HOUSTON -- The office of Harris County Judge Ed Emmett released Wednesday a rendering of the Astrodome's unique lighting setup for Super Bowl 51.
Anyone who passes by NRG Park on 610 South Loop late at night is probably used to seeing the main NRG Stadium lit up while the 52-year-old dome sits in the dark next door. But that won't be the case next week.
The newly released illustration shows the Astrodome lit up in teal or green along the main outside wall.
As USA TODAY reports, even the dome will play a role during the big game.
Just a few steps away from the site of the Super Bowl, the Astrodome is getting ready to earn another new nickname for itself: “The Dome That Will Never Die.”
Many still know it by its old nickname — “The Eighth Wonder of the World.”
But it hasn’t hosted an event since 2008, leading some to call for its destruction after voters rejected a $217 million bond proposal to help save it in 2013.
“The Astrodome needs to be torn down for parking or green space in time for Super Bowl 2017,” an anti-Astrodome group wrote on its Facebook page in May 2015.
Nearly every other abandoned NFL stadium has been torn down since the Astrodome opened as the world’s first air-conditioned domed stadium in 1965. And it still costs about $170,000 per year in county tax funds to maintain.
A second life
This is the only place in America where an active NFL stadium stands next to the vacated artifact it replaced. Normally, when a giant old stadium has been rendered obsolete, eventually it’s razed to save money and clear the way for new land use.
Not here, where the Astrodome opened with a bang off the bat of New York Yankees slugger
“The Astrodome will stand as a deserved tribute to the genius of its planners,” Johnson predicted.
Since then, Seattle, Minneapolis and Indianapolis all built domes that have been replaced and destroyed.
In Atlanta, the Falcons just played their last game at the Georgia Dome, which soon will be imploded just 25 years after it opened at a cost of $214 million. That building will be supplanted by the $1.5 billion
In Michigan, the former domed stadium of the Detroit Lions still is standing — sort of. The
By contrast, the county-owned Astrodome will survive indefinitely, fueled by nostalgia over what it once was and a sustainable vision of what it still can become. It originally cost about $35 million to build, which is about $270 million today.
“The building is structurally sound, it’s fully paid for and there is no question that it is an architectural and historic icon, not just for our community but for our nation and the world,” Emmett told USA TODAY Sports. “To tear it down, it would cost over $30 million, after which you would have nothing. I look at it more from a standpoint of 'How do we make it more useful for generations to come without costing a lot of money?' "
Some still wouldn’t have missed it if it had been flattened by now, including the Houston Texans, who moved into NRG Stadium as an NFL expansion team in ‘02.
