Photo by Abrahan Garza.

The clock is ticking for the Astrodome. On June 10, the deadline for private companies to submit their financially sound ideas for the Dome will hit. On June 25, the HCSCC will present Harris County Commissioners Court with the ideas. At that point, decisions will be made, votes will be cast and we'll finally know what the future holds for the Eighth Wonder of the World.

By now it feels like everyone has had their say about what we should do with the Dome. Even us, the humble folks at Hair Balls, have put in our two cents. With the deadline for proposals inching closer by the day, we realized something:

We hadn't asked you what you would do with the Dome.

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Photo by Jeff Balke

I have spent most of my 44 years on this earth in the city of Houston. I started visiting the Astrodome when I was just a kid for Astros and Oilers games as well as the occasional high school football game. I even walked on the floor for one of them. After all the memories and all the discussions, I don't have a tremendous amount of sentimentality for the old girl. My life would certainly go on if it was torn down just as it did when they shuttered Astroworld or when they imploded the Shamrock Hotel.

But, for the love of all that's holy, if the powers that be are going to, once and for all, demolish the only true identifiable Houston landmark, why must it be for a parking structure?

The truth is blowing up the Astrodome to build a parking garage for VIP parking would be in character for our city. We live in a city where historic preservation may as well be a four-letter word. The laws -- and I use that term extremely loosely -- governing what can be protected are so lax that virtually anyone with a bulldozer and a wad of cash can shred any structure in the city and build whatever they goddamn well please on the piece of dirt that remains.

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Pushing for independence, decades before it came

Irada Akhoundova remembers when the Soviet military rumbled outside her house. It was late 1991, post-perestroika, pre-independence, and Akhoundova, a principal of one of the schools of the Azerbaijan Republic, heard the four-wheelers and hard-tops tossing gravel outside her house. It was an early morning, and she had to get to the school in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. She still had to teach in the midst of Moscow's attempts to tamp out the secessionist movement that was rippling across the Soviet Union.

After cajoling a young soldier to give her a ride to the school, Akhoundova promptly corralled the students in the middle of the gymnasium. It was for their safety, she told them. Only a few hours before, the Soviets had raked down a handful of peaceful demonstrators. The military was still patrolling the corners, was still commandeering local armories, was still arresting and cordoning those they found calling for an independent Azerbaijan. And Akhoundova's students, these high school boys who'd taken to the nationalist movements, were eager to contribute.

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Chechnya, burning in 1994

Simon Hanukaev's family has lived along the western shore of the Caspian Sea for generations. Settled near the city of Derbent, a southern city in the Russian republic of Dagestan, Hanukaev's predecessors lived through khanates and tsars, under Bolshevik revolution and Stalinist resettlement. His parents, after Simon was born in the early 1980s, then watched Gorbachev's policies fail, and saw those among autonomous republics south of the Caucaus Mountains declare their independence, and stood while the Chechen neighbors to the direct west attempted, once more, to finally throw off Moscow's chokehold for the first time in 150 years.

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Klineberg released his 32nd Houston survey on Tuesday.

Stephen Klineberg is animated. He's twirling his arms, and he's shuffling his feet, and his voice is jumping and falling and tripping over itself in anticipation of what he'll next say. He's as excited as a Rice University sociology professor could rightly be, sharing his latest findings of the most comprehensive urban research study in the nation.

"Houston is the embodiment of the American perspective," Klineberg tells a group of reporters Tuesday morning, detailing the results of the 32nd Annual Kinder Institute Houston Area Survey. "It's a much more typical US city than San Francisco or New York. ... This is where America will be in about twenty years -- and there's a growing comfort with it."

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A week after confusion first settled around the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation's forthcoming decision on the Astrodome -- with some alleging an unspecified plan set to befall an unsuspecting populace -- we now have a better idea of what the HCSCC is preparing to provide. Just as officials told Hair Balls on Monday, the HCSCC board produced a resolution on Wednesday that details not a specific plan but a set of dates and promises that will eventually put the Dome's future in the hands of the Harris County Commissioners Court.

As it is, rumors still swirl -- out of USC? -- about a potential future option for the Eighth Wonder. Right now, though, the HCSCC is content with giving themselves nearly two months to cobble together and vet plans both private and public to eventually push forward.

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If everyone has a plan, then no one has a plan

A report came out in last week's Houston Chronicle purporting to detail a "vote on an unspecified plan concerning what to do with the Astrodome." According to John McClain, the board of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation was set to approve the plan and shuffle it to the Harris County Commissioners Court. "If county commissioners give their approval," McClain wrote, "the plan could eventually be voted on by the public."

This information was sourced to a "person" close to the situation. It is also incorrect.

See Also:
-- Digging Around the All-But-Abandoned Astrodome
-- Dome of Doom
-- Another Visit Inside the Abandoned Astrodome, and Still No One Knows What to Do with It

"[The Chronicle's report] was just wrong," Kevin Hoffman, HCSCC's deputy executive director, told Hair Balls. "There's a lot of speculation in the community regarding it, but we've been very careful and diligent in trying to get accurate information out."

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For our sixth installment of vintage photos mashed with their present-day locations, we entered the doomed Reliant Astrodome with photos from a 1968 Astrodome tour guide. It highlighted numerous events the dome accommodated It opened in 1965 as the Harris County Domed Stadium. From being the home of the Houston Astros and the Oilers, it was also host to three-ring circuses, boxing matches, rodeos and basketball games. Billy Graham set records with a 1965 visit, and the Dome hosted a political rally featuring President Lyndon B. Johnson.

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Our friend Alex Luster, who was the subject of a cover story in 2011, posted something intriguing to his Facebook page on Monday. According to him, Apple Maps, the app that took the place of Google Maps in the iPhone's OS 6 upgrade and has been much maligned, apparently still believes Six Flags Astroworld exists.

As we all know, Astroworld has been an empty lot for quite a few years now, but Apple Maps claim otherwise and a check of the app (as you can see from the photo) confirms it. Right there in an empty lot -- that is painfully easy to see in satellite views like in the photo -- is a listing for Six Flags Astroworld, that fanciful place of our youth that was torn down to the ground. Gone is the Runaway Rickshaw, the bamboo boat water ride and, of course, the Texas Cyclone. But not for Apple Maps.

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The most well-known prank in Rice history took place on a warm spring morning in 1988. A few years after the idea first crept into their keg-addled minds, a handful of engineering students erected a pair of 24-foot A-frames around the campus's centerpiece, a one-ton statue of William Marsh Rice that houses the ashes of the university's founder.

Willy, as the statue was affectionately known, had faced the university's picturesque Lovett Hall for 58 years. But before the sun rose -- as lookouts paced nearby roofs; as decoys helped dissuade patrolling police that a "senior research project" need not be bothered -- Willy would instead be staring down Fondren Library, rotated 180 degrees from the view he once enjoyed.

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