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HOUSTON’S FAMOUS ASTRODOME was for sale, so I hurried over to size up the property, arguably the most historic building in Texas aside from the Alamo. No city in America may aspire to greatness without sports teams, but the tropical heat and torrential rains played havoc with Houston’s mighty ambition. In 1965, Roy Hofheinz, a former mayor who was called the Judge because of his brief tenure as a county official, opened what was then called the Harris County Domed Stadium. The former “Eighth Wonder of the World” has been home at various times to the Houston Astros, the Houston Oilers, the Houston Rockets, and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, but when I visited it had been sitting empty for eight years, after all the teams ran off to newer venues and the fire department jerked the venue’s certificate of occupancy. It was a little sad, honestly, to see this noble landmark out on the streets, as it were. The city had turned its back on the iconic building that made civilization in Houston—and Texas at large—seem somewhat plausible in the first place.
Judge Hofheinz was an ideal expression of the Texas go-getter. He gained control of the Colt .45s, a National League expansion team, which he renamed the Astros. The team had only agreed to come to Houston because of the Judge’s promise to build a covered stadium. Hofheinz claimed to have been inspired by the Roman Colosseum, which in ancient days was shaded by an awning during matinee gladiatorial contests. If the Romans could do it, why not the Houstonians? But shade wasn’t enough for the Judge. He set out to construct the world’s largest air-conditioned room.
Such a structure had never been built before. Overheated Texans used to cool their churches and restaurants by placing fans over tubs of ice. Then, in 1923, the Second National Bank became the first air-conditioned building in Houston. By the 1950s, Houston laid claim to being “the air-conditioning capital of the world,” which included the PlazAmericas, the first fully air-conditioned mall. But the building of the Astrodome was a civic leap of faith. It still stands imposingly beside the freeway, “like the working end of a gigantic roll-on deodorant,” as Texas author Larry McMurtry noted with his unsparing eye. Hofheinz moved into an apartment inside the dome that occupied seven floors of the right-field bleachers and was equipped with a chapel, a bowling alley, a shooting gallery, and a private bar called the Tipsy Tavern. Bob Hope observed the decor and pronounced it “early King Farouk.” Hofheinz dressed the stadium ushers—attractive young women called Spacettes—in quilted golden outfits suitable for the frigid interior climate. The grounds crew, who wore orange jumpsuits with space helmets, were called Earthmen. “It was like having your own planet,” the Judge’s widow, Mary Frances Hofheinz, later recalled.
Another county judge, Ed Emmett, inherited the Astrodome dilemma when he took office in 2007. Most Houstonians said they’d prefer to have the old stadium torn down and made into green space, and they decisively rejected a bond proposal of $213 million to convert the structure into a multi-use event facility. However, Judge Emmett decided it didn’t make financial sense to raze the Astrodome. “It’s solid,” he told me, as we walked around the vast interior. “When Hurricane Ike came through [in 2008], every other structure in this area was damaged, but not this place. Plus, it’s already paid for.”
Emmett turned to the public for suggestions. About a hundred ideas were submitted, some scribbled on bar napkins: make it a parking garage, a ski slope, a science museum. One suggestion was to flood the arena, which is two stories below ground level, and reenact naval battles. Another group proposed turning it into a gigantic movie studio. “None of these ideas came with any money attached,” Emmett noted, as we stood in what had once been shallow center field, near the spot where Muhammad Ali knocked out Cleveland Williams in 1966. Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Billie Jean King v. Bobby Riggs—there’s an endless roster of memories here. I have a friend who scattered his father’s ashes on the playing field. Except for a brief birthday party for the stadium on its fiftieth anniversary in 2015, the last time the public was admitted was in 2005, when refugees from Hurricane Katrina took shelter here.
