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New Orleans’ 9th Ward might score a new football stadium after all
By Jeff Duncan Apr 14, 2021
The dream is still alive.
The audacious plan to build a football stadium for historic George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans’ Upper 9th Ward has been revived, thanks to the efforts of a new group of ambitious civic leaders.
The 9th Ward Stadium project hopes to deliver what its predecessor, the aborted 9th Ward Field of Dreams project, failed to do 13 years ago and construct a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose facility on the Carver campus in eastern New Orleans.
In addition to its new name, the project has a new plan and a new board of organizers, spearheaded by Arnie Fielkow, a former New Orleans Saints executive and New Orleans City Councilman.
Fielkow resurrected the plan after learning of the failed efforts of the original stadium project, which was launched in 2008 by former Carver teacher and athletic director Brian Bordainick. Fielkow donated $25,000 to the post-Katrina campaign, which also attracted support from the likes of Drew Brees, James Carville, Sean Payton and Alyssa Milano. The feel-good story garnered nationwide publicity, including a mention from President Barack Obama in his 2010 speech to commemorate the 5-year anniversary of the storm.
The project was eventually derailed by internal politics and malfeasance. A three-month investigation by The Athletic and WVUE-TV in 2019 revealed that the original project had been abandoned by a group of Carver alumni that wrested control from Bordainick and squandered more than $1 million in donations.
Now Fielkow and his board of unpaid volunteers hope to revive the plan and construct a $5 million stadium, which would also be used for soccer games and track and field meets. The stadium would be located on a vacant parcel of land owned by Orleans Parish Public Schools adjacent to the school’s campus just south of I-10.
“This is a jewel of a project,” Fielkow said. “We’re doing this because we love New Orleans, we love this community, and we love the youth. We want to bring a legacy project to New Orleans that will be here for the next 50 years and be a source of pride for everyone.”
Among the stadium’s features, which were designed by Eskew, Dumez and Ripple Architects: a 3,000-to-5,000-seat grandstand with 200 VIP seats and a press box; a Hall of Fame venue for New Orleans public school athletes; an artificial turf football field; an eight-lane tartan turf track; and a 160-space parking lot.
The stadium will serve as an anchor home field for Carver athletic teams, but it will also be open for use by all public high schools and middle schools, with an emphasis on serving schools in eastern New Orleans.
“This project will bring a lot of visibility to a beautiful community,” said Ann Duplessis, a former state senator who represented the nearby Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East neighborhoods. “Just imagine if this project gets off the ground, you will have a thousand-plus people every weekend or more visiting that community. Our kids need this.”
Duplessis is one of seven local civic leaders who make up the board of the new 501c3 non-profit, joining Fielkow, the former City Council President and current Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans CEO; Jewish Endowment Foundation executive director Bobby Garon; civil engineer Roy Glapion; charter school executive Stacy Martin; former Saints running back Deuce McAllister; and architect Mark Ripple.
"We made an intentional point to separate ourselves completely from the former organization that was administering this project," Fielkow said. "We are going to be as open and transparent as possible. We understand based upon the history that we’ve got to do this project right. There’s no margin for error here in terms of integrity."
The new board has worked diligently and quietly behind the scenes for the last year to resurrect the project and restore confidence in its success. In recent weeks, board members have conducted virtual meetings with civic leaders and public officials to introduce the new plan and rally support for the project. Fielkow said Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Jay Dardenne, the commissioner of administration for Gov. John Bel Edwards, are among those who have endorsed the plan and pledged their support.
“The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive,” Fielkow said.
In the next 14 months, the group hopes to raise $3.5 million in private donations. The state’s capital outlay budget is being targeted for the rest — as much as $1.45 million.
If all goes well, the plans can be handed off to school officials sometime in the next 18 months and construction on the project will begin in time to open the stadium in the fall of 2023, a decade after the original project’s groundbreaking ceremony was held on Sept. 26, 2013.
“This neighborhood, this community as a whole, we’ve all been waiting for this moment to happen,” said Byron Addison, a Carver graduate who is in his 10th season as the school’s head football coach. “Talking to my friends that I played ball with, all we ever dreamed about was having a place that we can call home. Now being able to coach in it would be a dream come true.”
Carver, like most public schools in Orleans Parish, does not have its own football field. Since the school began fielding a team in the early 1960s, it has played its home games at various neutral sites around the city, some as far as 10 miles away from the school's Higgins Boulevard campus.
The cross-town commute often has led to logistical problems for the team’s caravan of buses, Addison said. The Rams once arrived at a playoff game 5 minutes before the scheduled kickoff because of a traffic delay, he said.
“This project would mean so much because I know the things that we go through trying to prepare to get to a game,” Addison said. “It’s very important for the kids to be able to have something that they can call their home stadium.”
Duplessis believes the stadium also can serve as an economic engine for the Upper Ninth Ward, which was inundated by Katrina’s floodwaters and has experienced a checkered recovery in the 16 years since. The hope is that it will not only spur redevelopment in the neighborhood but also serve as a source of pride for residents in the oft-neglected community.
“There’s a feeling of desperation in some of our communities and families," Duplessis said. "But when they see that people that they will never meet are actually reaching back and providing something that they can say is theirs and that they care, I think that goes a long way with helping these young people to understand that the world is not against them, that there are good people (out there), and there are people who care and who care about their future and the future of the city."