Caesars Superdome: The Building That Became a City

The dome opened on August third, nineteen seventy-five, and it was immediately the largest enclosed arena in the world: thirteen acres under one roof, twenty-seven stories tall, seventy thousand seats arranged across three tiers. The Louisiana Superdome, as it was then called, was built to signal that New Orleans was a major-league city, and it delivered on that promise almost at once.

The New Orleans Saints had been playing in other venues since the NFL granted them an expansion franchise in nineteen sixty-seven. They moved into the Superdome for the nineteen seventy-five season, losing their first home game there to the Cincinnati Bengals on September twenty-eighth. The Saints would go on to lose for many years after that. For three decades they were something of a civic tragedy, a franchise that seemed to absorb the city's love without ever giving back a championship. Their fans wore paper bags over their heads. They were the Aints.

Then came August twenty-ninth, two thousand five. Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the federal levee system catastrophically failed, and more than thirty thousand people who had been unable to evacuate took shelter in the Superdome. The images that emerged from those days were among the most disturbing in modern American history: tens of thousands of people without food, water, or power in a building that sustained more than one hundred eighty-five million dollars in damage, with bodies on the streets outside and no help arriving for days.

The Saints played the entire two thousand five season away from New Orleans. When they returned on September twenty-fifth, two thousand six, for a Monday Night Football game against the Atlanta Falcons, the Superdome had been rebuilt. The first defensive play of that game produced a blocked punt that safety Steve Gleason returned for a touchdown, and the crowd of seventy thousand people made a sound that the building probably still remembers.

Four years later, the Saints won Super Bowl Forty-Four, defeating the Indianapolis Colts thirty-one to seventeen in a game watched by over one hundred fifty-three million Americans, the most-watched broadcast in television history at the time. The building that had been the site of catastrophe had become the launching pad for one of the most emotionally resonant championship runs in American sports history. The city carried both memories and was not required to choose between them.