60 years ago today marks to occasion of the official groundbreaking for the Harris County Domed Stadium, the white elephant better known as the Astrodome.
I’ve gone back and forth on the big issue of What’s to Be Done with it over the years. At first, I was a dedicated preservationist. I mean, we were talking about the Eighth Wonder of the World here, people! And as much as I am annoyed by overuse of the word “iconic,” the Astrodome surely qualified for that exalted status. Indeed, from about 1965 to 2000, it was the symbol of our city. If you wanted to make a Houston emoji, you’d just use the Dome.
As it’s slipped into decrepitude over the last 20 years, I’ve arrived at a point where I just don’t care. It seems impractical to have it just sitting there, taking up space, but the more I think about it, I believe that it’s best quality — as a raised middle finger to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the Houston Texans, two of my least favorite Houston institutions. The clownishly terrible football team — I’ve not the inclination to write about them here — and the retrograde municipal celebration recalling a purely fictional past as a Cowtown, these two cornerstones of local culture have become nothing more than stumbling blocks, each as doddering and in the way of what Houston truly is now as the Astrodome is in taking up much coveted parking spaces.
This is not a cowtown. It never has been. Country music is not particularly popular in Houston anymore. It had its day, but Houston has not been a full-on Kikker town since the 1980s. I am not bothered by the forced backslapping downhome bonhomie of Go Texan Day because it represents Houston as a bunch of rustics, but because it represents as the sort of rustics Houstonians never were. I am not bothered — indeed, I quite enjoy — the spectacle of trail rides pouring into town at Rodeo kickoff time, but again, this represents a fake history. Move the whole shindig north to Fort Worth. It belongs there. It is their culture, not ours.
As my friend Pete Mitchell once memorably put it, “There is nothing cool about the rodeo.” And there isn’t. A more perfectly square event could not be calibrated by man or machine. The whole gargantuan affair with its vast cadres of Armed Forces Appreciation, Calf Scramble Arena, Mutton Bustin’, and “Horspitality” committees is such a crushingly corporate behemoth it pains me to ponder, staffed in the main as it is by ambitious souls from the far suburbs or overpriced Midtown condos on the make or take.
As a child, I once had a very high fever and succumbed into a state of audio hallucinations in which a sort of white noise scrambled my brain to the point where my head hurt and I could think of nothing but the sensation of receiving that cacophonous input. That is the way I feel when I ponder the vast apparatus of the rodeo. That and a woozy soul nausea….the shrieks of terrified riders on the carnival wheels, the pervasive aromas of stale beer and smoking meats, the gaudy, nervous- making flashing lights of the midway, Ken Hoffman chirping about eating thrice fried Snickers bars, Bro-country of the sort that never found purchase on Houston’s music scene blaring from every speaker, DJs at booths for unpopular radio stations squawking about artists nobody likes this side of Cypress and Splendora….As a celebration of what Houston is, as opposed to what city boosters would have liked Houston to have been in the 1950s, it fails on every single level imaginable.
No, there is nothing cool about it, nor anything beautiful either. Nothing tender or sweet. Their compassion — the endless repetition of how many scholarships they hand out each year — begins to seem forced, manic, delirious. Did anyone ask? Why do you keep telling us?
I am glad and grateful for the existence of the parade and carnival, as kids need such events. I am not glad and grateful for the Rodeo’s conspiring to shed the city of Astroworld, leaving generations of Houston children without a wonderland this side of Fertitta’s undersized tourist traps in Kemah and on the Seawall. Yes, Astroworld had become rundown. Yes, it also could have been revamped. But the Rodeo wanted that land for parking one month out of the year, and so away it went, forever.
So, I guess, hurrah for the Astrodome after all. Stand in the way of the Rodeo and the Texans forever. Exult in your status as a sty in their eye, an enormous fly in their ointment forever and ever.
As a non-native Houstonian raising Houston children, I’ve always felt somewhat guilty for never taking them to the rodeo. I typically have a deep fondness for the events/quirks that a city embraces and takes on as part of its identity, but I never could wrap my head around the rodeo. I suspect that this is the very reason why. Thanks for putting it into words and alleviating at least this moment of parental guilt.
Thank you! The public, except you, is generally shushed into accepting that the Rodeo and Texans have full control of the grounds for their events, thus limiting options for the Dome, grounds owned by the PUBLIC of Harris County. Yet there was such an outcry when the Bayou Arts Festival was taking over the Picnic Loop of Memorial Park for a weekend.
My understanding is that the business leaders of Houston wanted to brand the city with the rodeo to deflect from the city's closer historical association with southern (read "White supremacist") culture. Having a lumberjack festival might've been closer to the city's historical roots with the East Texas lumber industry.