THIS STORY IS PART OF THE LENS CARNIVAL EDITION.

Claiming your spot for parades during Mardi Gras is a delicate, but crucial, art. 

Your spot along St. Charles Avenue can make or break your entire experience, which is why some people get up as early as five o’clock in the morning to secure their spots.

“Band-heads,” who closely watch marching bands, want to be where St. Charles Avenue travels under the Pontchartrain Expressway, near Harmony Circle. The next section of blocks belongs to high school students, some still in uniform shirts and plaid pants and skirts, who like to move around in groups, against the backdrop of the Popeye’s, Wendy’s and Office Depot. 

College students have built up a reputation at the other end of St. Charles, at the intersection of Amelia Street, where they go, dressed in dramatic costumes with their faces painted with glitter. The underage party scene is notorious for young people sneaking off for their own version of laissez le bon temps rouler.

Some people look for homes with Carnival in mind. “I moved here specifically so that I could be on the parade route,” Jonathan Henderson said, of his apartment on St. Charles near Washington Avenue. “It’s a childhood dream.” He already knew its vibe from when he was a teenager and used to walk to this part of St. Charles to catch the bus to Ben Franklin High School. “It’s the calmest place to be,” he said.

You see all walks of life along the St. Charles route, if you stroll it talking with people, like I did last year. As a New Orleans native, one of my favorite aspects of Carnival is that it’s a polyglot celebration, where all different kinds of people come together, putting aside their differences for a few weeks.

But it’s not quite that simple, as my stroll along St. Charles shows. 

Together, with people like us

Parade season is a time to feel joy along the route, as we all put up our hands and yell for throws. Strangers connect: the young guy next to you catches a stuffed bear for your kid. The older lady with a table nearby offers you some hot chicken and a beer.

You tell people that your son plays tuba in the band that’s coming and everyone yells his name as he approaches.

With its arching rows of live-oak trees, and illustrious multi-million-dollar mansions, the historic St. Charles Avenue route – which winds as it follows the bend of the nearby Mississippi River – is also a gorgeous setting for Carnival crowds of thousands, who are drawn to the St. Charles route for more than 30 parades each year, during the last two weeks of Carnival. 

But as much as parades bring us together, they also divide us from block to block, along New Orleans’ traditional parade route, by race, class, and age.

Because we’re New Orleanians, we do many of the same things in our chosen parade spots – grill, play music, open coolers of cold drinks, tote the kids in a wagon, bring bags to carry throws home. Grandma and grandpa grab the babies and play with parade throws – balls and tambourines. We unpack our stuff, put down a blanket and set up a few folding chairs.

We can do all of that in the midst of strangers and still protect our loved ones if we are in a place where we are “parade comfortable.” We scope it out. It feels safe. We know where the restrooms are, where the food is. 

Our chosen parade spot is a reliable meeting place, findable even for someone whose cell phone died, just like it was for our parents and grandparents in the days before cell phones.

Last year, as I walked between Second and Third Streets, I ran into registered nurse Paula Cooks, who had just finished a day of work at University Medical Center, hopped on her bike and rode to this spot, she said. “This is our neighborhood. This is where our family be, every year.”

Still, as I’ve found during my lifetime in New Orleans – and confirmed during my walk down St. Charles last year – people looking for comfort zones along St. Charles most often settle in an area with people they feel comfortable around, which oftentimes are those who look like them. 

Maybe this is due to the divisions of our city’s history – if your family has come to the same parade spot for decades, most likely your forefathers chose that spot during segregation times – when the only roles for Black people within the parades themselves as mule drivers, flambeau carriers, or as valets to Carnival royalty. 

Or maybe it says something larger, about how, even in one of the most diverse, mixed cities in America, we are still learning to be truly comfortable – parade comfortable – within each other’s company.

Coming to the same spot for decades

For Jonquil McEwen and her toddler daughter, the perfect spot is the parking lot in front of St. Charles Discount Zone, at the corner of Delachaise Street and St. Charles. For 15 years, this is where her family has found peace during Carnival. “It’s safe, quiet, the children can do what they want,” McEwen said. 

Every year for Sunday’s Bacchus parade, her whole family gathers here, packing this lot to full capacity. “You cannot even see the ground,” she said. 

The family started coming to that corner around 1960, when Wanda Bush, 66, was a little girl, about two years old. When she became an adult, she took a few years off, but returned in the late 1970s, not long after her son became a toddler. “We needed a place with space,” she said. 

Most people would take off on foot, early in the morning, walking from the 3rd Ward, or the 9th Ward, or wherever they were living in town. For her cousin, who is a close cousin, like a sister, there was no alternative to this corner. “This was her spot,” Bush said. “You got space for children, can keep an eye on them. You want somewhere they can run.”

