Auditoriums and Arenas

August 20, 2015 (Thursday)
The first concert by a symphony orchestra that I attended was shortly after World War 2, when our music class at school went to it as a group. The orchestra performed “Peter and the Wolf” and the members demonstrated their instruments for us. The concert took place in the old City Auditorium in Houston. It’s gone now, and Jones Hall, a large and beautiful home for the orchestra, is there in its place. A magnificent theater district, complete with many new buildings, occupies 17 square blocks downtown. The old Music Hall and Coliseum are also long gone, but Houston has more than its share of huge halls for all sorts of performances.

Jones Hall

I attended a convention in the George Brown Convention Center, which features a room so huge in size that one could get lost in there. Nearby is the big Toyota Center, where the Rockets play basketball, but also where famous musicians regularly perform. My grandparents used to live in a former residential area of historic three-story homes nearby. That area is now known as Discovery Green, near both arenas.
Just a few blocks away is Minute Maid Park, where the Astros play baseball, and a similar but larger place, now known as NRG Stadium, hosts the Texans for football. The old building where the Rockets used to play was named, The Summit, and later The Compaq Center, but is now known as the “Lakewood Church Central Campus.” The gigantic Astrodome, once the 8th Wonder of the World, sits vacant and idle–a spare stadium, if you will.
My old home town has changed much from the days when I attended roller derbies, rodeos and, later, conventions and a Billy Graham crusade in the Houston Coliseum, and went to boxing matches and wrestling contests in the old City Auditorium (at right) where I had gone to the concert mentioned above.
I have not kept up with Houston’s changes, so I have not named other huge buildings in town that serve similar purposes. I memorized Houston’s population during school days as 250,000 back then. The Metropolitan Area now exceeds 6,000,000 (and every one of those people is driving a car on the freeway as I write this–just joking, I think). Population of the U.S.A. back then was 131,000,000 but now is around 350,000,000.
There have been many changes in this old world during the nearly 84 years since I made my debut on Davis Street in Houston’s old North Side. That was a different world and a former life because God sent me to Rockport almost 51 years ago and I suppose he wanted me to stay here in Paradise, because I’m still here, enjoying every day.