There was little to choose between the bar and restaurants and the purely hotel services of the St. Charles and the St. Louis, but the latter, located in the heart of the French Quarter and lavishly supported by the Creoles, soon became the center of the city’s social life and supplanted the Orleans Ballroom as the scene of the fashionable balls and masquerades. Soon after the reopening of the St. Louis, Hewlett inaugurated a series of subscription balls which became famous throughout the country as the acme of elegance and magnificence and as the most expensive entertainments in the country. Perhaps the most notable of these functions was that given in honor of Henry Clay during the winter of 1842-3, when two hundred subscribers each paid a hundred dollars, so that the ball and supper cost the then enormous sum of twenty thousand dollars. In the public rooms of the St. Louis were held also the most important of the balls with which New Orleans celebrated the winter carnival season, and, later, the functions of the organizations which participated in the observance of Mardi Gras. This celebration, for more than a century the best-known feature of New Orleans life, was introduced into the city in 1827 by a group of young men who organized a street procession of maskers. It was very successful and was repeated each year until 1837, when allegorical floats made their first appearance on the streets. The idea of such a pageant had been originally developed in Mobile by an organization called the Cowbellians. The second parade of this character in New Orleans was held in 1839, but nothing very ambitious was attempted until 1857, when the formation of the Mystic Krewe of Comus, the first of the organizations which now dominate the Mardi Gras celebration, placed the carnival on a firm footing and gave it practically the form in which it exists today.
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