French Quarter now tight quarters

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff, 1/30/2002

NEW ORLEANS - Six days until Super Bowl XXXVI, and taxi driver Al Locks already is miserable. He inches his cab through the French Quarter, grumbles out the window at a cluster of soused and staggering middle-aged men, and laments that the worst is still to come.

''I dread these things, Super Bowl and all that,'' says Locks, 57. ''Traffic congestion, rowdiness, drunkenness.'' He pauses, for effect. ''Too old for it.''

Add an unprecedented security drive that has dozens of streets shut down, soldiers in fatigues sighted in the French Quarter, and foam ''No. 1'' hands banned from the Superdome, and even some less-grizzled locals are starting to feel queasy. Still, one man's logistical nightmare is another man's excitement, and another few hundred people's paychecks. And New Orleans, now on its ninth Super Bowl, knows full well what's coming.

These are the days when the city takes its last deep breath and gives in to the invasion. Already, the first wave of Super Bowl People has hit town: the NFL staff, some 3,500 reporters, and the football players themselves. (You can tell the players because they're the overdressed ones, milling outside their hotels in tailored pants and enormous silk shirts.)

By today, the crowds should be thickening, and by the weekend, the city should be full of corporate heavies, and the celebrities who seem to show up at every big event, and the loopiest of the loopy fans. This is, for the most part, a big-spending group, which takes away some of the pain.

''The Mardi Gras attracts too many young, obnoxious types,'' Locks says. ''Super Bowl, you get a little better than that. But it's jammed in at the wrong times.''

The timing is particularly tough this year, in the context of world events. After Sept. 11, when every symbol of Americana felt threatened, the Superdome suddenly started to look like a massive, televised target. It wasn't long before the federal government named Super Bowl XXXVI a National Security Special Event, the first sporting event to receive the designation.

The result is a multilayered security plan, managed by the Secret Service, that was under development by mid-November. Officials won't give up many details, but say there will be patrols from the air and around the perimeter of the Superdome, using twice as much manpower as the usual big game and spending more than double what the NFL has in the past. If anything goes wrong, a system of ''consequence management'' will kick in, overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The focus on security means the NFL is faced with a delicate balancing act: how to make its massive efforts at once visible and unobtrusive, to make people feel safe without making them feel nervous.

''We want to be in the background,'' says Milt Ahlreich, the NFL's vice president of security. ''We don't want to be something our fans focus on.''

That might be difficult, given the staggering set of game-day restrictions. The Secret Service has banned a long list of items from the Superdome Sunday: camcorders, backpacks, umbrellas, strollers, beach balls, horns, sticks, noisemakers. The giant foam hands are verboten, Ahlreich says, to avoid ''a problem that can be secreted'' from one.

The crowds will go through several levels of screening, with gates opening at 12:30 p.m. for a game that begins five hours later, said Mike James, the Secret Service special agent in charge of the event. The Secret Service is begging people to leave their cellular phones at home, to speed up the lines. The NFL will provide entertainment, of a patriotic sort, to salve the crowd.

That just takes care of the 78,000 or so who have tickets. In the French Quarter, site of the spillover, the tourist machine is already courting. Super Bowl-themed Mardi Gras beads are on display in the knickknack shops, official Super Bowl merchandise stores are open for business, and ''Super Bowl Party'' flags fly in front of the bars.

The city has tried to spiff itself up in time for the bowl crowd's arrival, with a mammoth effort of trash pick-up, pothole-patching, and painting that started weeks ago, says Cedric Grant, the city's chief administrative officer. Next comes the nod to security: closures of more than a dozen streets and highway off-ramps that will come at no small inconvenience to locals. Some 2,000 businesspeople who usually park beside the Superdome, Grant said, will have to park in a faraway municipal lot and take shuttle buses to their offices.

Efforts have been just as fierce at the Louis Armstrong International Airport, where crews that started work improving the access road in August were supposed to be finished by Jan. 18. Now their drop-dead, finish-the-job-or-else ''you will be tortured, beat, whatever'' deadline is today, says airport spokeswoman Michelle Duffourc.

Because the NFL had scheduled one week, not two, between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, airport workers are also scrambling to line up the charter flights filled with bigwigs who demand especially smooth passage.

But the biggest challenge for the airport, Duffourc says, will come after the game, when 35,000 people are expected to leave the city on a single day - three times the daily traffic the airport usually sees. Passengers are being told to come three hours before their flights take off. In tried-and-true New Orleans style, the airport is planning to placate the crowds with food: tour buses will be taken to a staging area with food, drinks, and possibly live music.

And then - in what seems like an eternity from now - the Super Bowl People will leave. Duffourc, like many locals, has been through that, too.

''You say, that was fun, glad it's over,'' she says. ''Let's not do it for another four years, at least.''

Except that, this year, there's hardly a break. The following weekend is the heart of Mardi Gras.