Carnival A-Z: Uptown Route

Although it is currently lent, I have chosen to finish the Carnival A-Z so that I can move on to other topics and have this collection completed.

The Uptown Parade Route is the current, primary parade route in the City of New Orleans. Infact all parades that parade on the east bank of the Mississippi in the city limits, save one (The Krewe of Endymion), parade on some variation of this route. The basic route begins on Napoleon Avenue at Magazine St. The Parade travels from the start to the corner of Napoleon Avenue and St. Charles Avenue, where it turns right onto St. Charles to head downtown. The parade will go around Lee Circle and continue down St. Charles (against the typical direction fo traffic) to Canal St. The Parade will then turn onto Canal St. where it wil head in one direction before U-turing in the other to approach the evenings terminus.

Thanks to Arthur Hardy Enterprises for the PictureEach Parade has its own slight varitation on the route. Some will on the other side of Napoleon, some will have slightly different routes on Canal depending on the end point of a particular parade, and some even begin at Magazine St. and Jefferson Avenue for an extended parade route. All the parades haven’t always been on this route though – many parades began their lives parading through the neighborhoods in which their membership lived; furthermore, this route hasn’t always existed.

The Uptown route began its life as a group of similar routes used by several parades – the routes were cross town routes. They generally began in either the Garden District or the Lower Garden District, passed trough the CBD, rolled up and down Canal, and entered the quarter before ending (often at the Municipal Auditorium). The existing variation on the uptown route began in the early nineteen seventies when the City of New Orleans decided the confided streets of the French Quarter were no longer appropriate for the growing parades. At this point the parades that had not yet done so moved the beginning of their routes up to Napoleon Avenue.