“Mainstrasse Village has always embodied Mardi Gras,” said Amy Kummler, the owner of Up Over Bar.
The Mardi Gras-themed bar on Main Street in Covington is the epicenter of the holiday’s celebrations in Mainstrasse Village.
Kummler, along with her team, organizes the annual Mardi Gras parade that starts off at Larry’s bar on 9th Street, turns on Main and makes its way down to The Standard. Kummler has been putting on the Mainstrasse Mardi Gras Parade since 1999.
However, it hasn’t run consecutively, as Kummler told LINK nky that “2000 was the year we got cut off. We couldn’t do it for two years because we had 60,000 people show up.” She said that year, they were the third-biggest Mardi Gras in the world, and they were even written up in national newspapers, “So now, it’s very controlled; it’s a bar event and a community event.”
“A lot of beads, a lot of candy, a lot of fun,” is how Kummler described the celebration that’s set to start at 7 p.m. on Saturday.
The parade, which last year lasted an hour and a half, according to Kummler, is family-friendly, but the pub crawl that starts afterward is not.
Starting right after the parade, the over 15 bars along the street will open their doors for the Mainstrasse Mardi Gras Pub Crawl. Drink specials, hurricane drinks and, of course, beads will be plentiful.
“It’s the biggest day of the year for a lot of Mainstrasse bars,” Up Over Bar bar manager Gabe Rich told LINK nky.
In the basement of Up Over Bar is a veritable graveyard of Mardi Gras past; specifically, there are tons of old Big Heads.
Big Heads are a Mardi Gras tradition; they’re massive papier-mâché heads that are worn throughout parades. Each head follows the theme of the parades of years past; the 2025 theme is superheroes.
Every year, Rich told LINK, the same group of women who are regulars at Up and Over get together at the bar and work on creating the year’s Big Heads.
“They come in every Monday in January and just start working on them,” Rich said. “They’ve been doing it for so many years, they’ve got it down.”
Over 30 floats, 25 big heads and three dance groups are expected to participate in this year’s parade. And this year, everyone at Up and Over is excited about the weather.
“We got lucky,” Kummler told LINK. “I’ve done this in the ice.”
Temperatures are expected to hit the low 50s this Saturday, and while that isn’t necessarily considered warm, it is much warmer than it could have been. This is due partly to Mardi Gras being much later this year than in years past.
While the Mainstrasse celebration doesn’t fall on that actual day, but the Saturday before. Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday,” and the celebration officially falls the day before the start of Ash Wednesday, the start of the Lenten season. It is traditionally thought of as the final day to eat and drink as much as you want before abstaining during Lent. This year, Lent starts particularly late, on May 5, making Mardi Gras later and, hopefully, warmer than normal.
Kummler said that in Mainstrasse, the Mardi Gras celebration marks the end of the darkest part of winter, which can be particularly hard on bars and restaurants.
“It means we can start making money again,” Kummler said.
Part of organizing the event, Rich said, is getting all the bars to participate and pitch in the money to get the proper permits for the event. Rich, Kummler and others at Up and Over said they put the event on for the love of it and for the community,
“This is for Mainstrasse Village as a whole to unify and do one big thing for everyone,” Kummler said. “It’s a group effort and a city effort.”