Before You Go. Most Americans hear "bayou" and think "Louisiana." But Houston is known as, among other things, the Bayou City. It can get hot, it can get humid, and it gets a lot of rain. Why do you think the world's 1st indoor stadium designed for baseball and football was built there? So while the Texans play in a stadium with a retractable roof, the weather could still be a factor.
The Houston Chronicle is predicting daytime temperatures in the high 60s, and nighttime temperatures in the low 50s, plus clouds, but probably now rain. A light jacket might be a good idea for the evening, but you won't need it for the game.
Houston is in the Central Time Zone, so you’ll be an hour behind New York time. Although Texas is a former Confederate State, you will not need your passport, and you won't need to change your money.
Tickets. The Texans are averaging 71,714 fans per game this season, slightly under their figure for last season, nearly a sellout. Being the NFL's newest team (whether you count moved teams as "new" or not), they don't having much of a tradition. But getting tickets may still be tough.
Seats in the lower level, the 100 sections, are $152 on the sidelines and $99 in the end zone. Seats in the upper level, the 600 sections, are $78 and $49. Every level in between is club seating, and prohibitively expensive.
Getting There. It’s 1,665 miles from Times Square in New York to downtown Houston, and 1,668 miles from MetLife Stadium to NRG Stadium. You’re probably thinking that you should be flying.
The good news: Flying to Houston can be done for as little as $353. Considering how far it is, that is a bargain. The bad news: Your flight won't be nonstop: You'll have to change planes in either Dallas, Chicago or Charlotte to get to Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport. (That's named for the father, not the son.)
There are 2 ways to get there by train. One is to change trains in Chicago, and then change to a bus in Longview, Texas. The other is to change trains twice, in Washington and New Orleans, and then stay overnight in New Orleans. No, I'm not making that up. You don't want that -- and don't be fooled by the fact that Houston's Union Station and the ballpark are next-door to each other, because Amtrak uses a different station a mile away, at 902 Washington Street. Round-trip fare is $544, and that could be more than by flying. Maybe we should just forget Amtrak, and move on.
Greyhound has 8 runs a day from Port Authority Bus Terminal to Houston, averaging 42 hours, and requiring you to change buses in Atlanta and New Orleans. It's $491 round-trip, but it can drop to $392 with advanced purchase -- in other words, flying could be less. The Houston Greyhound station is at 2121 Main Street, a mile from the arena.
If you actually think it’s worth it to drive, get someone to go with you so you’ll have someone to talk to and one of you can drive while the other sleeps. You’ll be taking Interstate 78 across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania to Harrisburg, where you'll pick up Interstate 81 and take that through the narrow panhandles of Maryland and West Virginia, down the Appalachian spine of Virginia and into Tennessee, where you'll pick up Interstate 40, stay on that briefly until you reach Interstate 75, and take that until you reach Interstate 59, which will take you into Georgia briefly and then across Alabama and Mississippi, and into Louisiana, where you take Interstate 12 west outside New Orleans. Take that until you reach Interstate 10. Once in Texas, Exit 770 will get you to downtown Houston.
If you do it right, you should spend about an hour and a half in New Jersey, 3 hours in Pennsylvania, 15 minutes in Maryland, half an hour in West Virginia, 5 and a half hours in Virginia, 3 hours and 45 minutes in Tennessee, half an hour in Georgia, 4 hours in Alabama, 2 hours and 45 minutes in Mississippi, 4 hours and 30 minutes in Louisiana and 2 hours in Texas. Including rest stops, and accounting for traffic, we’re talking about a 40-hour trip.
Even if you’re only going for one game, no matter how you got there, get a hotel and spend a night. You’ll be exhausted otherwise. Trust me, I know: Trains and buses are not good ways to get sleep.
Once In the City. Houston was founded in 1836 as Allen's Landing, and was renamed for Sam Houston, "the Father of Texas." There are 2.2 million people in the city proper, making it the 4th-largest in America, and 6.3 million in the metropolitan area, making it 5th. But with multiple teams, it's only the 10th-largest market in the NBA, and the 7th-largest in MLB and the NFL.
The sales tax in the State of Texas is 6.25 percent, but in the City of Houston it goes up to 8.25 percent. The city doesn't appear to have a "centerpoint," where the address numbers start at 1, but there is a Main Street, running northeast/southwest.
There is a light rail system, called METRORail, but you probably won't need it to get from a downtown hotel to the arena. One zone is $1.25, and the price rises to $4.50 for 4 zones, so a daypass is a better bargain at $3.00.
In 2002, the new NFL team, the Houston Texans, began play next-door to the Astrodome, just to the west, at Reliant Stadium, now named NRG Stadium. Like Minute Maid Park, it has a retractable roof. Suddenly, the mostly-vacant Astrodome seemed, as one writer put it, like a relic of a future that never came to be. (This same writer said the same thing of Shea Stadium and, across Roosevelt Avenue, the surviving structures of the 1964 World's Fair.)
