City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade is coming back in September
Pittsburgh’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade will march on in September following its postponement due to COVID-19 concerns, according to organizers.
The celebration of Ireland’s patron saint will occur at 10 a.m. Sept. 18, less than two weeks after the city’s Labor Day Parade. It will be the first time the events have been held since they were canceled in 2020 amid the pandemic.
Jeff McCafferty, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade chairman, said he postponed the parade with the hope that most people would be vaccinated by the fall.
“I didn’t want to go three years without having a parade, so we settled on the date of Sept. 18 and just went on planning from there,” he said.
The parade, which typically draws hundreds of thousands of people to Downtown, can be a huge economic boost for the region, Mr. McCafferty said. If each of his predicted 350,000 revelers spends just $10 at restaurants, bars or stores in the city, that’s more than $3 million going to local businesses.
“I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from it,” Mr. McCafferty said. “I’ve gotten some negative feedback in that some people
think that we’re just having it so we can have a party. I actually don’t even drink that much now; I just thought it was something we should do.”
He said he hopes that the later date will provide warmer weather than the often frigid conditions in mid-March and will bring people together after more than a year of social distancing.
Many bands have confirmed they will be in the parade, and, following recent tradition, Market Square will be closed off for a “family friendly” event featuring festivities like a “drum-off” between drum lines.
Moving the date to September was a “once-in-ageneration opportunity,” Mr. McCafferty said.
It also places the event less than two weeks after the Labor Day Parade on Sept. 6, which also was canceled last year.
“One year ago this week, we announced that Pittsburgh’s Labor Day Parade was canceled for the first time in history,” Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council President Darrin Kelly wrote in a release. “It was the right choice and the only choice because our sole priority during the pandemic was to keep our workers and our communities safe.
“But we promised that we would be back. One year later, we are back, stronger than ever. And we can’t wait to be back in the streets of Pittsburgh, celebrating our history and the heroic work that so many of our people have done to help us get through this public health and economic crisis.”
The union celebration is one of the largest of its kind in the country. More information on guests would be announced “in the weeks ahead,” the release stated.