A blitz on the Big Easy Throw in the Super Bowl, and it's a super-size party for Carnival

01/27/2002

By EILEEN LOH HARRIST / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

NEW ORLEANS – For Bourbon Street bartender Lisa Linscott, the record crowds expected to jam New Orleans in coming weeks will be a welcome sight.

"I'm ready, baby," said Ms. Linscott, a Texas native who has te nded bar for 14 years at the historic Old Absinthe House. "Bring it on!"

Normally, about 300,000 visitors flood into town in the five-day period that ends with Fat Tuesday, according to the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce. Mardi Gras 2001 was the largest New Orleans had ever seen, with a combined 2 million revelers – city residents, suburbanites and tourists – celebrating Carnival during the long weekend.

This year, the city again expects throngs of visitors for Mardi Gras, but that's just part of the picture. The Big Easy is hosting a slew of conventions, plus the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, plus Carnival – which culminates in a riotous Mardi Gras weekend Feb. 8-12.

About 420,000 tourists are expected to arrive in town in the three weeks before Mardi Gras, says Chamber of Commerce spokesman Brian Schwaner. Estimates of their economic impact range from $600 million to more than $1 billion.

As of the second week of January, the city's 33,000 hotel rooms were 99 percent booked for Super Bowl weekend and 80 percent booked for Mardi Gras, said Bill Langkopp, executive vice president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel-Motel Association. Occupancy was up 10 to 15 percentage points from last year, he said. "It's an unbelievable first quarter for New Orleans."

Authorities have been planning security, particularly around the Super Bowl events, for weeks. The U.S. Secret Service is in charge of arrangements, with other federal, state and local agencies involved. Super Bowl fans will be subjected to tight security screening, so authorities are urging them to show up several hours before the 5 p.m. kickoff time.

Everyone affiliated with New Orleans' hospitality industry – about 65,000 workers – is readying for what could spell the biggest, longest celebration ever hosted by the City that Care Forgot. Instead of the typical two-week blowout before Mardi Gras, they're expecting three weeks of serious partying.

New Orleans' notoriously laid-back attitude doesn't extend to party preparation, though. Plenty of people have been planning for the crowds for months, and plenty more will be working double and triple shifts to keep the good times rolling once the visitors arrive.

"The city can handle the crowds," Mr. Langkopp said. "That's the least of our worries. This is what we do, and all of it fits in with the good-time philosophy that we live by here."

The city's tourist season began in earnest Jan. 1, when New Orleans hosted the Sugar Bowl. In the six weeks separating the Sugar Bowl and Mardi Gras, the city also scheduled major conventions, including the planned 28,000-person, four-day National Automobile Dealers Association convention that began this weekend.

"There really isn't a lot of breathing room now," said Belinda Lazaro, spokeswoman for Royal Sonesta Hotel New Orleans. "We're in the middle of a trifecta – the Sugar Bowl, Super Bowl, Mardi Gras."

The Royal Sonesta owns the Desire Oyster Bar and Bistro on Bourbon Street; Begue's, a fine-dining restaurant; and three French Quarter nightclubs. Months ago, the hotel developed a plan to prepare for the 2002 crowds, said food and beverage director Patrick Dettwiller.

"We've actually treated it as one big event and plotted out when we were going to be busy, and when we were going to be slow," he said. "We called it the 'Sugar Bowl-Convention-Super Bowl-Mardi Gras Action Plan.' "

Elements of the plan include limiting liquor and food selections during the three heaviest weeks; placing minibars on the street (where alcohol may legally be consumed, provided it's in an unbreakable container); switching to disposable dishes and utensils; and offering buffets instead of sit-down service.

Mr. Dettwiller said the hotel usually goes through 13 or 14 kegs of beer per weekend; during the upcoming crunch, it expects to sell 31 kegs per day. The hotel has tripled its usual order of rum, ordered caseloads of beer in cans (instead of glass bottles) and plans to "pigtail" the beer supply, attaching three kegs to each draft beer line it uses.

The Desire Oyster Bar, which normally uses 30 sacks of oysters per weekend, expects to sell 30 sacks per day in the five-day span leading up to Fat Tuesday.

In the French Quarter on a recent Monday morning, only a few tourists were stepping delicately over puddles glistening on the brick sidewalk. Most of the activity on Bourbon Street came from workers unloading kegs of beer, crates of liquor and boxes of spicy Zapp's potato chips from distribution trucks.

At Pat O'Brien's, employees were freeing up storage space so the famed bar could stockpile mass quantities of its signature rum drink, the Hurricane.

"It's a battle," said Charlie Bateman, vice president of operations for Pat O'Brien's, surveying the bar's famed courtyard. "As long as you can get everyone to pitch in, you win."

A crucial part of handling the unrelenting crowds is bolstering employee morale, said Pat O'Brien's spokeswoman Shelly Waguespack. Even though the bar's 150-plus workers are looking forward to a lucrative month ahead, "it's hard to get people to work nonstop for three weeks," she said. "Normally for Mardi Gras, you're working straight through for two weeks, and that's hard enough."

During Carnival, Pat O's removes its furniture from the courtyard and covers the fountains with plywood caps. Such measures are standard Mardi Gras procedure at Pat O's, which conducts a recap of events every year after Carnival is over.

"We've been doing this for 64 years," Ms. Waguespack said. "After so many years and so many follow-ups, we pretty much have it down to a science."

New Orleans' tourist-oriented businesses plan to make up lost revenue from last year, when they were hit with the double whammy of a slow summer followed by a nosedive in tourism after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Souvenir shop owner Ram Sadhwani has already ordered loads of merchandise sporting the Super Bowl XXXVI logo: posters, key chains, T-shirts. A veteran of six Super Bowls, Mr. Sadhwani said those items sell fast.

His Bourbon Street store, Sunrise, usually carries such merchandise as novelty hats, voodoo dolls and risquι T-shirts. In the coming weeks, the shop will stock only Super Bowl and Mardi Gras-related items. "As soon as we find out who the teams are, we will order Mardi Gras beads in the team colors," Mr. Sadhwani said.

Tommy Frese, who manages Bourbon Street's 735 Club, said the 1,000-person dance club was packed to capacity last year when it hosted Playboy.com. "With the Super Bowl ahead of Mardi Gras, it'll be like an extra week of Mardi Gras," Mr. Frese said.

The club will again feature Playboy playmates this Mardi Gras.

In mid-January, Mr. Frese was still booking last-minute private parties and fretting about overtaxing his employees, who will have to staff the club 24 hours a day, every day for the 2 ½ weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday.

"But I'm ready," Mr. Frese said. "I think after the summer and everything that happened in September, it's going to be a welcome change. I think a lot of people are looking at this as the light at the end of the tunnel."

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2002