(Original headline: Local artist sees Mary on billboard )
Most people glancing up at the billboard above the barrooms in the 5100 block of Canal Boulevard see a colorful rendering of a New Orleans landmark: Jacob Schoen & Son Funeral Home in the 3800 block of Canal Street. But local artist and renovator Mark Kleindorf sees more. Much more. He sees the Virgin Mary, aglow in a funeral home archway.
"It just kind of hit me -- like what's this?" Kleindorf said, recalling the moment he first spotted the Madonna image while slapping a fresh coat of green paint on a nearby herb shop.
The billboard and the herb shop sit at the bustling intersection of Canal Boulevard, Canal Street and City Park Avenue. The wall Kleindorf was painting runs along the edge of Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery, one of several burial grounds at the spot that once marked the city limits.
Kleindorf was peering over vaults of yellow fever victims when he noticed a white blotch on the left side of the sign, part of the original funeral home photograph that could be described as sunlight, appeared to him as the profile of Mary, standing in the archway with her back to the ticking clock on the right side of the sign.
Seen as the Blessed Mother, the solitary figure seems perfectly proportioned. She is clothed in a white gown and veil and is facing west, toward the white tombs of Greenwood Cemetery across Canal Boulevard.
Kleindorf, 40, said the veiled image "got more defined" as he drove his pickup truck past the billboard on his way home.
The Bucktown resident doesn't compare his vision to the likes of Mary's reported appearance in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has drawn tens of thousands of New Orleanians there to pray since the 1980s. He said his discovery is a source of comfort and hope, and he wants "to share the news" with his community.
"We're hearing about a lady seeing her (Mary) under a bridge where the water was leaking through the cracks, and about Mary's face on a grilled cheese sandwich, and here, right here, we have our own Lakeview/Mid-City Mary," Kleindorf said.
In recent months, believers have flocked to a stretch of the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago to stare at an image of Mary -- her hands in prayer -- on an underpass wall, stained with water and road salt.
Last year, a Florida woman made headlines when a casino paid her $28,000 for a decade-old grilled cheese sandwich bearing Mary's face in the scorched bread.
'Simply a speculation'
Mary's image on a sandwich and sightings such as Kleindorf's should not be taken seriously, said Archdiocese of New Orleans spokesman the Rev. William Maestri.
"This would not even remotely qualify as an apparition," Maestri said of the image that reminds Kleindorf of Mary. "There is no appearance by the Blessed Mother communicating a message, a teaching or a request to anyone. This is simply a speculation based on an imaginative interpretation of what something appears to be."
Kleindorf, who refers to himself as a "cajew" because he was raised by a Jewish father and Catholic mother, said he is not the first member of his family to have a vision of Mary. Years ago, his uncle, Broadway and local actor Jay Kleindorf, shared with his nephew his story of a vision.
"When he was in World War II, he was driving in the back of a flatbed truck with a bunch of his Army buddies, and he looked up in the trees and he saw the Blessed Mother waving, pulling him towards her like, 'Come to me. Come to me,' " Kleindorf said. "So, he shouted to his guys, 'Jump,' and when they jumped, that's when the mortar hit the truck and blew up everybody else in it. . . . When he got older, he told me the story the same way over and over, didn't miss a beat."
'This is spooky'
Kleindorf said he was thinking about his now deceased uncle on the day he spotted Mary on the billboard because his uncle's last theater performance was in a play called "Odd Fellows Rest," which is where he was standing. He kept the sighting to himself for a year because he thought people would think he was crazy.
"Then I showed my mother, and I showed a couple of friends that happened to be in the neighborhood, and they were all like, 'Wow. This is spooky,' " Kleindorf said.
The image of Mary in the funeral home archway is there for anyone who chooses to see it, Kleindorf said.
"At that particular moment when that picture was taken, the light was shining at the right angle for something," he said. "You can use a little imagination, but you don't need much. It's there if you want to believe, I guess."
When asked if the funeral home had received any calls about the billboard, which has been up for several years, Garic Schoen, 84, answered abruptly before any mention of Mary's image. "Who's it supposed to be, the Blessed Mother?" Schoen said. "We never had any calls. If you hear any more about it, let us know."
