Hosting Its Next Super Bowl, New Orleans’s Superdome Is Turning 50

Branford Marsalis has traveled worldwide, but a trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the band leader in “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited in a local interview program that was being transmitted from the Super Dome.

Marsalis, now 64, knew the building well. An avid fan of sports and music, saw many soccer and jazz basketball games of Saints there, as well as concerts and other events. Hi, they also sold programs at Saints Games. The joy of those days hit him when he entered the stage.

“As soon as I saw the countryside, I overcome with all this emotion and I reflexively bought seasonal tickets,” Marsalis said. “When it opened, there were very few stadiums, and none of them looked as well as this. It was a great place to be.”

Marsalis could not use his seasonal tickets because he lived in California, so cooling them for his brother and bandmates. But his impulse purchase was a reminder of how the building, which turns 50 this year, and what it represents still has control over it and many others with connections with New Orleans and the Gulf coast.

During the last half century, the Super Dome Hasb leg better known as a sports place. It is the home of the Saints, and also a host of Super Bowls, Final Fours, Pits Bouts and other sports, including secondary football and university football, baseball and football. Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl there, and it was where a first -year student named Michael Jordan shot a national title for the North Carolina Male Basketball team.

But the Superdome, with its distinctive upper part, covers more than 13 acres and has a quarter of a million square feet or space that has been used for conventions, weddings, graduation and one hundred events. The building has received parades from Mardi Gras, Graduations, the Republican National Convention and Pope John Paul II. In the words of Doug Thornton, its manager for a long time, the Superdome is “the city’s living room.”

“This is a civic monument that was built in the era of the city monuments,” said Evan Holmes, deputy of Thornton, who manages the center of Superdome and Smoothie King below for the stadium district and exhibition of Louisiana. “There is a sense of the place, a sense of pride. This is a local place as much as a national place.”

On Sunday, the Superdome will become an international place when it is the host of its eighth super bowl record, providing the backdrop when a global audience tune in to see Kansas City chiefs play in the Philadelphia Eagles. The building will look different from what its last Super Bowl lasted in 2013, when half of the stadium lights lasted the duration of the third quarter, which led to a 34 -minute strike. In the last five years, the building has undergone a renewal of $ 560 million to add wider competitions, new mechanical stairs, better kitchens and suites, and more natural light.

It was the last image change of an inextricious building linked to the arrival of the saints in 1967, and the ambitions of a city that was anxious not to be discarded as an outdated color. The Superdome was one of the first main buildings built in New Orleans in the era after Jim Crow, and played a central role in the life of the city.

With its size and space age, the Superdome dominates the horizon and is a lighthouse for travelers flying or leading to the city. However, its curved white roof and its champagne bronze exterior look little like the houses of the city of pastel color that are the signature of the city.

The building was designed by Curtis and Davis, a local architecture firm, and destined to impress. Dave Dixon, a businessman who headed the city’s effort to get a professional football team in the 1960s, wanted a stadium to celebrate events but also took New Orleans out of the shadow of Atlanta, Houston and other larger southern cities.

Unlike most of the stadiums of the time, one of the main roads of the city was built, in the short term of hotels, restaurants and bars, and near an old cemetery, which led to rumors that the saints had Hex.

Dixon pressed Pete Rozelle, then NFL commissioner, for a new team. In 1966, when the League needed an antitrust exemption to merge with the AFL, Dixon enlisted the representative Hale Boggs, the majority of the House of Representatives and Senator Russell Long, both of Louisiana, who helped approve the legislation. In a Quid Pro Quo, New Orleans, awarded a franchise on All Saints’ Day at the same time and began playing in 1967 he was in a tulane stadium.

Dixon and John Mckeithen, the state governor, quickly put themselves to work in a stadium. They toured the astrodome in Houston and were decided to build something bigger and more versatile.

The objective was to open the Super Dome for the 1972 NFL season, but the construction, paid with bonds supported by hotel taxes, did not begin until 1971. The stadium opened in August 1975, too late, the Super Bowl IX, which NFL moved to Tulane. The cost quadrupled to $ 163 million and included Mardi Grass, an artificial grass.

