Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:34:00

New Orleans built its party plaza on top of a dead shopping mall that was built on top of a moved cemetery. Champions Square, on LaSalle Street directly off the Caesars Superdome's Gate C grand staircase, opened on 21 August 2010 as a 13.5-million-dollar outdoor festival plaza on the footprint of the New Orleans Centre mall, which had never reopened after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005 and was demolished in spring 2010 - the site's deeper history reaches back to the Girod Street Cemetery, which occupied the ground from 1822 until 1957. Only the old Macy's block and the parking structure, now Champions Garage, survive from the mall era. The design brief by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and Ellerbe Becket was a pedestrian-only gathering ground of roughly 90,000 to 121,000 square feet threaded between the Superdome, the Smoothie King Center, the Hyatt Regency and Benson Tower. Its founding purpose remains its most beloved: the premier tailgate in the NFL, where free concerts, food tents and tens of thousands of Saints fans turn every home-game Sunday into a street festival before kickoff - the name honours the Superdome's long history of hosting championships. A 2013 renovation round added the Bold Sphere Music stage, a permanent outdoor amphitheatre setup that reopened in April 2014 with Lana Del Rey and has since carried a steady calendar of touring concerts, from rock and country package shows to Lil Wayne's hometown Lil' WeezyAna Fest, which called the Square home in its first years. The attached club XLIV and Encore lounges add 17,000-plus square feet of premium indoor space for up to about 1,000 guests, and the Opening Act annex contributes another 12,000 square feet of climate-controlled event room. Between Saints Sundays, Pelicans playoff watch parties, festivals, corporate receptions and exhibit events keep the plaza working year-round - a purpose-built public square in a city that never needed to be taught how to use one.