16 March 2011

U.S. Cities Strike Up the Band for St. Patrick’s Day Parades

A boy waves the Irish flag as he rides on top of a float in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

By Bridget Hunter
Staff Writer

Washington — St. Patrick’s Day offers the Irish and non-Irish alike the opportunity to celebrate “Irishness” in a variety of ways — some authentic, some innovative, some downright tacky — but none has proved more widespread or enduring than the annual parade.

The run-up to the March 17 holiday is celebrated worldwide with parades, the largest of which are held in Dublin (Ireland), New York City, Montreal and Boston. Parades also are held in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore.

In the United States, St. Patrick’s Day parades are wildly popular, even in areas without any sizeable Irish-American population, and tend to take on a regional flavor. Chicago dyes its rivers green on parade day; other cities settle for painting green the traffic stripes on parade routes. In New Orleans, the parade takes on a Mardi Gras feel, but with vegetables thrown in lieu of beads, perhaps in memory of the thousands of Irish who fled Ireland during the famine of the 1800s only to die of tropical diseases in Louisiana.

A boy sits on his father's shoulders as he watches the annual St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago.

The first recorded New York City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade took place March 17, 1762, when a small group of Irish New Yorkers marched to the John Marshall’s Inn, near the present-day intersection of Barclay and Church streets in Manhattan. Little else is known about that early parade.

First intended “to show the newly arrived immigrants as respectable citizens worthy of esteem in American society,” according to historian John T. Ridge, the parade soon became an assertion of the political strength of the Irish in New York.

The New York parade is pre-eminent among St. Patrick’s Day’s parades. Organizers cite participation by more than 200,000, including marching bands, pipe and drum corps, police and military group, firefighters, emigrant societies, equestrian groups and canine handlers. The parade attracts roughly 2 million spectators.

Other long-running St. Patrick’s Day parades in the United States include those in Boston (1737), Philadelphia (1780), Chicago (1843) and San Francisco (1852).

In 1855, Thomas Francis Meagher, later a hero of the American Civil War and governor of Montana Territory, called the New York parade “a festival of memory” and its organizers believe it remains so today — “a festival of religious memory, of cultural memory, and of familial memory. … For each marcher and each spectator, even those who are Irish only for the day, has his or her own family history, a history which, this country being what it is, this world being what it is, is likely to tell a tale of exile and dispossession, of struggle and success, of decline and rebirth and continuance.”

Also see “America Goes Green for St. Patrick’s Day.”

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)