If you plan on getting up early tomorrow to stake out your parade viewing spot in New Orleans, sleep late. City officials say they’re serious about enforcing the “four-hour rule.”
That’s the city ordinance that says you can’t plop ladders, chairs, tables, etc. until four hours before a parade’s scheduled start time. New Orleans Parks and Parkways head Mike Karam says that means weekday mornings, no one should be prepping their parade plots.
“The parades that are rolling on Friday and then next Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — they’re not ’til the evenings,” Karam said. “And so we’ll be out there in the morning.”
Crews of city workers are prepared to gather up and throw away items left out more than four hours before the first parade of each day.
Karam says last year they had to convince a group to tear down the makeshift scaffold they were building on the neutral ground.
He says they’ll be reasonable, but they will enforce the rules.
“As a general rule of thumb, don’t bring your stuff to the neutral ground during the week before in the mornings,” he said.