of our Houston rabbit nose. 

If they are right, shame on us. We’ll be getting what we richly deserve – the short end of the stick.

Would you rather it serve as an architectural icon and Home of All Houston History – or just a space to park 2500 more rodeo and football car visitors at Reliant Stadium?

The rodeo-football people have already done their homework. They’ve done a new study on what it will cost to tear down the Astrodome and turn it into space for 2500 more parking spaces. They’ve even managed to get the Eunuch Chieftain of the NFL, Commissioner Roger Goodell, to state that tearing down the Astrodome for an additional 2,500 car parking spaces will help the City of Houston get the bid to host the 2017 Super Bowl. – Makes you wonder why those spaces weren’t that critical for the last SB we hosted in the first decade of this century.

Let’s put the proposition slightly differently: What is more important to Houston, preserving the architectural prototype for all covered athletic stadiums from the late 20th century forward – or providing additional parking space for 2,500 more Bruno Mars fans at the next rodeo performance?

I find the remarks by Commissioner Goodell to be both self-serving and short-sighted, and also most likely to have been words encouraged into expression by owner Bob McNair of the Houston Texans and the homey board chiefs of the Houston Rodeo group. For whatever reason, those people have never wanted to make the future of the Astrodome a plan hat could also benefit their interests beyond increasing the area for cars or carnival food stands. I can’t prove that either had anything to do with the Goodell statement, but I would be most unsurprised to learn that they were behind this little tempest in a teapot.

As an architectural achievement, the Astrodome rests on a level of significance that is historically equivalent to that one of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, The Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in Manhattan, the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia, the Coliseum in Rome, and the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor. Unfortunately for the Astrodome, it first saw the light of day in Houston, where the forces for fair preservation often lose to the expedient needs of today’s fast buck business culture.

Our fault? We should have had a Plan B for the Dome years ago. We didn’t have one. When the Astros left after 1999, it was just abandoned, left to decay under inadequate care that would still cost millions of taxpayer dollars over time. We would see a bump of public interest in doing something to save the Astrodome every now and then, but each plan would fall quickly to doom for want of vision, support, or money when it came time to line up against the real-time costs of putting the old place into shape for new use.

Look! As much as I hate to admit it, I’m beginning to finally see my city of Houston as one of those places that just isn’t big enough to take care of historical landmarks. What else is there to conclude?

If we cannot take care of the Astrodome, let’s, at least, take responsibility for putting the old girl out of her misery on our own dime. We don’t also need to be remembered as the town that took down the Astrodome under an ultimatum from the NFL in order to get 2,500 extra parking spaces at Reliant and a 2017 Super Bowl award. Throw in an extra thirty pieces of silver, if we elect to go this route.

Once upon a time, we could have converted the Astrodome into the coolest historical museum and entertainment center in the world. Too bad. We just didn’t have the people, the timing, and the plan that would work to get the job done. All we are doing now is running into a wall on the Astrodome’s life span that has been waiting for us forever, given the way history is devalued in Houston.

Goodbye, Astrodome! Wish we had been the kind of people who knew how to preserve the major construction project in the history of Houston. As it turns out, we just didn’t have it in us as a community – and your disappearance shall be our eternal loss – and not some stupid trade result from a deal we made with the NFL over a Super Bowl.