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With no corporate sponsor to give it a formal identity, the 10,000-seat park has been known as Zephyr Stadium when it was home of a Triple-A baseball team, as Baby Cakes Stadium when the team’s new management renamed the waning franchise in 2016, and then, for lack of a better title, “The Shrine on Airline.”
But with the end of professional baseball in a once historically rich baseball city, the stadium is more of an albatross as it lies in wait for a revival that is on the drawing board of the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District and its chairman, Kyle M. France.
Since the departure of minor league baseball from the area in 2019, the Airline stadium has hosted the local rugby team, NOLA Gold, now its only tenant.
But, more recently, two local high schools have given it a rebirth as a football facility.
John Curtis, which has not had a home field since its years at Kenner’s Muss Bertolino Playground, has agreed to use the dormant park as its home for the 2023 football season.
Jesuit also has agreed to use the 10,000-seat facility for two home games against Catholic League rivals St. Augustine (Sept. 29) and Archbishop Rummel (Nov. 3), not as a change of scenery but because of its schedule.
Prep football on the highway is hardly a new occurrence. There were a handful of games played there between 2016 and 2017 before the Baby Cakes management ended the practice.
Now under more favorable management looking to renovate the “Shrine” and utilize it as a viable sports and entertainment venue, the stadium is back in play.
The rental fee should be much less than the $3,550 cost to host a game at the 24,500-seat Tad Gormley Stadium that has been Jesuit’s home field for most of its games since 1937. But Catholic League athletic directors say it actually costs about $7,500-8,000 to open the Gormley gates.
When available, Strawberry Stadium at Southeastern is very reasonable at less than $3,000, but it’s still a 60-mile trip to Hammond. And, as for future games at Yulman Stadium, Tulane has made it known that the high schools are no longer welcome by putting a $15,000 price tag on the rental fee.
But the “Shrine on Airline” will have to complete the conversion from a baseball park to a football/soccer/rugby facility.
“We have to come up with a master plan to reconfigure the stadium to make it a multi-event facility,” France said. He cited the possibility of getting a professional soccer team and the USFL’s New Orleans Breakers as future tenants.
Fox Sports owns the USFL brand, so the money’s there for a possible move of all of the league’s games out of Birmingham and into the cities the eight franchises are supposed to represent. France said the stadium could be converted into an 18,000-seat facility for about $30 million.
“Right now we’re spending about $1 million on maintenance with no revenue coming in,” he said. And that makes no sense to him or the commission.
There is a caveat: The timetable for completing the renovation could be affected by the election of a new governor because the current commission turns over the Caesars Superdome, Smoothie King Center, Champions Square and the “Shrine” to a new board to be appointed by the next governor in 2024.
But the Shrine’s location in Jefferson Parish and the parish council’s wholehearted support for significant physical improvements should clear any political hurdles that may occur.
In the spring, the parish council earmarked $15 million from the American Rescue Plan Act for the stadium renovation, and the state has committed a similar dollar amount in the capital outlay budget, Councilman Deano Bonano told Crescent City Sports.
France said the commission wants to maximize the stadium’s potential for a venue for something other than baseball, which has proven to be of much less interest to this community than football, rugby and soccer.
Unlike football, baseball’s heyday here has come and gone.
Growth of stadiums
Early references to stadiums in which high school football was played showed that Athletic Park was the first facility. Located on South Carrollton Avenue one block to the north of the square where now sits Jesuit High School, it was home to the New Orleans Pelicans baseball organization from 1901-08. It was also home to the Tulane Green Wave football team during the same period before its owner, Alexander Heinemann, moved it via several mule-drawn wagons to the corner of Tulane and Carrollton. It became known as Pelican Stadium, and most of the city’s schools used it as their home football field prior to the construction of City Park Stadium in 1937.
Jesuit called the stadium on Loyola’s campus home for most of the facilities’ 11 years of operation (1928-39) until the college dropped its football program.
Holy Cross Park, a rectangular space on school’s the lower Ninth Ward campus, also served as a home field for football and baseball. But because attending games was considered a “road trip” for the city’s other schools and fans, Holy Cross made the 24,500-seat City Park Stadium its home when it opened in 1937.
We know the stadium today as Tad Gormley, named in 1967 after its longtime caretaker. It became the stadium of choice after Pelican Stadium was dismantled in 1957.
A year later, Behrman Stadium followed with 5,000 seats to accommodate smaller schools. Most of the six small Jefferson Parish schools had makeshift football fields on their campuses.
With the creation of the New Orleans Recreation Department in 1947, playground football teams for youth exploded throughout communities in every neighborhood. And the city, under the leadership of Mayor Chep Morrison and an accommodating City Council, the first football and track stadium was built on the corner of Leonidas Street and South Claiborne Avenue. It became known as NORD Stadium and serviced the playground teams and the city’s smaller schools that didn’t have on-campus stadiums like Newman, New Orleans and Rugby Academies. Soon after it was built in 1957, Kirsch-Rooney Stadium followed suit as a preferred field for smaller schools.
Today, Newman, Country Day and St. Martin’s have their own fields.