Two million square feet inside, the stadium was an instant attraction, with 20000 people a year doing tours. Liz Breekman recalled that his family brought relatives of Chicago to see the stadium. When she was a teenager, she is accustomed to a school dance in the Superdome, and then attended Endymion’s extravaganza, a duration of the night over the entire Mardi Gras all night.

Now, head of the Saints season, she and two friends formed “Super Ladies”, which use black poses, gold layers and super dormal replica as hats for games.

“The dome is part of us, it is part of our identity,” he said. “When you are in Chicago, you see the Sears tower. When you are in New Orleans, you see the Super Dome.”

The Saints were terrible in their early years, and moving to the Superdome changed little. But the building became a home from the Romig family. Jerry Romig worked as a public management announcer for 446 consecutive Saints games until 2013, when his son Mark Tok surpassed. His other son, Jay, has been the timer, and one of his daughters, Mary Beth Haskins, has worked as an observer, helping Mark identify the players whose names he needs to announce.

The team hit the background in 1980 when it ended 1-15 and fans wore paper bags on their heads. Archie Manning was the field marshal in that team, who was so merciless that his wife, Olivia, stopped taking his children Cooper and Peyton to the games. Later, both played high school soccer games there.

“There was a great anticipation to see this big thing up in the center,” said Archie Manning. But “I never got into that, there was a curse, or some voodoo in the team.”

Despite the loss of the Saints, the team attracted fans of the Gulf coast, and New Orleans became a frequent host for the Super Bowl because it was compact, full of bars and restaurants, and over time it had space for conventions and hotel rooms.

“The Super Bowl grew with the city,” said Jim Steeg, who directed the Super Bowl for the NFL from 1979 to 2005. “New Orleans was what all the other city wanted, to create a place to celebrate in Bourbon Street.”

The Superdome organized the first Super Bowl Interior in 1978, and was the first place to include suites. New Orleans also organized the first Super Bowl after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The season was delayed a week, forcing the league to spend millions of dollars to buy conventions and weddings that were already scheduled.

Steeg said, he thought, that New Orleans was one of the few cities that could accommodate the additional planning necessary for that Super Bowl because the League had to deal only with a clique of politicians and local departments. “There was a lot of continuity there and people who could help you do things,” he said.

Outside the game, that Super Bowl is quite known to the mid -time show of U2 and Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England patriots, stating: “We are all Patriots” after his team beat the St. Louis Rams for his first title.

But the Superdome, of a quarter of a century, no longer had the comforts of generating Dut Stadium income. Tom Benson, owner of the Saints, explored alternatives, including the transfer of the team to Mississippi. The state and team finally chose to renew the Superdome, and the plans were largely finished when Hurricane Katrina beat the city in 2005.

With New Orleans flooded, the Superdome, with a large hole in the ceiling, became a shelter for tens of thousands of people. The Saints faded San Antonio, where three games play at home, and four more at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Benson wanted to permanently transfer the team to Texas, but Paul Tagliabue, the league commissioner, refused to leave the city. Local business leaders worried that if the Superdome darkened, the city seemed to have closed, which would damage tourism.

In December 2005, Tagliabue visited New Orleans and promised NFL support to fix the Superdome in time for the 2006 season.

“As horrible as Katrina went, and it was horrible, horrible, horrible, if there was a positive side, we made us focus on construction,” said the president of the Saints team, Dennis Lauscha.

Tagliabue sent Frank Vuono, a former league executive, to sell tickets, suites and sponsorships.

“It was like the impossible mission,” Vuono said. “I launched it as US companies that tried to save an American city.”

In the first minutes of the return of the Saints to the Superdome, the defensive Steve Gleason blocked a point of the Atlanta Falcons that was recovered for a touchdown, the first score in an unequal victory. Fans inside and out hugged and cried. The team, the stadium and the city were back.

On Sunday, when fans are in the Super Bowl, many of them will spend a statue outside the building that commemorates the Gleason game, another time when Super Dome helped to remind the world the resistance of Nueva Orleans.