'Spirit of Houston': Astrodome Conservancy seeks opinions from public on how to restore the Eighth Wonder of the World

Astrodome Conservancy is a private nonprofit organization that is committed to preserving and restoring the Houston Astrodome.

Opening in 1965, the Astrodome was the first fully-enclosed sports stadium and first air-conditioned event venue of its size, seating up to 70,000 people. The stadium was closed in 2009 after years of disuse. 

Founded in 2016, Astrodome Conservancy seeks the reuse and redevelopment of the historic stadium. The same year the organization was founded, the Harris County Commissioners Court voted to allocate $105 million for the Astrodome's redevelopment.

"At the heart of our mission is really public access," Beth Wiedower Jackson, executive director of Astrodome Conservancy, told Houston Daily. "We strive to ensure that the Astrodome is not only preserved as the landmark that it is, that it is reused creatively and innovatively, but that that reuse has at its heart public access as this is, after all, a public building owned by Harris County, and it was Houston's living room for many decades."

The Astrodome is coined the eighth wonder of the world. Wiedower Jackson explained the value and connection of the stadium to Houston residents. 

"For Houstonians the dome represents an attitude, a spirit that I think it doesn't take long living in the city to catch on to," Wiedower Jackson told Houston Daily. "A kind of a can-do-don't-tell-us-no attitude. That we can make it happen. It represented just a belief in the future and I think that those things still carry forward."

Wiedower Jackson said that besides being the first enclosed domed stadium in the modern world, the stadium represented the mid-century space race which was happening in Houston.

"They're identifiers, they're culturally significant in Houston because it helps us to create and be a part of a cultural identity and everyone's looking for that in some part," Wiedower Jackson told Houston Daily. "The cultural identity of a place is very significant to the human race and so creating that cultural identity or calling it out, and in many many cases that cultural identity is tied to a place, and we think the Astrodome in Houston is one of those very few places that evokes that kind of identity, that spirit of Houston."

Astrodome Conservancy recently launched a new campaign called Future Dome to seek opinions from the public about what to do with the Eighth Wonder of the World, reported KHOU 11 News.

"There have been many many proposals submitted over the past 10 years or so to Harris County and none of them have had viable funding sources or worked within the constraints of the site," Wiedower Jackson told Houston Daily. "When we looked at what's missing from the equation here, why is this not moving forward, we very quickly identified that the public's voice had not been a part of the conversation thus far."

The Future Dome campaign is scheduled to last eight weeks and residents can submit ideas or opinions to the campaign here.