Superdome has come a long way in a year.
What a make over the Superdome has gone through in just over a year since Katrina tore through the area. Its going to be interesting to see how the Saints come out and play here on Monday night.
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The atmosphere on Monday night is going to be beyond electric.Comment -
$185 Million in repairs and improvements.Comment -
that really is amazing...I just hope that it's not all in vein as it's a tough place to have a major sports arena/ stadium due to the proximity to the ocean...Comment -
Does anyone know of anyone is in protest to this? Because them spending $185 million on a event complex and not using some of that on the surrounding areas? Im not sure on their rebuilding efforts in the area.Comment -
I think most of the tourists end up footing the bill in hotel taxes and all...that's how they do it in a lot of city's so they don't piss off the local taxpayers...Comment -
Amazed they could sell out the whole season. Thought there was no way.Comment -
Should be one of the most emotional Monday Night games ever, I love Saints here.Comment -
I'm glad to see New Orleans is finally able to go back home again, and play in front of there fans. Who really knows how good this team is, because I can't really base a lot from last years team/schedule due to the conditions.Comment -
on a side note, does anyone know if Tulane will be playing their home game this upcoming Saturday at the Superdome?...I'm assuming so, but wanted to make sure...Comment -
No kidding, where are they coming from? Either way it's a great story and a game I am looking forward to.Originally posted by lakerfanComment -
Football is little like religion and for some even gambling I guess. You spend on that even when you are cash strapped in other areas.Comment -
Saints Bring Hope to the Faithful
New Orleans Geared Up for NFL Home Opener
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 24, 2006; Page E01
NEW ORLEANS -- On the night Katrina left, the Industrial Canal rolled down Rosemont Place and began the process of taking Gilbert Haynes's home. It started with the floors, the cabinets, the chairs and tables, then the murky water began its ascent up the attic stairs where Gilbert and his wife, Voynn, huddled with her ailing mother, praying the flood would not swallow them, too.
And yet they came back to the red brick house in New Orleans East, despite no flood insurance and little money from the government, because this was home. It was all they knew. They organized the rebuilding themselves, with Haynes calling the contractors every night when he came home from his job as a truck driver.
Only now, nearly 13 months after the storm, have they been able to move out of the FEMA trailer in their front yard and sleep in their house. But they still don't have a front door, new windows or running water. Each time they want to shower, eat a meal or go to the bathroom they still have to step back into that dreaded white trailer.
"Every day you feel like giving up but you can't give up," Gilbert Haynes says. "You've got to keep going."
So it might seem strange that in the most agonizing year of his life, with almost every penny to his name going into a house that lacks a front door, Gilbert Haynes did something he had never done. He bought a set of New Orleans Saints season tickets.
To wonder why Haynes would spend $320 on professional football tickets at a time like this is to not understand the soul of the broken city.
"This football team has become an inspiration for this city," says Alexander Kalogeropoulos, a UPS driver who lives in nearby Metairie and also lost his house in the hurricane. "Without them, we would be reduced to jazz and drinking and food."
Monday night, the Saints will play their first game here since Hurricane Katrina, a return that seemed impossible to imagine in those initial days after the storm when evacuees filled the Superdome's aisles and concourses, a symbol of the city's collapse. To many here where Katrina still dominates the daily conversations, this game against the Atlanta Falcons is the seminal event in the city's recovery, a gesture that New Orleans might survive after all.
Businesses have been asked to close at 3 p.m., workers are encouraged to wear black and gold. There will be a downtown party that will shut down many of the same streets that were closed for a very different reason in the last days of August 2005.
The Saints have always had a peculiar place in New Orleans's heart. With just one playoff victory in 39 years, the team has teased the people here with perpetual promise, leading them to twirl parasols, scrawl "Aints" on paper bags that they pulled over their heads and know the annual taste of hopes destroyed.
But perhaps not this season. The Saints -- with a new coach, new quarterback and the No. 2 overall selection in this year's draft, running back Reggie Bush -- are 2-0, giving hope at a time when hope is a rare commodity.
"I can see how a lot of people would spend a FEMA check on the Saints, they love the Saints here," says Joe Horn, a Saints wide receiver. "People eat, breathe and sleep the Saints."
So much so that in the city's worst year, with lives ruined and money scarce, the Saints still managed to do something unprecedented: They sold out every game in the 68,354-seat Superdome -- with every one of those seats a season ticket.
