By Jonathan M. Alexander,Staff writer, Houston Chronicle – July 10, 2025
In the winter of 2018, Ed Emmett thought he found the perfect plan to save the Astrodome and make it useful for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo — the organization that was one of the biggest proponents of tearing the building down.
Emmett, who was the Harris County judge, immediately called the Rodeo’s CEO Joel Cowley to explain his proposal. They’d raise the floor of the building to ground level, open the sides where they could place a food court, a petting zoo or some children’s rides, and build a parking garage below.
It would cost $105 million and didn’t require a bond vote. Cowley agreed to the idea, Emmett said, as did the rest of the county commissioners’ court. It was the closest Harris County had come to figuring out a solution to one of its biggest conundrums of the past decade.
But the plan never happened.
And seven years later — 17 years after the Houston Fire Department first declared the Astrodome unsafe and closed its doors to the public — the Eighth Wonder of the World still remains vacant with no solution in sight.
The abandoned building, plastered with “Do not enter” signs and secured with locks and chains, is now used as a de facto storage unit. For more than two decades after its last tenant left, politicians and other community leaders have grappled with the same question of what to do with the Astrodome: Invest money in its restoration, let it sit idle, or pay to demolish perhaps the city’s most iconic landmark.