Altar where Pope celebrated Mass is razed
NEW ORLEANS [AP] — The arched outdoor altar where Pope John Paul II celebrated a 1987 outdoor Mass on the New Orleans lakefront quietly disappeared this week.
The Times-Picayune reported that two pieces of heavy equipment scraped at nearly bare ground where the yellow and white pavilion once stood. Its soaring steel roof once supported a bare cross that overlooked a 65-acre field packed with 130,000 worshippers who had come to pray with the pope.
The altar had been neglected for years, according to Marco Perez, general manager of the UNO Lakefront Arena and East Campus. He says that after years of neglect and disrepair, it was simply time for it to come down.
The only day it was used, Sept. 12, 1987, the steps leading up to the elevated floor of the pavilion were banked with thousands of yellow flowers. Overhead, yellow and white tarps stretched over a curved steel frame. The canopies sheltered John Paul and dozens of local clergy from summer heat and a sudden afternoon thundershower that drenched the multitudes who nonetheless refused to move.
Designed by Walk, Haydel & Associates, the pavilion was built for one event, on one day.
That done, the archdiocese donated the structure to UNO.
Some months after the papal Mass, Perez, who was there himself, said he returned to the site and discovered a plaque commemorating the event fixed to the building but dangling by a single fastener.
He removed it and turned it over to the UNO archives, where it remains, he said.
For a time, the New Orleans Soccer Academy made some use of the building. But Hurricane Katrina stopped even that.
Unused and neglected, the skeletal scaffolding rusted year by year. Beneath, the building became home for “termites, rats and feral cats,” Perez said.
After Katrina, no one had any use for the structure that would justify its nearly complete restoration, he said.
The university consulted the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which had no objection to its demolition, Perez said.
“At the end, it was such an eyesore,” he said. “All it did was serve as a reminder of what Katrina had done to us, and no one needs to be reminded of that.”
