Rivertown Mardi Gras Museum

Jefferson Parish runs its own Carnival season—separate krewes, separate routes, separate histories from the city across the line. The parades roll down Veterans Boulevard, not St. Charles. The Rivertown Mardi Gras Museum in Kenner holds what those parades leave behind: costumes, float designs, throws, krewe records.

The museum sits in Kenner's sixteen-block Rivertown historic district, part of a museum cluster that includes the planetarium. What it documents is simple: Jefferson Parish built its own Mardi Gras tradition, parallel to New Orleans but not subordinate to it. Different neighborhoods, different krewes, different parade committees. The float sketches and costume archives trace those distinctions.

New Orleans remains a major destination for annual Mardi Gras celebrations, but the tradition never stopped at parish lines. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday during museum hours. Go to see what a metro-area Carnival looks like when the parade route runs through suburbs instead of the Quarter, when the krewes answer to Jefferson Parish instead of City Hall.