Dec. 5, 1964 - The Houston Colt .45s, who finished ninth in the National League last season after playing to only 730,000 customers in a dimly lit, makeshift baseball park, hurried toward a success story today that defied even Texas superlatives.
With a new name (the Astros) and enough money to impress even the wealthy New York Mets, the Houston club began the final stages of the grandest stadium in baseball.
It rivals the nearby space center in way‐out architecture, its completed exterior resembling a fantastic white cylinder. The contractor expects to be done by Feb. 1, two months before the baseball season opens — and it has air conditioning and a roof.
These were some of the superlatives the Houston club delivered this week as it unveiled its new “wonder of the world” to visitors at the winter baseball meetings.
The “rain or shine stadium,” also known as Houston's Big Bubble, but officially the Harris County Domed Stadium, will probably finally be called Astrodome Stadium.
All of the seats are upholstered and all in place: 45,000 for baseball, 53,000 for football (the lower stand “expands” on rails, as in Shea Stadium). When the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham takes over for 10 days next year, enough chairs will be added to seat 66,000.
— The baseball team, which pays $750,000 a year to rent the stadium, isn’t worried about paying the rent. It already has sublet the park for 123 dates in its first year alone: conventions, football, etc.
But the touch that strains Texas’ pride the most is the booming sale of luxury box seats on the stadium’s ninth level. They are really more like penthouses than boxes and, like penthouses, are rented by the year with five-year leases required. The cost: for a 24-seat box, $15,000 a year; for a 30-seater, $18,000, and for 54 seats, $34,000.
The stadium cost $31.6 million, including a network of roads and parking for 30,000 cars. But the county will start to get that back April 9, when the New York Yankees and Baltimore Orioles play five exhibition games against the home team (day and night) the weekend before the season opens.
Then if the Colts — or Astros — have any strength left, they open the regular season in their Taj Mahal of baseball on Monday night, Apr. 12 against the Philadelphia Phillies.
The only remaining problem in preparation for all this is fixing ground rules in case Mickey Mantle belts one off the roof, 208 feet high at its apex behind second base.
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