Rebirth (Steve Gleason's Blocked Punt)

On September 25, 2006, in the first quarter, Steve Gleason blocked a punt by Atlanta's Michael Koenen, and Curtis Deloatch recovered the ball in the end zone for a touchdown. It was the Saints' first game in New Orleans in nearly 21 months, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and the team. Gleason revealed in 2011 that he had ALS, and his awareness work earned him a Congressional Gold Medal in 2019, the first for an NFL player, presented on January 15, 2020. The statue of the block went up outside the Superdome in July 2012.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.9 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 1.0 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.0 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• Congo Square — 1.1 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.

More markers nearby

• John Julian McKeithen — steps away
• Jazz (Loyola Avenue) — 0.4 mi
• The Pythian Temple — 0.4 mi
• The Rault Center High-Rise Fire of 1972 — 0.4 mi