Branford Marsalis has traveled the world over, but one trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the bandleader on “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited on a local talk show that was being broadcast from the Superdome.
Marsalis, now 64, knew the building well. An avid sports and music fan, he saw many Saints football and Jazz basketball games there, as well as concerts and other events. He also sold programs at Saints games. The joy of those days hit him when he walked into the stadium.
“As soon as I saw the field, I got overcome with all this emotion and reflexively bought season tickets,” Marsalis said. “Back when it opened, there were very few domed stadiums, and none of them looked as good as this one. It was a great place to be.”
Marsalis couldn’t use his season tickets because he was living in California, so he gave them to 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 a hold on him and many others with connections to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
For the past half century, the Superdome has been best known as a sports venue. It is the home of the Saints, and also a host for Super Bowls, Final Fours, title bouts and other sports including high school and college football, baseball and soccer. Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl there, and it was where a freshman named Michael Jordan made a jump shot that clinched a national title for the North Carolina men’s basketball team.
But the Superdome, with its distinctive top, covers more than 13 acres and has a quarter million square feet of space that has been used for conventions, weddings, proms and hundreds of other events. The building has welcomed Mardi Gras parades, graduations, the Republican National Convention and Pope John Paul II. In the words of Doug Thornton, its longtime manager, the Superdome is “the city’s living room.”
“This is a civic monument that was built in the era of city monuments,” said Evan Holmes, Thornton’s deputy who manages the Superdome and the Smoothie King Center next door for the Louisiana Stadium & Exposition District. “There’s a sense of place, a sense of pride. This is a local venue as much as a national venue.”
On Sunday, the Superdome will transform into an international venue when it hosts its record eighth Super Bowl, providing the backdrop when a global audience tunes in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play the Philadelphia Eagles. The building will look different than it did during its last Super Bowl in 2013, when half the stadium lights went dark during the third quarter, leading to a 34-minute stoppage. Over the past five years, the building has undergone a $560 million renovation to add wider concourses, new escalators, better kitchens and suites, and more natural light.
It was the latest makeover of a building that is inextricably linked to the arrival of the Saints in 1967, and the ambitions of a city that was eager to no longer be dismissed as colorfully antiquated. The Superdome was one of the first major buildings constructed in New Orleans in the post-Jim Crow era, and played a central role in the city’s life.
With its size and Space Age look, the Superdome dominates the skyline and is a beacon to travelers flying or driving into the city. Yet its curved white roof and champagne bronze exterior look little like the pastel-colored town homes that are the city’s signature.
The building was designed to impress. Dave Dixon, a businessman who spearheaded the city’s effort to land a pro football team in the 1960s, wanted a stadium that would hold events but also lift New Orleans out of the shadow of Atlanta, Houston and other larger Southern cities.
Unlike most stadiums of the era, it was built on one of the city’s main thoroughfares, a short walk from hotels, restaurants and bars, and near a former cemetery, which led to rumors the Saints were hexed.
Dixon lobbied Pete Rozelle, then the commissioner of the N.F.L., for a new team. In 1966, when the league needed an antitrust exemption to merge with the A.F.L., Dixon enlisted Representative Hale Boggs, the House majority whip, and Senator Russell Long, both from Louisiana, who helped get legislation passed. In a thinly veiled quid pro quo, New Orleans was granted a franchise on All Saints’ Day around the same time and began play in 1967 in Tulane Stadium.
Dixon and John McKeithen, the state’s governor, quickly got to work on a stadium. They toured the Astrodome in Houston and left determined to build something larger and more versatile.
The goal was to open the Superdome for the 1972 N.F.L. season, but construction, paid for with bonds backed by hotel taxes, didn’t begin until 1971. The stadium opened in August 1975, too late to host Super Bowl IX, which the N.F.L. moved to Tulane. The cost quadrupled to $163 million and included Mardi Grass, an artificial turf.
