Coronavirus: New Orleans bars ordered closed for Mardi Gras

NEW ORLEANS — Lean times are looming for New Orleans through Fat Tuesday.

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New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced Friday that from Feb. 12 through Mardi Gras (Feb. 16), all bars in the Big Easy will be closed to indoor and outdoor service, WDSU reported. Drinks to-go will also be prohibited, the television station reported.

There will be no sales of packaged liquor in the French Quarter. That includes bars currently operating as restaurants with conditional permits, WWL reported.

Cantrell also said revelers will have to pass through checkpoints to reach major gathering spots and there will be a heavy police presence in the city, The Times-Picayune reported. The North Claiborne Avenue median under Interstate 10 will be fenced in to prevent crowds and street parties, according to the newspaper.

Pedestrians or vehicles will be prohibited on Bourbon, Decatur and Frenchmen streets between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. with the exception of residents, employees, hotel guests and restaurant/retail goers, WDSU reported.

“It’s like a death of Mardi Gras for 2021,” Carrie Hanafy, a bartender in nearby Metairie, told WWL. “People are going to be mourning and they don’t want to be mourning, they want to be out partying doing what they want to do.”

Adina DeFelice, a manager and bartender at The Starlight on Bourbon Street, said her phone was “blowing up” all day Friday after hearing the mayor’s decision, WWL reported.

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“It’s disheartening but also at the same time you want everybody to be safe,” DeFelice told the television station. “I can pay off debt, I can pay off credit cards with Mardi Gras money. Without this it’s going to drain me, a lot.”

“The days they’re closed are the biggest days in the bar business,” Willie Mackie, general partner at The Page, told WWL.

Carnival parades and balls were canceled in December.

“I’m glad that we are not going to be putting beads over bodies,” Mark Schettler, general manager of Bar Tonique, told The Times-Picayune. “We are talking about five days of closure to prevent 14 to 28 days of closure if there was another spike … Neither option is great, but we are in a global pandemic.”

Cantrell told reporters she would “rather be accused of doing too much than doing too little.”

“I think we were all hopeful that we could strike the necessary balance of having a safe Mardi Gras and a fun Mardi Gras as well, but given these new variants, recent large crowds in the Quarter and the potential for even larger crowds this weekend and the weekend as we move into Mardi Gras, it has become very apparent that it is hard to do,” Cantrell said.

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