The Astrodome: The Eighth Wonder of the World and Its Slow Ruin

Judge Roy Hofheinz called it the eighth wonder of the world, and in April of nineteen sixty-five, the press mostly agreed with him.

The Houston Astrodome was the first enclosed, climate-controlled, multipurpose stadium ever built. When it opened on April ninth, nineteen sixty-five, it held more than forty-two thousand people in air-conditioned comfort at a time when baseball fans in most American cities still sat in the sun and sweated. The dome was two hundred eight feet tall at its apex, large enough, Hofheinz liked to say, to contain an eighteen-story building. The natural grass that had been planted inside died because the skylights needed to support it let in too much glare for the fielders. Monsanto developed an artificial substitute, first called Chemgrass and then renamed AstroTurf after the stadium, and an entirely new category of sports surface was born from a failed sod experiment.

The dome hosted baseball and football and boxing and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in nineteen seventy-three. For a generation, it was the most famous arena in the country.

In August of twenty-oh-five, after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans, twenty-five thousand evacuees were sheltered in the Astrodome. The images of families camped in the stadium seats, waiting for aid that was slow to arrive, tested the easy metaphor of the wonder and found it inadequate. The dome had been designed for spectacle. This was something else.

By twenty twenty-six, the Astrodome sits empty and contested, the subject of a preservation debate that has outlasted its useful sporting life by decades. The county that owns it has defeated multiple demolition proposals and multiple renovation proposals. The dome endures in a condition that is not quite death and not quite use, which may be the most American fate a monument can have.