Two million square feet inside, the stadium was an instant attraction, with 200,000 people a year taking tours. Liz Broekman remembered her family’s bringing relatives from Chicago to see the stadium. As a teenager, she went to a school dance at the Superdome, and later attended the Endymion Extravaganza, an all-night party during Mardi Gras.
Now a Saints season-ticket holder, she and two friends formed the “Super Dames,” who wear black dresses, gold capes and replica Superdomes as hats to games.
“The dome is part of us, it’s part of our identity,” she said. “When you’re in Chicago, you see the Sears Tower. When you’re in New Orleans, you see the Superdome.”
The Saints were dreadful in their early years, and moving to the Superdome changed little. But the building became a home to the Romig family. Jerry Romig worked as the public address announcer for 446 consecutive Saints games until 2013, when his son Mark took over. His other son, Jay, has been the timekeeper, and one of his daughters, Mary Beth Haskins, has worked as the spotter, helping Mark identify players whose names he needs to announce.
The team hit bottom in 1980 when it finished 1-15 and fans wore paper bags over their heads. Archie Manning was the quarterback on that team, which was booed so mercilessly that his wife, Olivia, stopped taking their sons Cooper and Peyton to games. Both of them later played high school football games there.
“There was great anticipation watching this big thing going up right downtown,” Archie Manning said. But “I never got into that there was a curse, or some voodoo thing on the team.”
Despite the Saints’ losing, the team attracted fans from across the Gulf Coast, and New Orleans became a frequent host for the Super Bowl because it was compact, teeming with bars and restaurants, and over time had enough convention space and hotel rooms.
“The Super Bowl grew up with the city,” said Jim Steeg, who ran the Super Bowl for the N.F.L. from 1979 to 2005. “New Orleans was what every other city wanted, to create a place to party on Bourbon Street.”
The Superdome hosted the first indoor Super Bowl in 1978, and it was the first venue to include suites. New Orleans also hosted the first Super Bowl after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The season was delayed one week, forcing the league to spend millions of dollars to buy out conventions and weddings that were already scheduled.
Steeg said, though, that New Orleans was one of the few cities that could accommodate the extra planning needed for that Super Bowl because the league had to deal only with a coterie of local politicians and departments. “There was a lot of continuity there and people who could help you get things done,” he said.
Outside of the game, that Super Bowl is best known for U2’s halftime show and Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, declaring, “We are all Patriots” after his team beat the St. Louis Rams for its first title.
But the Superdome, a quarter-century old then, no longer had the revenue-generating amenities newer stadiums featured. Tom Benson, who owned the Saints, explored alternatives, including moving the team to Mississippi. The state and the team ultimately chose to renovate the Superdome, and the plans were largely finished when Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the city in 2005.
With New Orleans flooded, the Superdome, with a large hole in its roof, became a refuge for tens of thousands of people. The Saints decamped to San Antonio, where they played three home games, and four more at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Benson wanted to permanently move the team to Texas, but Paul Tagliabue, the league’s commissioner, refused to abandon the city. Local business leaders worried that if the Superdome went dark, the city would look as if it had shut down, which would hurt tourism.
In December 2005, Tagliabue visited New Orleans and promised N.F.L. support to fix the Superdome in time for the 2006 season.
“As horrible as Katrina was, and it was horrible, horrible, horrible, if there was a silver lining, it made us focus on building,” the Saints team president, Dennis Lauscha, said.
Tagliabue dispatched Frank Vuono, a former league executive, to sell tickets, suites and sponsorships.
“It was like mission impossible,” Vuono said. “I pitched it as American companies trying to save an American city.”
In the opening minutes of the Saints’ return to the Superdome, defensive back Steve Gleason blocked an Atlanta Falcons punt that was recovered for a touchdown, the first score in a lopsided win. Fans inside and outside hugged and cried. The team, the stadium and the city were back.
On Sunday, when fans file into the Super Bowl, many of them will pass a statue outside the building commemorating Gleason’s play, another moment when the Superdome helped remind the world of New Orleans’s resilience.
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