Mardi Gras began as a giant street party of masks, costumes, dancing and parades. It was a joyous celebration. It was originally associated with the religious requirement for confession before the beginning of Lent.

Not many people who attend Mardi Gras know anything about its history. For them, Mardi Gras is a just big excuse to get drunk and rowdy. The streets are teeming with teenagers and teen-wannabes who drink more than they can handle, flash their breasts for beads and generally party until they can’t party anymore.

Is Toronto’s Nuit Blanche heading down the same path?

Nuit Blanche is intended to be a massive arts festival, where ordinary streets and buildings become giant art exhibits, where musicians and artists take to the streets to perform, interact and create installations that are bigger and wilder than the imagination. It is intended to be a celebration of art in the dark of night and cool, autumn air.

Instead, over the past few years it has become little more than an excuse for underage and just-legal youths to drink, do drugs and party until their bodies can’t take it anymore.

Scenes from Saturday’s clash between revellers and police has to be considered disturbing to the festival’s organizers. It was a frightening mob of drunken rowdies bent on terrorizing authority figures in Yonge-Dundas Square. The badly outnumbered cops had to seek protection while being pelted with bottles and slurs.

Toronto police admitted that they were overwhelmed with the number of calls coming from incidents at Yonge-Dundas Square on Saturday night.

Not that there wasn’t any warning. Even Torontoist, our favourite urban voice, warned against going to Yonge-Dundas Square in this year’s Nuit Blanche survival guide.

“Yonge-Dundas Square is the Hellmouth of Nuit Blanche,” the article reads. “You will find nothing there but a wasteland of vomiting teenagers, overflowing garbage, and your own existential crisis.”

Mmmm. Nothing says celebrating inspirational art exhibits like a wasteland of vomiting teenagers.

Even the starchy Globe and Mail has taken to describing the event as “a boozy bacchanal with a garnish of visual arts.”

Prior to the mob clashing with police, there was a stabbing in the square on Saturday night. In 2013, 19-year-old Rameez Khalid was stabbed to death outside the Four Seasons Centre. That same year, the Toronto Eaton Centre backed out of hosting any Nuit Blanche events because of graffiti, vandalism and “so much damage at the hands of unruly event-goers that management decided to withdraw its sponsorship completely.”

Suburban Torontonians hoping to show their kids some of the impressive exhibits know to clear the streets by 10 p.m., because little good happens afterwards. As Torontoist warns, event-goers need to beware of teens “roving in packs with that signature ‘I just finished off a mickey of Smirnoff for the first time’ stagger.”

Following the mob incident early Sunday morning, discussions this morning revolved around better policing of events, and who even is responsible for policing the all-night street party to begin with, and what can be done to stem the rowdy and drunken behaviour of teenagers taking advantage of an open street party to besmirch the event and the city.

And it’s a shame. Instead of celebrating the 10th anniversary of Nuit Blanche in Toronto, we’re left debating if the event has swayed too far from its original intent.