About a dozen blocks Uptown, near Napoleon Avenue, Julie LaCour stood next to a ladder-chair that held her niece Charlotte, now 7. The ladder, in turn, stood on ground that’s been familiar to her for decades.

 “I’ve been doing the same spot for 34 years,” said LaCour, who first watched parades here when she was eight months pregnant with her son. “We’re on the third generation of little ones here,” she said. “It’s in our soul.”

On a nearby part of the neutral ground, Laura Duffy stood next to a row of ladder-chairs bearing her family’s surname – and holding Gabriel, Nicholas, Duffy, Della, and Palmer, five of the family’s children, dressed in purple, gold and green-striped shirts. Duffy began coming here long before the birth of her son Bruce, who is now 26. Last year marked 40 years here. 

It, too, is a perfect spot. Everything is taken care of. They cook outside, with a table laden with food and drinks. And they rent hotel rooms on St. Charles, so there are places to use the restroom.

‘If you feel uncertain, move.’

Taisha Payne’s husband got to St. Charles in the wee hours to begin setting up for their spot on the parade route, at Marengo and St. Charles. This year marked 10 years there, in what they called The Payne Camp. Everyone in it wears bright yellow t-shirts that read “Payne Gras,” in letters that replicate the iconic New Orleans street tiles. 

That morning, their setup had begun at 5 a.m., when her husband arrived to find that someone had stolen their usual spot. But they were making it work in a slightly different spot in the same area, to watch friends and family members in the Mystic Femme Fatale parade.

People in yellow shirts line-danced to a DJ playing music and got hot plates of food straight from a big iron grill, where friend Brett Bennett stood, flipping burgers and pieces of chicken. A sea of lawn chairs dotted with yellow shirts stretched from one side of the neutral ground to the other.

It was picture-perfect family fun. When picking a place along the parade route, you ultimately have to follow your instincts, Payne said. “If you find a place where you feel uncertain, move.”

Payne, who was born and raised in New Orleans, acknowledges that there will always be concerns about violence. But ultimately, it’s the right of every New Orleanian to feel safe here, on the parade route, she said. And she feels strongly about that point. “At the end of the day the streets are for everybody. They don’t belong to anyone,” she said. “Anybody that walks up can enjoy the parade wherever they want. That’s the beauty of Mardi Gras. It’s on the street because the streets belong to the city. And the city is for the people.”

Hanging with elders

Two years ago, my friends and I were watching the Muses parade when gunfire rang out. One moment, we were trying to catch beads and pose for pics. The next moment, we were running for safety, with gunmen on the other side of a float.

That night, I had set up in a new spot on St. Charles, because I was on my way to a friend’s party on the route. But I felt uneasy when we first got to the location. I should have followed my instincts, as Payne advised.

That experience puts me on alert now, whenever I head to St. Charles. And honestly, maybe I am making a life transition – moving from the lower part of St. Charles, where the teens and young people hang and move around in large numbers – to a more quiet area of the route. I am looking for peace.

Some people find peace on the route, because it’s their year-round home. We passed Susie Hoskins, reading a book on her St. Charles Avenue porch, near Conery Street. From her chair, she sees her grown children and their friends, filling the area from the tree on the corner to the next big oak tree. 

She takes it in, but in her own way. “This is life,” she said, opening her arms toward all the costumed people on the streets around her, a scene she takes in, as needed, in between pages of her book. 

A block away, a group of families rented apartments on St. Charles for an entire month, just to be on the Carnival route. That’s possible thanks to a landlord who signs 11-month leases with tenants in his buildings, followed by one-month leases during Carnival. Or so one of this month’s tenants explained.

One of the buildings stands on St. Charles between Sixth and Seventh Street. Guys in polo shirts sat on the ledge of the window upstairs. The main door downstairs was flung open. “We’ve been doing this for 30 years,” one man said.

It’s another world one block away, in a section of St. Charles characterized most by age. Everyone here seems to be with their elders. Grandparents Bill and Mary Woodall and their family pulled up chairs and a table in front of their former building, the Charles House Condos in the Lower Garden District. 

While the Woods lived here, they got used to how this block flows during Carnival. “I like it here. No barricades. It’s family-oriented. A lot of people around here are old New Orleans people,” Mary Woodall said, as she offers up a piece of chicken and a cold beverage. 

A few years ago, the Woodalls moved — six blocks away. “During Carnival, that’s an eternity away,” she said. “So once a year, this is where you’ll still find us. I would call it our spot.”