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Archive for February 9th, 2013

The Ravens won this year’s Superbowl, and the 49ers made a respectable comeback in the second half, but the real winner of last Sunday’s game (other than Beyonce) was the city of New Orleans.

The half-hour power outage notwithstanding.

Considering the fact that this Gulf city has experienced two of America’s worst environmental tragedies in the last decade (Katrina and the BP oil spew), the metropolis has made a remarkable recovery, strengthening its infrastructure and image to reclaim its position as one of the nation’s most popular tourist destinations.

To be sure, it didn’t happen overnight. CNBC’s Brian Shactman explains,

…the effort has not been easy, and the cost has not been cheap. Here are some of the numbers: Approximately $365 [million] was spent upgrading the airport. The Mercedes Benz Superdome received a $336 million facelift. Hotels spent hundreds of millions to upgrade facilities, and even the street car system got almost $150 million.

More importantly, Shactman points out,

…the infrastructure is now in place for future events: BCS title game, Final Four, etc. And the expectation is that the Super Bowl will be back sooner than the 11-year gap between the last two.

When we’re talking about rebuilding a city’s infrastructure and most crucial industry, seven years is actually an incredibly brief time period, even for a city as small as New Orleans (which has a population smaller than Wichita’s).  Read the rest of this entry »