PRIDE PARADE PRIMER
People are expected to fill the streets throughout the North Side on Sunday for Chicago’s 48th annual Pride Parade.
The parade celebrating the LGBTQ community steps off at noon from Broadway and Montrose, winds its way south and ends at Diversey and Cannon Drive. Some key things to know:
If you’re going to the parade — or anywhere nearby during the parade — driving and parking are sure to be a bear. Parking is banned along the route from 5 a. m. until 8 p. m. Sunday.
The CTA will be adding trains and running longer trains. It recommends getting Ventra tickets in advance or making sure you have enough money loaded on them to avoid lines at L stations. A one- day, unlimited- ride ticket costs $ 10. Because the L will be jammed, no bikes will be allowed on trains after 5 a. m. Sunday.
If you take the L, the Belmont stop on the Red Line and Brown Line is always the most crowded, according to the CTA, which says: “Crowding both at the station and outside of it has sometimes resulted in the police asking us to close the station for safety reasons. If Belmont’s platforms become crowded we may need to temporarily halt entry to the station while we allow trains to pick up waiting passengers to make room.”
Other L stops nearest to the parade route: along the Brown Line, Diversey and Wellington; along the Red Line, Wilson, Sheridan and Addison.
Metra will be running two extra trains before and after the parade on its BNSF line, plus one extra train out of the city to the suburbs in the afternoon on each of its Union Pacific lines.
Because so many people attend the parade — guesstimates of crowd size typically are in the hundreds of thousands of spectators — the route will be lined on both sides of the streets with barricades that onlookers will be asked to stay behind.
For anyone needing to get from one side of the parade route to the other, there will be police officers and security staffers stationed at designated crossing loca- tions at these streets to allow people across: Montrose, Irving Park, Grace, Addison, Cornelia, Roscoe, Aldine, Barry and Wellington.
Organizers are promising “more security and a tighter rein on public alcohol consumption.”
And if you want to meet the parade’s grand marshal, Lea DeLaria, Carrie “Big Boo” Black on Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” organizers say she’ll be out an hour before the parade’s start to mingle with the crowd.