A Brand-New Map Without Us

Jack Lubin reports from Super Bowl week in New Orleans.

By Jack LubinFebruary 23, 2025

• Sports

• Politics

IF YOU DRIVE a straight shot east on Interstate 10 from Louis Armstrong International Airport, you will arrive at Caesars Superdome; if you look to your left once the Superdome has fully risen on the horizon, you will see the Orleans Justice Center. At the moment that Super Bowl LIX kicked off, roughly 1,495 New Orleanians were being forced to live inside of the euphemistically named parish prison. About 97 percent of these caged individuals awaited trials for crimes for which, in the eyes of the law, they remained innocent. Eighty-eight percent of these caged individuals were Black. On Super Bowl Sunday, the Orleans Justice Center housed about 250 people more than its city-mandated population cap, a statistic made unexceptional by the fact that the prison population has exceeded its cap every day for the last nine months. In the less than one year since Republican governor Jeff Landry rolled back Louisiana’s substantive criminal justice reforms in a hurried “special session on crime,” the number of people caged in the prison one mile from the Superdome has increased by 25 percent.

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The first difference between Super Bowl week and any other is the sound of helicopters. At times, the noise is deafening; choppers seem to fly low enough to graze the city’s few skyscrapers. They make sweeps of the city to scan for nuclear radiation. The last such flyovers took place in 2013, ahead of that year’s Super Bowl. That go-around, the helicopters detected radiation from radium at 100 times the normal level in Gert Town, the 80 percent Black neighborhood in walking distance of the Superdome. Six years later, residents were informed of these radiation levels for the first time via leaflet.

The second difference is the traffic, which chokes the city at levels unseen outside of the peak of Mardi Gras season. The pre–Super Bowl traffic is less the result of more cars on the road than it is a by-product of the city’s heightened infrastructural idiosyncrasies. To quote an anonymous leader of the “mad dash” to properly pave New Orleans’s streets ahead of the Super Bowl, as Sisyphean a mandate as humanly imaginable: “We’re doing 10 years of deferred maintenance in six months—it’s crazy.” The city’s roads are almost constitutionally potholed; turning onto a road to find unpaved sand is an altogether not uncommon experience. Outside of the city’s marquee hospital, a dense cloud of steam billows like Once Upon a Time in America’s allegorical opium den. Super Bowl traffic, then, is largely a phenomenon of its own making: congestion not from vehicular traffic but from repair crews attempting to pave an entire city for important travelers from out of town. But roads close for more frivolous reasons too. On Thursday, the street outside of a local coffee shop is closed so that Toyota can film a commercial, as if they’d procrastinated the biggest assignment of the year. The gym parking lot, alongside the entire thoroughfare it abuts, is converted into a series of tents labeled “NFL Honors,” within which a crew will ferry to and from the next-door Saenger Theater where anti-hate activist Snoop Dogg will present the league’s MVP award. The city is simultaneously beautified and walled off for outside corporations and their VIP lists; the two most common refrains from the week are “excuse me, you can’t walk here” and “I love New Orleans.”

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The late Fredric Jameson theorized that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. A corollary: It is easier to imagine the end of the United States of America than the end of the National Football League. For a week, the city is remade in the image of the NFL, which is to say it becomes a canvas for advertisement. In the Mississippi River, an orange Cheetos riverboat—Cheese of the Seas—floats alongside the Steamboat Natchez and the Algiers Ferry. Cracker Barrel has unleashed a scooting, Roomba-like robot that, if stopped, will dispense cheese. Marriott Bonvoy hosts a Jason Kelce look-alike contest; the first Bonvoy member to correctly identify Kelce among the throng of burly men wins Super Bowl tickets at a 50-yard-line suite. Doritos commissions a tattoo artist on the Riverwalk. Traffic on my street is shut down for the “GQ Bowl,” at which Bode will debut its Spring 2025 line. Cybertrucks are spotted bearing advertisements for Crescent 9 THC Seltzer and the Cameo app. Outside Complex’s Family Style Food Festival idles an ice cream truck advertising the Colin Kaepernick Ben & Jerry’s collaboration. Yard signs in the “we buy diabetic test strips” mold read: “WE BUY AND SELL Super Bowl Tickets.” In 2019, a yet-unfinished Hard Rock Hotel collapsed on Canal Street, killing three construction workers and injuring more than 30 people. Six years later, the lot is still vacant, strewn with rubble. For a week, the metal fences delimiting the lot’s boundary are adorned with the official pink-and-green Super Bowl LIX wrap.

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In April 2024, Palestinian solidarity encampments in Jackson Square were broken up by a series of arrests and prosecutions. On Saturday, Jackson Square is full of Philadelphia Eagles fans with granulated sugar on their chests. On one side of the square, the sparsely attended Super Bowl parade rolls down Decatur, where out-of-towners throw beads carelessly from the Kansas City Chiefs float. In a city whose primary political configuration is the parade, this particular effort feels like a commercial being played with the volume off. The Verizon, Tostitos, and CBS Sports floats follow one another in rapid succession; the Krewe of Blue Plate Mayonnaise is relegated to foot patrol. On the other side of Jackson Square, a group of anti-circumcision protestors tout signs in silence. The men, who wear white jumpsuits with stylized bloodstains at their crotches, share their materials with anybody who will stop to take a photograph. I am handed a sign that reads “Nobody wants less penis” as the ringleader shows my friend his “male genital mutilation survivor” tattoo.

