- Harris County Commissioner’s Court To Vote on Proposed Astrodome Parking Plan This Tuesday [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Average Vacancy Rate Within Houston’s Crane-Served Industrial Facilities Stands at 10.5%, Finds NAI Partners [HBJ]
- Holliday Fenoglio Fowler Secures Financing for 388-Unit Energy Corridor Housing Community Aura Memorial [Realty News Report]
- Braun Enterprises Closes on Montrose, Heights Properties [HBJ]
- Aloft Houston Downtown Slated To Open Oct. 4 in Historic Stowers Building at 820 Fannin [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Academy Sports + Outdoors Debuts in Valley Ranch Town Center in New Caney [HBJ]
- Pete Rose Hit King Baseball Academy Starts Construction in Katy [HBJ]
- John Hardy Opens Stand-Alone Boutique in the River Oaks District [Culturemap]
- Louis Shanks Closing Largest Showroom and Distribution Center in Houston [Furniture Today]
- Metro To Start Testing New Zero-Emission Electric Bus in Southwest Houston in December [Houston Public Media]
- Updated FEMA Coastal Flood Map Puts New 8,000 Harris County Owners’ Properties into Special Flood Hazard Zone [Houston Public Media]
Photo of Sawyer Yards: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
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Only $75,000 per parking space, seems like a great deal. We can charge $20 per spot, and if we can get someone to park there every day, it will only take a little over 10 years to pay for the project…not counting upkeep, cost over-runs, and the cost of collecting the parking fees.
It’s appropriate that we will “save” the Astrodome by turning it into a parking garage. Houston will now have an official monument to the car!
FPMF moved to NRG due to flooding downtown. Open Air Festival cancelled due to weather at NRG Park. Sooo please tell me why we don’t convert the DOME into an 18 acre covered festival ground? It seems to me a partnership between the county and Houston First would be a win win. All festivals held downtown on the bayou( including Freedom over Texas), tranquility park and jones plaza move indoors out of the elements and surrounded by parking. HLSR’s carnival moves indoors, Texans tailgating moves indoors, Bayou City Arts Festival indoors with a single location, Art Car Show and Parade indoors. All festivals and parades could move out of the rain, heat, cold, mosquitos and off the STREETS. We could replace the skylights and roof with ETFE to allow a “open roof” feel, “plant” trees around the concourses, natural ventilation and automated self cleaning port a potties. We could build adjacent to it the long proposed Will Clayton Intl Center and a Astrodome museum. The east side parking lot between the dome and rail station a Hoffienz Memorial garden and a covered pallasades to walk through. Its starring us in face, but all the county geniuses, rodeo gods and Texans posse can come up with is a parking lot? I’m currently a causality of the unemployment reality of a down time, I need a job, let me show these “leaders” what to do. Smh
@SimplySid Nailed it! AND think about all the concerts that go to CWMP in The Woodlands….those could come to the Astrodome!
Hate to rain on the parade, but didn’t nearly all of these alternate concert / fairgrounds came into existence during the Astrodome’s heyday; presumably because they couldn’t afford the rental cost for a massive stadium? The refurbishment cost would not come cheap, making for an expensive rental and these options would have already been shopped around vigorously many times in the past decade.
TEAR.IT.DOWN.
Agree with Sid. Last weekend there was an incredibly loud event occurring at NRG Park (it was called a ‘concert’, but it certainly wasn’t music). If crap like that could be moved inside the dome and sufficiently muffled, the entire neighborhood west of NRG would be grateful, ‘specially the folks in the Broadmead. No need to remodel anything; no one attending these things, being as they are in altered states, pays the slightest attention to their surroundings anyway. Just make the dome safe and up to code, whack together a stage, and there ya go.
Regarding using the facility as a tailgating venue, that’s not a place I’d want to be breathing unfiltered indoor air on game days.
Re: Local Planner’s comments, I have a solution.
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I would like to advance a late entry to the Astrodome repurposing competition. My proposal is to build a single massive stack on the roof of the dome. Replace the glass panels with ones that are transparent, install glass panels along the walls, and install glass radiating outward along the Dome’s perimeter. Allow these glass panels to generate heat, which will flow upward toward the stack, spinning turbines, and generating electricity.
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The amount of solar radiation could be regulated with blinds so that what is a power plant one day could become covered and well-ventilated fairgrounds the next day.
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This would also be an impressive landmark.
This has been done before, sort of. Seems like it would be an appropriate kind of boondoggle for the “Energy Capital of the World” to take on. Here’s some reading material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower