Remember when the Houston Astrodome was called the "Eighth Wonder of the World". I used to think that was the height of pretentiousness, a symbol of Texan pomposity and vulgarity. The Astrodome was viewed as an ugly eyesore by the rest of the country, and the teams that played in it never really obtained an advantage from the home crowd, which was usually seated too far away from the action to provide any assistance. Perhaps the two most memorable events held in the Astrodome, the King-Riggs tennis match and the 1968 Houston-UCLA basketball game, were played on surfaces that were hundreds of feet from the front row of fans, giving the TV viewer the antiseptic experience of watching a practice in an empty gym.

The city of Houston has now built two "modern" stadiums for their baseball and football teams, and the world's smallest indoor football stadium lies dormant for most of the year, according to this Washington Post article. The logical thing would be to tear down the monstrosity, since any effort to renovate the Astrodome into a museum or shopping mall would be incredibly expensive. However, sharing an opinion that is held by no one outside of Harris County, some locals want to maintain the stadium as an historic landmark, and I think they're right. Like the ugly uniforms the Astros used to play in, the Astrodome might have been tacky and vulgar to the rest of us, but to the people of Houston, it meant something grand, and it was what gave them an identity. Like it or not, we shouldn't only try to preserve the beautiful things in our society, since we're much, much more than that.