Photo taken in the leadup to Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004.
As you can see, the new stadium dwarfs the old one.
Once, the Astrodome was flashy enough to be the site of movies like The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training and Murder at the World Series. (Both were released in 1977. In the latter, the Astros, who had never yet gotten close to a Pennant, played the Series against the Oakland Athletics, who had just gotten fire-sold by owner Charlie Finley.)
The Astrodome also hosted the legendary 1968 college basketball game between Number 1 UCLA (with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then still Lew Alcindor) and Number 2 University of Houston (whose Elvin Hayes led them to victory, before UCLA got revenge in that year's Final Four), and the cheese-tastic 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, the "Battle of the Sexes."
Elvis Presley sang there on February 27, 1970 and on March 3, 1974. It hosted Selena's last big concert before her murder in 1995, and when Jennifer Lopez starred in the film Selena, it was used for the re-creation. In 2004, the same year NRG (then Reliant) Stadium hosted the Super Bowl (which was won by... Janet Jackson, I think), the Astrodome was used to film a high school football playoff for the film version of Friday Night Lights; the old Astros division title banners can be clearly seen.
Today, though, the Astrodome seems, like the Republican Party that held a ridiculously bigoted Convention there in 1992, stuck in the past. The former Eighth Wonder of the World is now nicknamed the Lonely Landmark, and while it served as a shelter for people displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, since 2008, when it was hit with numerous code violations, only maintenance workers and security guards have been allowed to enter. The stadium's future is not clear: Some officials are worried that demolishing it would damage the new stadium and other nearby structures.
NRG Stadium was built roughly on the site of Colt Stadium, which was the baseball team's home in their first 3 seasons, 1962, '63 and '64, when they were known as the Houston Colt .45's (spelled with the apostrophe), before moving into the dome and changing the name of the team. Astrohall, built in 1971, was torn down in 2002 to make way for parking for the new stadium (which, after all, was built on Astrodome parking).
The climate-controlled Astrodome was necessary because of not just the heat and the humidity, but because of the mosquitoes. Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers said, "Some of those mosquitoes are twin-engine jobs."
Later, seeing the artificial turf that was laid in the Astrodome for 1966 after the grass died in the first season, due to the skylights in the dome having to be painted due to the players losing the ball in the sun, Koufax said, "I was one of those guys who pitched without a cup. I wouldn't do it on this stuff. And Dick Allen of the Philadelphia Phillies, looking at the first artificial field in baseball history, said, "If a horse can't eat it, I don't want to play on it."
The Astrodome hosted a 1988 match between the national soccer teams of the U.S. and Ecuador, which Ecuador won. NRG Stadium has hosted 2 such matches, a 2008 draw with Mexico and a 2011 win over Panama. The Mexico team has made it a home-away-from-home, playing 10 matches there between 2003 and 2013. The stadium hosted the 2010 MLS All-Star Game, in which a team of MLS players lost to Manchester United.
NRG Stadium hosts the annual Texas Bowl, which more or less replaced the Bluebonnet Bowl, formerly an Astrodome fixture. It hosted the Final Four in 2011, will host it again in 2016, and will host Super Bowl LI in 2017.
The NRG complex, including the Astrodome, is at 8400 Kirby Drive at Reliant Parkway, although the stadium's official address is One Reliant Park. Reliant Park station on METRORail.
Since the Astrodome is to the east of NRG Stadium, that's the side of the stadium on which you are least likely to enter. If you come in from METRORail, you will have a half-mile walk west on Reliant Parkway, and you will most likely enter from the north gate. And I recommend METRORail, because parking is a whopping $33. Tailgating is permitted, within the rules as spelled out on the Texans' website.
Food. Being a “Wild West” city, you might expect Houston to have Western-themed stands with “real American food” at its ballpark. Being a Southern State, you might also expect to have barbecue. And you would be right on both counts.
Unfortunately, a major feature of NRG Stadium concessions is Papa John's Pizza. I understand Texas not caring that Papa John is a bastard to his employees, but they should at least care enough not to promote Peyton Manning, an AFC South Division rival quarterback!
They also have several stands each for Quizno Subs, Menchie's Frozen Yogurt, 5 Star Dogs (hot dogs), and a few other chains whose logos I can't quite make out on their map.
Team History Displays. The Texans were founded in 2002. Barring a move in the next few years, they will remain, by any way you measure it, the NFL's newest team. So there isn't much history to display: A pair of AFC South title banners, and no players even remotely good enough to get their uniform numbers retired or be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame -- not even a washed-up star returning home to close out his career.
