New York Diary

Dates, Establishment, and the Tourist Exchange

When I was 16, I landed in Dublin at about 8 am St. Patrick's Day morning, much to the chagrin (and, I think, the surprise) of my high school teachers, who had hoped to bring us on an educational tour of England and Ireland. They were stymied, for a bit at least, by the parade, the free-flowing Guinness, the blocked-off streets, and the newfound liberty of their otherwise unaccompanied charges. We had a grand time.

I mention this only because I feel it gives me a certain amount of credence when I say that there is nothing in the world quite like the New York St. Patrick's Day parade.

Police from as far away as Canada and from what must've been nearly every county in New York (as well as groups from Connecticut and New Jersey, among others) were on hand to march. There were extraordinary numbers of pipes and drums and literally thousands of people in kilts (because, after all, Scotland and Ireland are really just exactly the same, aren't they? I mean, who can tell two different islands whose inhabitants speak very differently inflected forms of English apart from one another?). There was such a crush of people around the parade route (where I went during lunch) that at one point I was bracing (hard) against a wall so as not to be either caught up in the flow or trampled. And, of course, there were neverending hordes of Irish-Americans marching under the banners of, among others, "The Bronx Gaelic Society," "The Ancient Order of Hibernians" (established: 1836, making them truly ancient indeed), "Brooklyn Irish League," and such IRA-friendly-sounding names as "The Independent Irishmen" and the "Irish Republicans of America." And of course there were, conservatively, two million spectators.

All of this leads to an interesting question. Dublin's St. Pat's parade (established: 1996, for all you who thought this was a celebration with long and storied Irish origins) drew "hundreds of thousands of people" this year. From my own experience, I would suggest that a hefty proportion of these were Americans. New York's parade, by contrast, is populated by----you guessed it--people from Ireland, to judge by the accents on the street today. Not exclusively by people from Ireland, but a fair number of them were certainly mingled in among those two million spectators.

So here's the question: netting tourists over the week surrounding St. Patrick's day, do we send more people to Ireland, or do they send more people here? And, relatedly, does more money flow from us to them in this week, or from them to us? (Okay, two questions.)

Of course, contrary to the belief of some Americans who seem to fetishize the Irish (and don't get me wrong--I absolutely loved Ireland, but I think we have a rather ridiculously romanticized notion of the place and its people nonetheless), it isn't crazy that "real" Irish--that is, people who actually live there or who hold Irish citizenship--might come to the Big Apple for their St. Patrick's day holidays. After all, we've got the biggest celebration in the world here. And remember how Dublin's parade is a product of the 1990s? Well, New York's celebrations date back to 1756, making it the second oldest official civic celebration of the holiday anywhere in the world (and predating the Declaration of Independence by 20 years, much to the surprise of those of us who think of Irish immigration as a product of the mid-19th century).

Where was oldest civic celebration of St. Pat's Day, you ask? Also in the US, in Boston, Massachusetts, where popular recognition of the holiday dates back to 1737--and where March 17 is also celebrated as the officially observed Evacuation Day, which conveniently gives the population the day off from work and school without the need to deal with the sticky issue of publicly recognizing what is, technically at least, a religious holiday.

posted by Skay @ 5:54 PM