The migration of whites to the suburbs in the sixties was less virulent than that experienced by the cities the East. In New Orleans, between 1960 and 1970, the white population fell 16 percent while the black population rose by the same percentage. In Newark and in Atlanta, during the same period, the white population fell by 33 percent and 18 percent respectively while the black population rose by 50 percent and 33 percent.

The population of Orleans Parish continues to decline, as it did in the sixties when there was net emigration of both blacks and whites, but the rate of decrease seems to have slowed by about half. Between 1970 and 1974, for example, the New Orleans population declined from 593,000 to 569,000, but by 1976 it had leveled off at 562,000.

Many of the people who leave New Orleans are moving not to the comfortable suburb of Metairie but to the more fertile employment territories of Houston, Dallas, and New York. New Orleans is thereby losing some of its best and brightest. A few years ago, a TV commercial for a local bank featured a young black man who had graduated at the top of his class at Xavier University. The commercial told how the bank had financed the young man's education and how he was now a great addition to the community, working for a leading engineering firm. What the ad didn't say was that the leading engineering firm is in Atlanta. Similarly, top graduates of Tulane Law School regularly go to work in New York.

Still, there is a strange charisma that draws many native Orleanians back to the city after a few years of apprenticeship in the banks of New York or the law firms of Washington. The future of the city is, in great measure, in the hands of these prodigal sons and daughters.

The ones who have returned in recent years have found that while the city's charms have been kept intact, the world now is too much with New Orleans. Real estate prices have soared and rents have gone up; utility rates are much closer to the national average; and life has become more of a scramble, more the way it is in Cleveland or Schenectady. Finally, in the mid-sixties and early seventies, when the city felt itself forced to face the fact that so many of its people were poor, and without jobs, its solution was, of course, to erect a building—the Superdome, the largest covered stadium in the world.

The Superdome sprang fullblown from the forehead of one Dave Dixon, a local promoter and former car salesman. Dixon managed to sell his idea in 1965 to Governor John McKeithen. Dixon tells the story that after he described his idea to McKeithen, the governor "bolted out of his chair and said: 'By God! That will be the greatest building in the history of man. We're gonna do it!'

The Superdome did not, however, turn out to be the greatest building in the history of man, or even the second greatest. It was beset with cost overruns and political scandals. Voters in 1966 were told that the Superdome would cost $35 million, the same as Houston's Astrodome, which it would dwarf; instead, the final figure was $165 million. The Dome was supposed to make an operating profit its first year; instead, it has shown a large deficit for each of its three years of operation, and no one today seriously thinks the Dome will ever come close to paying for itself. Last year's operating loss was $5.5 million, not including debt service, which runs to $10 million a year. In fact, the Dome costs $50,000 a day to keep open—whether it is used or not.