As the NFL's newest team, books about the Texans are few and far between. Museum of Fine Harts Houston curator Anne Wilkes Tucker and legendary Houston sportswriter (first for the defunct Houston Post, now for the Chronicle) Mickey Herskowitz collaborated on First Down, Houston: The Birth of an NFL Franchise in 2002 and '03. Other than that, probably the best you can get is The Story of the Houston Texans by Gordon Pueschner, which came out in time for the 2009 season, thus missing the closest thing the Texans have yet had to "glory days."
As far team videos, you're out of luck: No Super Bowl win means no commemorative highlight video of either the game or the season; and, being a franchise whose last anniversary was their 10th, and whose greatest moment to date is a pair of wins in the Wild Card round of the Playoffs, an anniversary DVD would, for the moment, be a bit silly.
During the Game. If you were wearing Dallas Cowboy gear to a Houston Texans game, you might be in trouble. But Rockets fans aren't especially hostile to New Yorkers, so safety won't be an issue.
The Texans' mascot is Toro the Bull. The Texans hold auditions instead of having a regular National Anthem singer. Their pregame introduction song is "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC. Their theme song is "It's Football Time In Houston" by country-signing native Clay Walker, their fight song is "Battle Red," their defense's theme song is "Bulls On Parade" by Rage Against the Machine (I'll bet that leftist band goes over really well in rural Texas), and an unofficial rap song titled "Houston" was recorded by locals Slim Thug, Paul Wall and ZRo, getting over 1 million YouTube views. But the team does not appear to have a postgame victory song.
After the Game. Houston is a comparatively low-crime city, and as long as you behave yourself, the home fans will probably behave themselves, win or lose.
There's a Starbucks at NRG Center, the convention center, to the northeast of the stadium. Other than that, the closest restaurants are a Denny's at Main Street and South Loop West Freeway (the service road for Houston's beltway, Interstate 610), and, where Old Spanish Trail splits from Main Street, an Olive Garden, a Chipotle and a Sonic.
Lucky's Pub appears to be the go-to bar for New Yorkers living in the Houston area. It is at 801 St. Emanuel Street at Rusk Street, a 12-minute walk from the United Center, adjacent to BBVA Compass Stadium, the new home of MLS' Houston Dynamo.
Sidelights. Houston's sports history is pretty much wrapped up in the decaying corpse of the Astrodome, whose history I've already discussed. But there are other sites worth mentioning.
* Minute Maid Park. The new home of the Astros opened in 2000, at 501 Crawford Street, attached to Union Station. The Astros were able to play on God's own grass for the 1st time since 1965, and under God's own sky for the 1st time since 1964. They have now reached the postseason there 4 times: The 2001 National League Division Series, the 2004 NL Championship Series, the 2005 World Series, and the 2015 American League Division Series. Preston Station on METRORail.
* Site of Sam Houston Coliseum. The Houston Aeros, with Gordie Howe and his sons Mark and Marty, won the World Hockey Association championships of 1974 and 1975, while playing here, before moving into the Summit in 1975 and folding in 1978. The Beatles played there on August 19, 1965. It was built in 1937 and demolished in 1998. The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts is now on the site. 801 Bagby Street, at Rusk Street, downtown.
* TDECU Stadium and site of Jeppesen/Robertson Stadium. The Houston Oilers played at Jeppesen Stadium from 1960 to 1964. They won the 1960 AFL Championship Game there, won the 1961 title game on the road, and lost the 1962 title game there -- and, as the Oilers and the Tennessee Titans, haven't gone as far as the rules allowed them to since 1961.
Built in 1942, it became Robertson Stadium, and was the former home of the University of Houston football team and the former home of MLS' Houston Dynamo, who won the 2006 and 2007 MLS Cups while playing there. The new John O'Quinn Field at TDECU Stadium (named for Texas Dow Employees Credit Union) has been built at the site. 3874 Holman Street at Cullen Blvd. Number 52 bus.
* BBVA Compass Stadium. The new home of the Dynamo opened in 2012 at 2200 Texas Avenue at Dowling Street, within walking distance of downtown. It is also the home field of the football team at Texas Southern University. On January 29, 2013, it hosted its first U.S. national team match, a draw with Canada.
* Rice Stadium. Home of Rice University football since 1950, the Oilers played the 1965, '66 and '67 seasons here. Although probably already obsolete by the 1973 season, it seated a lot more people than did the Astrodome, and so Super Bowl VIII was played there, and the Miami Dolphins won it -- and haven't won a Super Bowl since.
It has been significantly renovated, and now seats 47,000, down from the 71,882 that crammed in for the Super Bowl on January 13, 1974. University Blvd. at Greenbriar Street, although the mailing address is 6100 S. Main Street. METRORail to Dryden/TMC, then walk or Number 084 bus.
