What If They Had A Mardi Gras And Nobody Showed Up?

Yesterday was Mardi Gras, the day before Ash Wednesday where the nation’s Catholics revel in alcohol and debauchery before being chaste and not eating meat on Fridays for 40 days. (Except replace “Catholics” with “people” and “before being chaste and not eating meat on Fridays for 40 days” with “– and how!”)

Except, in Philly, it’s kind of a muted affair. Ever since the 2001 South Street Riots, where 80,000 drunk people jumped around and damaged some property and got arrested, there hasn’t been much of a Mardi Gras on South Street anymore. Rich Frank, the manager of Fat Tuesday’s on the street where all the hippies meet, explains:

Frank says where there may have been 80,000 people in the streets in the years leading up to 2001, there were only “about 25 people” on South Street about 11am Tuesday.

Fortunately for Frank, those 25 people each drank 17 cases of beer, so he had a pretty good sales day anyway.

On South St., Another Year of Muted Revelry [KYW 1060]