Savannah booths up soon

IT IS one of the first indicators at the Queen’s Park Savannah that Carnival is here. The vendors booths are about to go up, National Carnival Commission (NCC) chairman Winston “Gypsy” Peters told Newsday yesterday. The material for the booths, Peters explained, are kept in a NCC warehouse in San Juan.

As people jog or move around the Savannah in the next couple of days, they are sure to see the booths starting to go up, Peters said. They are only now being constructed because of the time between now and Carnival Monday and Tuesday.

“Carnival is in March. If Carnival was in the beginning of February, all of those things would have been up already but Carnival is the 4th and 5th of March,” he said.

“The longer you keep up those things, the more money you have to pay to keep them. So we are doing it in a timely fashion, where we would save ourselves and the country some money.”

Peters said the invitation for vendors to apply for the booths only went out on January 4, and there is traditionally a set of people who apply for booths every year, but there were also those who applied and got booths outside of the vendors’ association. The construction of the booths is mainly done in-house as the NCC usually relies on very small contractors.