E-Mail This Article to a Friend SHRINE OR AUDITORIUM? Mothers of Convention BY BILL JENSEN

Parked right off the French Quarter, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center is a four-block-long, glass-and-steel monolith holding court along the Mississippi River. We traveled 17 hours on a train to get there, my wife scheduled to give a talk at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference, where 25,000 brainiacs get together and show off their year’s — or for some people, their lifetime’s — research.

We arrived early in the morning, walked past the food court and the Starbucks in the lobby, past room after cavernous conference room, until we found her appointed hall. Five-hundred chairs sat in neat rows. Large plush curtains lined the walls. Air conditioning provided a pleasant shield from the oppressive heat.

Scientists eventually filed in and my wife gave the kind of talk scientists give ("Regulation of Dendritic and Synaptic Development by Homer 1a and Homer 1b in vivo"). She spent the rest of the day looking at posters of other scientists’ research. I spent the day walking around the city looking for remnants of Lee Harvey Oswald’s pre-assassination stay (mention the name Oswald to any employee at the William B. Reilly Coffee Company, Lee’s last gig before landing that coveted Texas School Book Depository job, and you’ll quickly be shown the door). At night, we took advantage of the open-container laws in the French Quarter, ate po’ boys at Mother’s, and gambled with money we didn’t have at Harrah’s. But every morning we found ourselves back at the convention center.

The convention center is now home to scenes less benign. An eight-year-old girl found with her torso cut from her pubic bone to her neck. A seven-year-old boy found in a freezer, throat slashed. A 13-year-old girl raped to death. Troops finding as many as 40 bodies, according to some reports. Bathrooms overflowing with shit and piss.

The city will no doubt want to get the centerpiece of its $5 billion tourism industry up and running soon (CNN reported that New Orleans will lose $1 billion due to canceled conventions through November alone.). But with the body count in New Orleans reaching 9/11 proportions, and the horror stories beginning to seep out of what really went on in that week of darkness at the convention center, who will want to go back there? Will people really want to schmooze in the staging area of one of America’s biggest tragedies? Even after it’s done wringing itself out and drying itself off, New Orleans may very well be left with a 1.1-million-square-foot empty shrine to its darkest nights.