tigereye

I'm guessing you have never been to Japan? It can get very cold there. Thus some of the waters on the real beach there can get quite chilly. The Waters of the Ocean Dome however are actually heated waters. And naturaly retractable roof lets the locals bath year round. In the winter time, with the heated waters, you can think of the Ocean Dome as being the world's largest hot tub. That not the only attraction either.....in addition to some pretty cool rapid rides, it has a fire breathing volcano that goes bizark every half hour. This volcano creates a tsunami...well, the wave pool does its thing.

Actually, form an engineering standpoint, the Dome would work for serving as a shell for an intimate 25,000 seat soccer stadium. Back in its hey day, the Dome used to seat 42,000 when one end of the stadium was left open which made room for the scorebaord spectacular. If you subtract the other endzone, you easily shrink capacity to the nieghborhood of 30,000 or less. Open ended soccer stadiums are the popular designs for the MLS anyways. To further shrink capacity, the interior would need to be gutted and the concourses would need to be enlargerd, which would push the seating deck closer to the pitch. Overall, this would eliminate sections in the seating bowls design which could get you to the 25,000 mark. What I would like to see done is for the the entire reliant campus be sectioned off into three rectulangular blocks. One for Reliant Center, the middle for stadiums, and the last one for parking. the Astrohall needs to be replaced by a Parking garage structure to serve soccer. The parking lot east of the Dome needs to be raised for in favor of a retractable soccer pitch that could move in and out of the Dome to make it more multipurpose. The Dome's seating bowl needs to be as multipurpose as the Saitima Super Arena in Japan, which can change form a 40,000 seat soccer stadium to a 5,000 seat concert venue in the blink of an eye. And last but not least...on the North end of the Dome that faces Reliant center, an air conditioned, sheltered walk way with moveable pathways like you find in airports needs to be built to connect Reliant Stadium and the Dome to the light rail line to make it more attractable to use for commuters. No one likes trudging across barron parking lots in the middle of the night to catch a train....wake up Metro. This needs to be done.....nuff said.

Remember when I said this......its now falling into place......that is if they dont use the Astrodome and build at Delmar NW Mall redevelopment thread

First post here......let me give you and other a little heplfull info. There is an investor who has the ball rolling in Houston, hence all the talk aobut the stadium on the NW side of town. The investor is Club America of Mexico City. Much like Chivas and there owner Jorge Vergara, they want in on one specific market. For Vergara, it was LA, and he got what he wanted. For Club America, its Houston becuase its a big market with a huge hispanic base that's close to Mexico, just like LA. They do not want to go to San antonio as they feel the market income per household is to low to aqudately support a franchise. Hence, San Antonio is in negoations with Tigres, another Mexican club for ownership. There Mayor was recently in Mexico to meet with club officals And BTW....the only reason why SA is in is becuase they gave the "tax-payer-funded" Alamodome away to the MLS by giving them FREE RENT and all concessions, parking. I'm confused.....Mayor Garza was doing this to have a tenant in the Dome to make money for the city of SA. How is SA gonna make money out of this deal? And as for Houston's proposed SSS in the NW side of town.....root for it to happen as it will tie into plans to redevlope the old Northwest Mall inot one massive sports and entertainment year round complex.