St. Patrick’s Day celebrations across the country are back after a two-year hiatus, including the nation’s largest in New York City, in a sign of growing hope that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic is over.
The holiday served as a key marker in the progress of the outbreak, with parades celebrating Irish heritage among the first major public events to be held in 2020. An ominous acceleration of infections is cascaded quickly and widely.
The full return of the New York Parade on Thursday coincides with the larger reopening of the city. Large mask and vaccination rules have been lifted recently.
“Psychologically, it means a lot,” said Sean Lane, president of the parade’s organizing group. “New York really needs this.”
The city entertainment and nightlife scenes in particular have the return to a normal st.
“This is the best thing that has happened to us in two years,” said Mike Carty, the Irish-born owner of Rosie O’Grady’s, a restaurant and pub in the Theater District.
“We need the business, and this is where it really started,” said Carty, who organized after the parade the Grand Marshal of the parade.
In other cities, too, the festivities are back.
Over the weekend, Chicago turned its river green after doing so without much fanfare last year and skipping the tradition altogether during the initial virus attack.
Boston, home to one of the country’s largest Irish enclaves, closes its annual parade Sunday after a two-year absence. So is Savannah, Georgia, where the cancellation of the parade disrupted a nearly two-century tradition.
Several communities in Florida, one of the first states to reopen its economy, have also returned their parades.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis resigned two years ago.
Since then, DeSantis has been one of the country’s leading voices against masks and vaccination mandates, as well as other pandemic measures.
New York’s Parade – the largest and oldest of them all, first held in 1762 – begins at 11 a.m. and runs 35 blocks along Fifth Avenue, along St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Central Park.
It is held as the city emerges from a discouraging battle with the highly contagious Omicron variant, which killed more than 4,000 people in New York City in January and February.
New infections and hospitalizations have been declining since then, prompting city officials to illuminate the procession green.
On the eve of the holiday, Mayor Eric Adams hoisted the Irish flag in a park on the southern tip of Manhattan, not far from Ellis Island, to honor the city’s Irish history.
“This St. Patrick’s Day honors the Irish immigrants who moved and helped build our city, and the many Irish Americans who serve New York City to this day,” the mayor said. “Today we celebrate the fighting spirit of the Irish with the courage and resilience of this whole city.”
At the moment you do not need to show proof of vaccination to eat inside a restaurant in New York, but huge numbers of people still wear masks in public and avoid big people. Office towers remain partially empty because many companies still have not called employees into their booths. Tourists, once thick enough to block Manhattan sidewalks, are still not back to their usual numbers.
“When you walk around town, it’s still very different,” said Lane, the parade organizer and financial advisor at a large Wall Street firm. “It’s a very different atmosphere when you walk into Manhattan than it would have been two years ago because people are not quite back yet.”
Allowing the parade to continue, he said, could provide a stream of confidence among New Yorkers to return to public life.
This year’s parade lasted two years, following token processions during the pandemic.
To continue the tradition, the organizers of 2020 and 2021 quietly held small parades at St. Bagpipes accompany a small contingent of officials and a bit of people drawn to the music.
It remains to be seen whether big crowds will turn up for this year’s parade, even though organizers are expecting hordes – even though many New Yorkers remain appalled by massive, potentially virus-spreading public events.
The organizers hope that the people will not only remember the holiday, but to honor the first responses that helped the city get through the pandemic, as well as to support a delegation of Ukrainian marchers, bringing attention to the war in their homeland.
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