The Saints, who dropped many of their ticket prices this season, don't know how many of the fans who will be in the stands on Monday night lost their homes. They assume many, maybe even most, of the ticket holders are like Kalogeropoulos and Haynes. But it didn't seem an appropriate question for sales agents to ask when they were on the phone with prospective buyers.
"You know what they talk about? They talk about how this is a couple of hours a weekend that they get to go to the game," says Mike Stanfield, the Saints' vice president of ticket and suite sales. "It's a release; what are people looking forward to? What's fun for them to do?"
In Louisiana lately, not much.
Vickie Walters lost her home in Metairie when the water gushed over the sides of a nearby canal. And while she and her husband, Freddy, were insured and can afford to rebuild, the emotions of the last year have beaten her down. She spent the first six months after Katrina across Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville, weeping for much of each day.
"If you go down Canal Street from Carrolton towards downtown and look left and right you see all the places boarded up, it's just frustrating," she says over the phone, her voice beginning to crack. "You just get sick to your stomach. It chokes you up. It's a beautiful city. It makes you so sad."
Her salvation has been the Saints. There is an almost ecumenical devotion here to the local football team. In recent years, its slogans have been single words like "Believe" and "Faith." Several cars are still driving around the city with black and gold "Faith" stickers affixed to their bumpers, symbols that have taken on a double meaning in the year after Katrina.
"It's the thing you have that becomes that bright spot," Walters says. "You have a dreary life right now. You have lost your house, but you still have faith. You want to be in that number."
The final line, "When the saints go marching in," was left unspoken.
Walters takes solace in the fact the team's fleur-de-lis insignia has become something of the symbol for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Every day as she gets dressed, she puts on a piece of fleur-de-lis jewelry. Her favorite is a pin.
And so when the renewal form came for the $85 seats she and Freddy have at the Superdome, her husband didn't hesitate to send in the check.
"I don't know if it was a financial burden for us or not," she says. "If it was he wouldn't tell me. He knows how much it means to me."
Everyone here has a story, a narrow escape, a night they will never forget. The Hayneses were able to take a boat to a nearby highway, where they flagged down a truck and caught a ride to the Convention Center. There they starved and baked for four days until Gilbert came across a man who had been given a semi-trailer by the police but didn't know how to drive it. Gilbert jumped in the cab and took his wife, mother-in-law and 60 other people to Baton Rouge before eventually evacuating to Houston.
His mother-in-law, who had just had her hip replaced before the ordeal, died there this summer in a nursing home. She never got to see her home in New Orleans again.
"I got to the point where I got so stressed, sometimes I don't want to get out of bed," Gilbert Haynes says.
Kalogeropoulos spent the storm trying to salvage his collections of memorabilia, including an album of famed local trumpeter Al Hirt playing "When the Saints Go Marching In." He carried boxes between the basement that was flooding and the attic, where the roof eventually blew off.
"Once you get that hole in your roof, it changes the whole momentum," he says. "It pushes on the doors. The attic door was the next to go. It blew open a bedroom door I pried with a ladder. It took the ladder and the door."
His wife and five daughters, aged 13 to 21, didn't say a word when he bought Saints tickets for $250, perhaps because they knew how close the team came to not returning.
Saints owner Tom Benson, who was already unhappy with the Superdome before Katrina, took the team to his home town of San Antonio after the facility was deemed unusable. Benson found the Alamodome to be ideal, although the uprooted Saints managed to win only three games all season. With at least some prodding from the NFL, Benson decided to bring the team back.
With the euphoria of that return also came a sense of duty: If the Saints were going to take a chance on New Orleans, then the people of New Orleans had to take a chance on the Saints.
"It was good for the economy of the city that they came back," Haynes says. "We need them. We can't lose them."
Monday, New Orleans will have them. The band U2 will be here, as will the cameras of "Monday Night Football." The country will be watching. And maybe if everyone listens closely, they will hear Al Hirt in that number, when the saints go marching in.
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I heard on the radio all ticket were sold out for the season too season ticket holder. That is amazing.
NostComment -
anyone with info. as to whether or not Tulane will play at the Superdome this Saturday or not?...Comment -
outstanding...thanks onlooker...QB Ricard got hurt in their last game, got to check his status for this one...Comment