The French Quarter is as unevenly distributed as it’s ever been; the neighborhood, which roughly shapes New Orleans in the popular imagination and in turn is shaped by top-down attempts to meet the public imagination, is a dense knot of bodies on one block and utterly abandoned on the next. Its roads are incongruously, newly paved. One senses a distinct soullessness, a haunting. The most crowded I see Bourbon Street with my eyes over the weekend is when roughly 30 people, most of them NFL on Fox employees, scurry around an announcers’ booth set up, somehow, in the heart of the street’s busiest intersection. It’s a hot day, and Rob Gronkowski looks so hungover that I feel physically pained. The most crowded I see Bourbon Street on my phone is a proto-crowd-crush throng of mostly backward-hat-wearing dudes attending a live back-to-back DJ set from men named “Dom Dolla” and “John Summit.” Elsewhere in the city, Zach Bryan and apparently uncanceled comedian Shane Gillis do a surprise show at Saturn Bar, a Bywater joint with balconies that wobble on its quietest nights. The city becomes a rolling sponsored pop-up, momentarily shifting nightlife’s center of gravity away from guys who look like Post Malone and toward, well, Post Malone.

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For both city and state officials, the success of Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans has been the sine qua non of the last half decade of governance. Perceived rises in crime rates were used as cudgels to suggest a city in crisis, unfit for hosting such an esteemed event. The state spent $21 million affixing the Crescent City Connection, the bridge running across the Mississippi River, with programmable string lights ahead of the game. Greater New Orleans, Inc., the “private economic development agency” allotted $80 million in government funding to beautify the city ahead of the Super Bowl, spent its money dousing the French Quarter in the same lemon scent that IV Waste last used in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. To live in New Orleans is to expect your life to be improved through governance only when such improvement might come as a by-product of quixotic efforts to become the platonic host city.

And so it was not without significance that, after a man drove a pickup truck into the New Year’s Day crowd on Bourbon Street, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick announced at a press conference that the majority of the 15 killed and 57 injured were locals, not tourists. Call it a statement of priorities from a government convinced beyond reproach of its role as host: New Orleans is open for business, and we wouldn’t let anything happen to visitors.

Thus the French Quarter during Super Bowl week is transformed into a militarized “enhanced security zone,” an arrangement closer to fascist blockbuster than just security theater. Entering the secure perimeter, one is subjected to bag searches, armored vehicles, and everyone from active-duty soldiers to US Fish and Wildlife employees in camouflage wielding assault rifles. ICE agents are rumored to be about. At one point, Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid trudges solemnly through it all.

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Tourism is, for better or worse, a driving engine of the New Orleans economy. People come to New Orleans to indulge and perpetuate their fantasies of the city as a place of abundant joy, to-go alcohol, exceptional dining, and street jazz. The city’s cultural footprint in the popular American imagination can obfuscate basic facts about its size—smaller, population-wise, than Aurora, Colorado; Wichita, Kansas; or Bakersfield, California, among roughly 50 other American cities—and its prosperity, or lack thereof.

It is often said upon visiting New Orleans that it is almost unlike an American city. It’s a point that is difficult to articulate without veering into the colonialist, and it’s one with which I have come to disagree more and more. New Orleans, if anything, is a lens through which you might grasp the contours of the American future. It is a place driven largely by an economy that exists by sole virtue of its ability to sell facsimiles of itself; it polishes and packages a Disneyesque rendition of its mythologized culture while disappearing via incarceration the Black people who drive such culture. The history of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is one of privatization, racial engineering, and the prioritization of New Orleans as export and destination rather than as existing city. In this light, Super Bowl LIX is, if not an endpoint, something of a signpost for the city’s future.

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Ahead of the Super Bowl, more than 100 unhoused people are forced out of their encampments and into the “Transitional Center,” a functionally windowless, floorless warehouse deemed “not safe or healthy for human habitation.” The warehouse, which cost upwards of $17 million, was built pursuant to a no-bid contract awarded by Governor Landry. Unhoused people are moved to this hellhole under threat of imprisonment. Scott Turner, Donald Trump’s new housing secretary, has reportedly “refused to rule out government-run detention camps for unhoused people.” The Guardian notes that the cost of this warehouse runs both twice the current operating budget for the agency coordinating citywide homelessness services and roughly equivalent to the potential cost of housing 80 percent of the city’s unhoused population in their own apartments. Encampment sweeps and roundups were first attempted ahead of a series of Taylor Swift concerts at the Superdome, but a stubborn federal judge got in the way.

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The thing, of course, is that all tourist dollars are not spent the same. Throughout the city, business owners report slower sales than could possibly have been expected. The Super Bowl, it turns out, is an engine of prosperity predominantly for the corporations doing their advertising and the handful of local, physical spaces lucky enough to be bought out by them. The National Football League, its sponsors, and its hangers-on invest so much money in selling the New Orleans experience that they no longer require the city or its people to do so. In effect, they perfect the New Orleans tourism problem by taking it to its logical conclusion; during the game itself, Tom Brady and Kevin Burkhardt are depicted standing at the intersection of a mock-up of Bourbon Street so meticulously polished as to enter the uncanny valley. On football’s biggest night, New Orleans was polished, perfected, and extracted.

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The game itself was unbearably boring. The Philadelphia Eagles won by a landslide, Kendrick Lamar called Drake a pedophile, and on Monday most everybody went home.

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Featured image: Photo of militarized Bourbon Street courtesy of Richard Campanella.