Convenience Big Store

February 10, 2026

Houstonians wear costumes for the Notsuoh (Houston spelled backwards) celebration in the early 1900s. The annual event, designed to rival Mardi Gras, didn't last past World War I

Before it was a bar name, Houston's forgotten No-Tsu-Oh festival once rivaled Mardi Gras

If you hear "No-Tsu-Oh" in Houston (and if you happen to enjoy barhopping like my friends and I), you're likely to picture that dark, multi-story downtown bar on Main Street with the mismatched rooms, that one treacherous metal staircase and the almost psychedelic décor that makes you feel like you've drunkenly stumbled into an eccentric millionaire's art gallery after midnight.

But more than a century ago, No-Tsu-Oh — that's Houston spelled backward — was something else entirely.

In the late 1890s and 1900s, that name belonged to a downtown festival that, for a few years before it was taken away (like everything fun in this city), transformed the muddy streets of our city's core into a carnival.

It was Houston's answer to Mardi Gras, which the Gulf Coast is preparing to celebrate a week from today, but by the end of World War I, it faded away.

What was the No-Tsu-Oh festival?

No-Tsu-Oh began in 1899 as a form of commercial boosterism, dreamed up by businessmen and power brokers who wanted more money to flow into the city. Houston, at that time, was on its way to being the economic powerhouse it is today, with the railroads expanding and the Ship Channel's long-promised dredging inching closer to reality.

So what better way to show off that Houston wasn't just a mosquito-infested mudpit, that Southeast Texas' swampy metropolis-to-be was actually worth investing in, than to stage a spectacle outrageous enough to rival New Orleans' Mardi Gras extravaganzas?

Houston threw itself a party.

Revelers organized parades, built elaborate floats and took to the streets in celebrations that featured masked partygoers, crossdressers, drunks dressed as crawfish and mock monarchs such as King Nottoc (cotton) and King Retaw (water).

But for all its costumes and chaos, No-Tsu-Oh reflected the city that created it. The pageantry was organized and controlled by Houston's white residents, and like much of public life at the turn of the 20th century, the celebration was segregated.

Black Houstonians, whose labor and culture helped power the growing city that No-Tsu-Oh celebrated, were largely excluded from the main festivities. That led to the creation of a parallel celebration, the De-Ro-Loc festival ("colored" spelled backward), organized within Houston's Black community.

Why did No-Tsu-Oh disappear?

For more than a decade, the festival did what it was designed to do: draw crowds and project the image of a city on the rise.

However, the revelry wasn't tidy, nor was it cheap.

By the mid-1910s, newspaper coverage shows the festival struggling under mounting debt. Typical for Houston. The No-Tsu-Oh Association, its organizers, had spent heavily on floats, pageantry and promotion, and by 1918, the defunct festival was auctioning off its expensive parade wagons to the Red Cross.

At the same time, complaints about disorder and drunkenness grew louder as the nation edged toward World War I.

The combination proved fatal, and in the end, No-Tsu-Oh faded into the city's collective nostalgia as a bold idea that ran up a tab and disappeared once the city decided it had more serious things to worry about.