* Site of Buffalo Stadium. Before there were the Astros, or even the Colt .45's, there were the Houston Buffaloes. The Buffs played at Buffalo Stadium, a.k.a. Buff Stadium, for most of their history, from 1928 to 1961, when the Colt .45's made them obsolete.
They were a farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals, and as a result in its last years Buff Stadium was renamed Busch Stadium. The Cardinal teams of the 1930s that would be known as the "Gashouse Gang" came together in Houston, with Dizzy and Daffy Dean, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin and Enos Slaughter. Later Buff stars included Cleveland Indians 3rd baseman Al Rosen, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Wilmer "Vinegar Bend" Mizell, Negro League legend Willard Brown, Cardinal MVP Ken Boyer, and Phillies shortstop Ruben Amaro Sr.
Wanting to lure in more customers but also to beat the infamous Houston heat, lights were installed in 1930, 5 years before any major league park had them. The Buffs won 8 Texas League Pennants: 1928, 1931, 1940, 1947, 1951, 1954, 1956 and 1957. The stadium was at the southwest corner of Leeland Street & Cullen Blvd., about 2 1/2 miles southeast of downtown. A furniture store is on the site now. Number 20 bus.
* Toyota Center. The new home of the NBA's Rockets replaced the Summit. It took 8 years from Rockets owner Les Alexander's demand for a new arena until first tipoff, in which time NBA Commissioner David Stern announced that the Rockets would have to move without a new arena (not that there was anything wrong with the Summit, aside from a low number of luxury boxes), and NHL Comissioner Gary Bettman announced that Houston would not get an NHL team. But tip off the Rockets did, on October 30, 2003.
1510 Polk Street, also bounded by Jackson, Bell and La Branch Streets. It's downtown, 5 blocks east of Main Street and the light rail, with Bell Street the closest station.
* Summit. Before the Toyota Center, the Rockets played at The Summit, later known as the Compaq Center, from 1975 to 2003. It's been converted into the Lakewood Church Central Campus, a megachurch presided over by Dr. Joel Osteen. 3700 Southwest Freeway at Timmons Lane. Number 53 bus.
Before that, between their 1971 move from San Diego and the 1975 opening of The Summit, they played some home games at the Astrodome, some at the Astrohall, some at the Sam Houston Coliseum, and some at the Hofheinz Pavilion.
There's another notable sports site in Houston: The U.S. Military Entry Processing Station, in the Customs House, where Muhammad Ali, then living and training in Houston, had to report to fulfill his draft obligation. He did report there, on April 28, 1967, and refused to be drafted. (To be fair, they did call his birth name, Cassius Clay, not his legal name, Muhammad Ali.) Ali was convicted of draft evasion and stripped of the Heavyweight Title. He stayed out of prison on appeal, and case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction.
The Customs House is still standing, and still used in part by the U.S. Department of Defense. 701 San Jacinto Street. Central Station on METRORail.
The tallest building in Houston, and in Texas, is the JPMorgan Chase Tower, formerly the Texas Commerce Tower. It was built in 1982 at 600 Travis Street at Texas Avenue, downtown, and stands 1,002 feet tall, rising 75 stories above the concrete over the bayou.
Houston's version of New York's American Museum of Natural History is the Houston Museum of Natural Science, in Hermann Park, at Main Street and Hermann Park Drive. The Sam Houston Monument is a few steps away. The Houston Museum of Fine Arts is at 1001 Bissonnet Street, just 5 blocks away. Both can be reached by the Number 700 bus.
Of course, the name "Houston" is most connected with two things: Its namesake, the legendary Senator, Governor and war hero Sam Houston; and the Johnson Space Center, the NASA control center named after President Lyndon B. Johnson, who, as Senate Majority Leader, wrote the bill creating NASA and the Space Center, because he thought it would bring a lot of jobs and money to Houston (and he was right).
Aside from his Monument, most historic sites relating to Sam are not in the city that bears his name. As for reaching the Johnson Space Center, it's at 1601 NASA Parkway and Saturn Lane. The Number 249 bus goes there, so if you don't have a car, Houston, you won't have a problem.
Although Houston is the post-Presidential home for George H.W. and Barbara Bush, his Presidential Library is at Texas A&M University, 100 miles away in College Station.
There have been a few TV shows set in Houston, but the only one that lasted was Reba, starring country singer Reba McIntire. But it was filmed in Los Angeles, so if you're a fan, you won't find the house in Houston. Films set in Houston, in addition to the sports-themed ones, include Brewster McCloud (which also used the Astrodome), Logan's Run (which used the Houston Hyatt Regency for some scenes), Telefon (set there but filmed in California), Terms of Endearment, Reality Bites, and, perhaps most iconically, Urban Cowboy.
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Houston can be hot, but it's a good sports town, and, best of all, it's not Dallas. So there can be a good old time in the hot town tonight.