The lead up to New Orleans’ annual Mardi Gras season intensifies Friday with major nighttime parades down historic St. Charles Avenue and animal lovers gathering at a venerable French Quarter restaurant to pay tribute to four-legged faux royalty.
Galatoire's Restaurant, a fine dining fixture on Bourbon Street, will relax its jackets-required dress code and temporarily ditch its no-pets policy to host the king and queen of the Mystic Krewe of Barkus — two silver Labrador retrievers — at a morning event heralding the Sunday pet parade.
On Friday night, three parades with marching brass bands and colorful floats with costumed riders are to step off in the Uptown area. Other Friday night parades are scheduled in neighboring Metairie, and there will be more than two dozen celebrations almost nightly until Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, which this year falls on Feb. 21.
“If you think about the complex logistics, over multiple neighborhoods, multiple krewes, multiple law enforcement agencies — this is like Times Square on New Year's Eve for two weeks,” Kelly Schulz of New Orleans & Company, the city tourism industry's trade association, said during a city news conference Thursday.Sign up for NBC Philadelphia newsletters.
Complicating that effort has been a rise in crime and a shortage of police officers, which somewhat muted the celebration's comeback last year. Since parades in 2021 were canceled because of security concerns and the pandemic, some of the routes for the 2022 parades were trimmed.This year the original routes have been restored and the local police department is bolstered by a contingent of 125 troopers from other parts of the state to help keep order.
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