Imminent Domain

Finally it was time for some football talk. Tagliabue mumbled his way through some remarks, and then a standing ovation greeted energy mogul Bob McNair, the man who spent $700 million to buy an expansion team. "Sports are an element that within a community can be a uniting force," McNair said.

Then came the groundbreaking. A trough of dirt had been placed in front of the stage, supposedly where the 50-yard line of the new field will be.

Stone had noted that the groundbreaking ceremony for the Astrodome 30-some years ago had featured dignitaries firing six-shooters into the ground, in honor of the baseball team that was then called the Colt .45s. (County Judge Bob Eckels, apparently a graduate of the Lloyd Kelley School of Road Rage, noted oddly in his remarks that "I wish I had a .45 to shoot today -- I was thinking about that today on the freeway on the way here.")

No guns were present in this politically correct age, of course; instead the VIPs donned hard hats and wielded souvenir shovels. Then they walked outside and posed for another shot, with the Astrodome in the background.

The forlorn Dome had been sitting just outside the tent all morning, of course; the new stadium will be built only a few yards away from the old. In a superslick video shown during the ceremony, featuring far more computer-generated special effects and better music than the pregame one, you had to look quickly to catch sight of the dotty old Eighth Wonder of the World as it looked over the shoulder of the futuristic, glass-walled edifice that one speaker had, inevitably, referred to as the Ninth Wonder of the World.

No one knows what will become of the Dome. County officials glibly talk of making it a supersize convention facility, but there's no public money available to do it. The question of whether the private sector would take a chance on it is very much up in the air. Eventually, since the new stadium and related facilities will take up a large section of the current parking lot, people forced to walk long distances from their cars to their seats might clamor to tear down the Dome and use it for parking spaces.

All of which presents a somewhat sobering thought on how fleeting are the lifetimes of these taxpayer-funded palaces.

As the assorted dignitaries posed with their shovels March 9, proudly congratulating themselves on their vision, few probably were thinking ahead 30 years. They probably weren't imagining that not too distant day when their images would be shown for nostalgic purposes to yet another happy crowd of the powers-that-be, who were celebrating the groundbreaking of a new facility to replace the doddering, outmoded relic that first began taking shape in a large tent in the year 2000.

E-mail Richard Connelly at rich.connelly@ houstonpress.com.