Emmett favored making the Astrodome’s 350,000 square feet of floor space into a giant indoor park, or else simply providing a space for festivals and special events. It’s a minimal plan, he admits. “We could have the state archery contest here,” he said. “The Texas horseshoe tournament. I’ve also got ties to the cricket community.” It seemed a long way from opening day, April 9, 1965, when the Astros beat the Yankees 2−1, and Mickey Mantle hit the stadium’s first home run.
I got a tour in a golf cart with a flashlight through the home team’s old locker room, where the hot tub was still intact. Judge Hofheinz also used to prowl around late at night in his golf cart, exploring his creation. The playing field was now given over to storage, much of it from the larger, sleeker NRG Stadium next door. There were stacks of stadium chairs, turnstiles, and a hut for a parking-lot attendant. Two hundred feet above us was the roof with its geometric plastic tiles. When the stadium opened, there was reasonable concern that outfielders wouldn’t be able to see the ball, so someone stood on the catwalk overhead and dropped baseballs as Joe Morgan and Rusty Staub raced around struggling to catch them. To reduce the glare, the Lucite panels were painted with a translucent coating, but that killed the grass. Hofheinz had the dead grass painted green until he was able to replace it with AstroTurf, a grass-like carpet, which was now lying in massive rolls like haybales on the concrete stadium floor.
The retractable pitcher’s mound was buried under a couple of steel plates. Two of my favorite ballplayers, Nolan Ryan and J. R. Richard, once stood on this spot. They were briefly teammates, although Ryan was the one who got the first million-dollar contract in baseball history, creating resentment on Richard’s part. Both could throw hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs and breaking balls at almost that speed, but the six-foot-eight Richard was by far the more intimidating pitcher. I never saw a pitcher so thoroughly overpower hitters. At the moment he released the ball, his right foot was almost off the mound and his hand seemed to be right in the batter’s face. His slider was probably the most difficult pitch in the game to hit. It was thrilling to watch him.
In both 1978 and 1979, he struck out more than three hundred hitters, a feat that only Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax had accomplished in consecutive seasons in the modern era. The following year was expected to be the season that Richard firmly proved himself to be the most dominating pitcher in baseball. He was thirty years old, and getting better every year. He won ten of his first fourteen starts. But then he began complaining about a “dead arm,” along with stiffness in his shoulder and back. He took himself out of several games when he couldn’t see the catcher’s signs. For weeks he complained of dizziness and pain. Because of his very public gripes about Ryan’s contract, fans turned against him, believing he was “loafing,” although he hadn’t missed a start in five years. Even the team doctors and staff didn’t believe him. The Astros reluctantly put him on the disabled list. “They said it was all in my head,” Richard later recalled. “They said I was unhappy, pouting about Ryan.”
On July 30, 1980, with an earned run average of 1.90, Richard suffered a major stroke from a blood clot in an artery leading to his right arm. Doctors had finally detected it several days earlier but decided it was stable, and so they did nothing. Richard never played in the big leagues again. After a couple of bad investments and two divorces, he was financially ruined. In January 1995, while Ryan was preparing to start his twenty-seventh season in the major leagues, a reporter for The Houston Post found Richard living under a bridge, about three miles from the Astrodome.
Ryan went on to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and served as president of the Texas Rangers. He is said to be worth $60 million. He is one of the most popular Texans of all time. Richard became a minister and got involved in serving the homeless population in Houston. They were two great players, but I wonder how their destinies would have differed if their plights ha
d been reversed. One imagines that Nolan Ryan, the million-dollar man, and white, would have been treated as soon as he reported his symptoms. No one would have accused him of being a malingerer and a malcontent. No doubt he would have been rapidly attended to. Perhaps he would have been given better financial advice. On the other hand, Richard was always solitary and difficult. He was known to be using cocaine in his playing days. He was not as easy to make into a hero. Still…
I asked Judge Emmett if the fate of the Astrodome was that it, like its predecessor the Roman Colosseum, would become a venerable ruin. Emmett said he didn’t see that happening. Indeed, a few months after my visit, Emmett persuaded the Harris County commissioners to put up $10.5 million to design the redeveloped facility, which would include underground parking and a vast festival area. “The Astrodome’s days of sitting idle and abandoned are over,” the Judge promised. “I’m confident we can do it without a tax increase. A hundred million dollars more or less is easily doable in a county with a larger population than twenty-five states.”
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HOUSTON IS the only major city in America without zoning laws. You can build pretty much anything you want anywhere you want, except in designated historical districts. You’ll see some odd sights, such as a two-story family home adjacent to a roller coaster, or an erotic nightclub next to a shopping gallery, or a house made of beer cans. Solo skyscrapers suddenly pop up in residential neighborhoods. The absence of zoning is an artifact of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s, when zoning was viewed as a communist plot. But there was another group, of blacks and liberals, who saw an advantage in siding with the ultraright. “Zoning would have been used to keep people out,” Bill White, a former mayor, observed.
According to City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Houston now has the highest standard of living of any large city in America, and among the highest in the world: “Personal household income has risen 20 percent since 2005 in Houston, compared with 14 percent in New York, 11 percent in Los Angeles, and less than 9 percent in Chicago.” Parks are being renovated and expanded, and housing is affordable—60 percent below the average in Los Angeles, for instance.
Houston grew by 35 percent between 2000 and 2013, an astounding figure for an already mature city. It will soon bypass Chicago to become the country’s third-largest metropolitan area, behind New York and Los Angeles. “All the growth has been Latino, African American, and Asian,” the Kinder Institute’s Stephen Klineberg said. “Houston is now the single most ethnically diverse metro area in the country.” One out of four Houstonians is foreign born, and no single racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority. “We speak one hundred forty-two different languages,” Sylvester Turner, Houston’s second black mayor, told me. “We’re seeking to be even more inclusive.”
For many years Texas led the nation in the number of refugees it admits. In 2016, Texas took in 8,300 of the 85,000 refugees that came to America, a close second to California. (Under President Trump, the number of refugees permitted into the country has been capped at 45,000.) Houston accepts more refugees than any city in the country. At last count (2010), Texas has the largest number of Muslim adherents in the United States. However, the governor decided in September 2016 to withdraw from the federal resettlement program.
Like other cities in Texas, Houston has become more progressive over the years; for instance, 81 percent of Houston’s citizens favor background checks for all gun owners, and a majority approves a path to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The proportion of Houstonians identifying themselves as Democrats was 52 percent in Klineberg’s latest survey, while the number saying they are Republicans declined to 30 percent—the largest gap in the history of his polling. Those numbers are not at all reflected in the political leadership of the state, which is far more right wing than the general population.
Nearly 40 percent of Houston’s population is under twenty-four—it’s an incredibly youthful town—so education is a pressing issue. More than half of that youthful cohort are Latino, and nearly 20 percent are African American; they are the future of Houston and also the most likely to be undereducated. Texas is near the bottom on education spending and academic achievement. These failures will have national consequences, since one out of ten children in the United States is a Texan—more than seven million of them. One in four Texas children lives in poverty.
There was a time when oil, cotton, and cattle were the only real sources of wealth in the state, and education wasn’t such a crucial predictor of success. “The question is whether older, wealthy Anglos are willing to invest in a Texas future that is predominately not Anglo, when it’s not a mirror of Europe but a microcosm of the world,” says Klineberg. “The hope for Houston and Texas is that it is in our basic DNA to do what is needed to succeed.” Houstonians know that they are at a crossroads. “This place could be either London or Lagos,” my friend Mimi Swartz, a longtime Texas Monthly writer, told me.
* * *
IN EARLY AUGUST 2017, an atmospheric formation known as a tropical wave stirred into life off the western coast of Africa and began its journey across the Atlantic Ocean. By the time the disturbance neared the Lesser Antilles, on August 17, it was designated a tropical storm and named Harvey. Two days later, Harvey bumped into a wind shear in the eastern Caribbean, and it subsided once again into a wave. The National Hurricane Center stopped providing advisories as it appeared that the storm with its rather amusing name had simply petered out.
