Just as New Orleans hit upon jazz, the only unique American contribution to art, and hit upon it almost by accident and despite itself, it could also hit upon the way out of the hell which has overtaken the American city.
—Novelist Walker Percy, in Harper's, 1968
New Orleans may just be doing that today. Its hopes of a renaissance-on-the-Mississippi rest heavily on a single building. That is, the Louisiana Superdome, the arena for the Super Bowl clash between Dallas and Denver. It has been called, variously and hyperbolically, the eighth wonder of the world, the most usable public facility ever designed, the structure that will make all other existing stadiums as obsolete as Rome's Colosseum. It is, claim Orleanians, "the domedest thing you ever saw," "the classiest sportin' house in the world" and "the Miracle on Poydras Street."
Mushrooming 273 ft. into the skyline, sited in 52 acres of the central business district, the copper-toned Superdome looks like a happily defected UFO, or—more to Orleanians' tastes—a gargantuan cheese souffle. Inside, despite a decidedly sublunary decor, the building is a mechanical marvel, capable of seating in air-conditioned comfort the entire populations of Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco, with room left over for a couple of football teams, four trade exhibitions, a dog show and a few hundred ushers, guards and food vendors. Or, as Orleanians never fail to point out, it could swallow Houston's Astrodome with hardly a burp.
The building could fill a page in The Guinness Book of World Records. The largest enclosed stadium in the world, it boasts a 9.7-acre roof, 9,000 tons of air conditioning, 32 escalators, ten elevators and 88 rest rooms. It has served more sit-down dinners in one place than any other caravansary in history: 65,000 meals in three days (Creole chicken, stuffed flounder and meat loaf) to the Lutheran Youth Gathering in August 1976. It has the world's largest roll-up rug, a 126,85 l-sq.-ft., zippered greensward of AstroTurf that the locals fondly call Mardi Grass. Also the biggest set of TV tubes: six superscreens, each 22 ft. wide by 26 ft. high, suspended from a 75-ton gondola, which afford the farthest-out viewer in the cheapest, loftiest seat a closeup of a cheerleader or an instant replay of a football fumble.
The elliptically shaped main arena (known as a "squircle") can be switched from a football stadium that can seat 76,791 Super Bowl fans to a compact configuration for 20,000 basketball rooters. Automated bleachers move on rails from the east side of the dome toward the permanently anchored stands on the west side, while other stands move in from either end to surround the basketball court, bringing the closest seat to within 9 ft. of the action.
Thus, like Alice in a concrete Wonderland, the squircle can grow or shrink to accommodate such varied attractions as the circus, opera, ice shows, rock concerts, religious rallies and national conventions.
Last year the biggest-ever Lions International convention in the U.S. brought more than 40,000 people to the dome for five days. Even when it was not in use, guided tours of the megastructure packed in 200,000 visitors last year at $2.50 a head. The building's varied facilities lured 73,350 convention delegates to New Orleans.