Mardi Gras in Mid-City · A Local's Guide to the Real Parade Route
Mardi Gras in Mid-City
Written from a coffee shop on the Endymion route.
The version of Mardi Gras on TV is the Bourbon Street version. It involves a lot of beer in plastic cups and a lot of people who flew in from somewhere else. It is not how locals do Mardi Gras and it is not how anyone who actually likes Mardi Gras does Mardi Gras.
The real version is in Mid-City and Uptown — along the neighborhood parade routes, with ladders for the kids, with locals you might recognize from earlier in the season, with food trucks and bathroom plans and parking that works if you know where to look. This is the local’s guide to Mardi Gras in Mid-City, written from a coffee shop directly on the parade route.
Three reasons.
The parades pass through here. Bourbon Street itself sits inside the French Quarter, so the famous tourist street doesn’t have parades rolling down it. The main parade corridors are Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue — the streets that border the Quarter, not the streets inside it. Many parades do end in or near the Quarter, but they roll along Canal Street first. Mid-City is on the Canal Street side of that geography, with Endymion and many other parades rolling straight past 2940 Canal.
The crowd is local and family-oriented. The Mid-City parade-watching crowd skews local, with kids on ladders and chairs lined up along the route hours before the parade rolls. It is the closest thing to a neighborhood block party at city scale.
You can actually catch throws. The Bourbon Street crowd is so packed you can’t move your arms; everything thrown over the balcony lands on the same six people. The Mid-City crowd has space. You can catch beads, cups, doubloons, sometimes shoes (Krewe of Muses), and once in a while the famous Zulu coconut if you’re standing in the right place uptown on Mardi Gras Day.
The biggest Mid-City parade is Endymion, a super krewe with one of the largest crowds of the entire Mardi Gras season. Endymion rolls on the Saturday night before Mardi Gras, starts in Mid-City near City Park, runs down Orleans Avenue, turns onto North Carrollton, and then takes Canal Street downtown all the way to the Superdome. It passes 2940 Canal Street on the Canal Street stretch.
Endymion is the parade where things you have never seen on TV happen — multi-section floats, celebrity grand marshals, throws in volumes that defy belief. Get to the route early. By 4 PM the prime spots are taken for an 8 PM kickoff. Some people set up at noon.
The full Mardi Gras schedule includes dozens of other parades in the two weeks before Fat Tuesday. Many of them roll through different parts of the city — Uptown on St. Charles, Metairie on Veterans, the West Bank, the marching krewes through the Marigny. The official schedule changes year to year and is published by Mardi Gras Guide every year. Check it before you plan.
Mardi Gras Day (Fat Tuesday) is different from the preceding two weeks. The big super-krewe parades are over. The day belongs to Zulu (rolls early in the morning, traditionally Uptown), Rex (the king of Carnival, also Uptown), the truck parades after Rex, and dozens of walking krewes throughout the city.
In Mid-City on Mardi Gras Day, the energy is more decentralized. Walking krewes pass through the neighborhood. Families decorate their porches. There is no single parade to plan around — instead, the whole neighborhood is the celebration.
If you’re spending Mardi Gras Day in Mid-City, here’s the move: have a real breakfast somewhere with bathrooms, stake out a Canal Street spot for the Zulu / Rex tail end if you want to catch a coconut or a doubloon, and then spend the rest of the day walking the neighborhood to find the smaller krewes and house parties. Mardi Gras Day rewards walking, not standing.
The French Quarter. Mardi Gras Day in the Quarter is a tourist holding pen. There are no parades. There are a lot of drunk people who flew in for the weekend. It is the version of Mardi Gras you saw on Spring Break in college if you had that experience. It is not the local version.
Anything that promises “parade viewing” with a cover charge. Parades are free. Always. Most of what’s being sold as a “Mardi Gras experience” in this city is a regular bar with a cover charge and a parade outside it.
We do sell a small number of balcony seats above the Endymion route at 2940 Canal. The fee goes to the baristas working that day — Carnival is two or three times the normal load and the balcony money funds the bump for the staff who are pulling it. If a guaranteed Endymion spot above the route is what you want, and you’d rather your money go to the people actually working the shop than to a bar’s parade-day markup, ask in person or email us at brew@witchesbrew.co. We don’t market it heavily because it isn’t the main reason to come to us during Carnival.
2940 Canal Street is on the parade route. Most independent coffee shops close on Mardi Gras Day. We do not. We are open every day during Carnival season including Mardi Gras Day itself, with our normal 8 AM – 6 PM hours.
What that means for your day: if you are anywhere near the Canal Street route, we are the place to stage from before the parades, the place to warm up during, and the place to land after. Real coffee, real bathroom, real chair. The crowds get heavy outside our door but our doors stay open the whole time. For more on what’s on the bar between parades, see our coffee writeup.
Mardi Gras is the best two weeks of the New Orleans year. Skip Bourbon Street. Come watch it the way locals do.