Posted on 03/17/2006 6:09:13 AM PST by ex-Texan
The city will turn into a sea of green when the 245th annual St. Patrick's Day Parade makes its way up Fifth Avenue Friday.
The parade kicks off at 11 a.m. on 44th Street and will head up to 86th Street.
Hundreds of thousands are expected to take part, including many local politicians, in the world's oldest and largest St. Patrick's Day Parade.
This year's parade honors the Fighting 69th Infantry, the New York National Guard unit that lost 19 members in Iraq.
A platoon of firefighters who boycotted last year's parade after they were not allowed to don green berets will march in this year’s parade with the hats in their hands.
The grand marshal is Timothy Rooney, an associate member of the New York and American Stock Exchanges whose family owns the Pittsburgh Steelers.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn says she will not march in this year's parade. Quinn is openly gay and has been against the parade's barring of gays and lesbians.
The speaker had considered marching this year, if she could do so openly. But after talking with parade officials Quinn has decided to steer clear of the festivities.
There’s good news for city Catholics who want to enjoy their corned beef Friday, despite the fact that it's a Lenten Friday. The New York Archdiocese and the Brooklyn Diocese have granted dispensations allowing Catholics to eat meat for the day.
From the referenced story:
Speaker Christine Quinn is refusing to march, after parade organizers told her that she and other gays and lesbians cannot march as a group.
Why is it always about YOU and YOUR preferences? Why can't you be Irish and share someone else's joy for a day, like the rest of us?
Let's hear from New Yorkers about this day and how it grips the entire town. It's an old and wonderful celebration of the end of Winter and a salute to a Spring that often seems still far off.
Traffic is snarled as the parade winds through town with all manner of participants from marching bands to armed forces troops to who knows what? Special interest participants just blend in to this wonderful ritual that the whole town celebrates.
My neighborhood will be a zoo tonight with noise, fights and nasty pools of vomit on our building steps and the sidewalks on our block.
She's Here,
She's Queer,
SHUT UP,
just let me enjoy my beer.
Have you heard the joke about the two gay leprechauns Gerald Fitzpatrick, and Patrick Fitzgerald ???
(...to use the joke for occasions other than St. Patricks Day, replace the word "leprechauns" with "incompetant federal prosecutors".....)
Boy are liberals stupid!
She is going along with the ban against queers and thinks this is making a statement?
If she wanted to make a statement she SHOULD march.
"Does anybody know who will be marching today? By that, I mean any so-called Big Wigs?"
Mayor Bloomberg plans to march in the parade. Does he count as a big wig?
It was cold, windy, raw...in other words, perfect St. Patrick's Day weather. One of the older guys had an old-fashioned hip flask that we all hit when the priests weren't looking. My first taste of good scotch and the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
After the parade we went to the Germantown apartment of one of the guy's maiden aunt where we drank whiskey sours and played poker until late before finding our way back to Penn Station for the ride home.
They don't make them like that anymore.
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Wrong bucko, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn has a Norwegian Independence Day parade every year too.
My understanding is that it is just the organizers of this parade who don't allow "gay pride" units to march in it. They don't ban gays per se, just marching as gays.
AFAIK, New York City itself would allow a gay pride parade.
A wonderful memoir!
I first came to New York as a grown man in my early thirties and witnessed the enthrallment New Yorkers have with the ritual of St. Patricks Day.
Yours is a fitting "loving snapshot" of big city life and I witnessed countless real life experiences such as you just shared all around me. It was exhilarating and wonderful.
Thank you for sharing.
Just thinking of that day 41 years ago reminds me of how much has changed in our city and our world and how innocence is the biggest casualty of those changes.
Yay. Setten de Mai!
That is a decidedly wistful reply.
Reminescent of a Simon and Garfunkel ballad. It was an essence of your young life and a cherish worth keeping in memory.
This day for me is an occasion for humility and gratitude...and gladness at being alive.
You have added to it . Thank you.
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