The Texas Gulf Coast acts as sort of a catcher’s mitt for the tempests that are hurled across the sea. And yet, with all the predictions about global warming generating more frequent storms of increased severity, we hadn’t had a direct hit since Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2008. Ike was rated only a Category 2 hurricane, but it was one of the most destructive storms in Texas history, bringing a twenty-foot storm surge and killing eighty-four people. Many of our complacent political leaders doubt that the climate is changing—or if it is, that human activity has anything to do with it. In light of widespread scientific consensus on these matters, it is difficult to read the political resistance as anything other than abject submission to the oil and gas industry, which is headquartered right in the Gulf Coast hurricane strike zone.
The depleted storm named Harvey lumbered across the Yucatán Peninsula into the Gulf, where it gathered enough strength to be termed a tropical depression—meaning that it had winds of thirty-eight miles per hour or less. Suddenly, in the space of fifty-six hours, Harvey exploded into a Category 4 hurricane, thanks to abnormally warm waters in the Gulf.
Harvey made landfall at 10 p.m. on August 25 at Rockport, a little fishing village and art colony north of Corpus Christi, with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour, wiping out city blocks in Rockport and leveling smaller towns in the area. But it wasn’t the wind that would do the real damage; it was the rain.
As the storm veered northwest, toward Houston and Beaumont, meteorologists began to panic. “All impacts are unknown & beyond anything ever experienced,” the National Weather Service tweeted on August 27. William Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), predicted that the storm would be the worst disaster Texas had ever seen.
Governor Abbott urged residents from Corpus Christi to Houston to evacuate, but Mayor Turner and Judge Emmett quickly overruled him. “You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road,” the mayor said at a press conference. He referenced Hurricane Rita in 2005, when an evacuation order had been given. About 2.5 million people fled inland, creating the worst gridlock in Houston’s history. Steve Harrigan got his eighty-five-year-old mother out, and it took him nine hours to drive to Austin, usually less than a three-hour drive. His brother-in-law left two hours later, and the same trip took thirty-two hours. People who were stranded on the highway died of heat stroke. There were traffic accidents. Fights broke out. A bus carrying evacuees from
a nursing home caught fire. More than a hundred people died in the thwarted exodus. The uncomfortable truth about Houston is that there is no escape in the face of a major hurricane.
Harvey had become indolent; it just sat on top of Houston and the surrounding region, pouring more rain than any storm in U.S. history—measuring 51.88 inches at Cedar Bayou, just east of Houston, a record. An estimated 34 trillion gallons of rain fell on East Texas and western Louisiana. Nearly a hundred thousand homes were flooded, and as many as a million vehicles were destroyed. Dr. Joel N. Myers, the president and chairman of AccuWeather, predicted, “This will be the worst natural disaster in American history. The economy’s impact, by the time its total destruction is completed, will approach $160 billion, which is similar to the combined effect of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.”
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AS IT HAPPENED, I was supposed to be in Houston rehearsing a new play. I had planned to drive down on Sunday, August 27, but Harvey got there before me. All the roads were blocked. My actors had already arrived for costume fittings, and they were marooned in the hotel. I had a video chat with them on Monday, and they kept looking away from the screen to the window, where the storm continued to rage. Their eyes were filled with awe.
My play is called Cleo. It’s about the making of the movie Cleopatra. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are the main characters. Their illicit romance began on the movie set in Rome in 1962 and became the most scandalous love affair of the twentieth century. I was radiated by their romance, which happened to coincide with the onset of puberty. I have been working on the script, off and on, for twenty years. Bob Balaban, the actor, is our director, and we had a reading at the Alley Theatre in January 2016, on the little Neuhaus stage downstairs. The audience was wonderful, and after the reading, Gregory Boyd, the artistic director of the Alley, offered us a production.
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