Today in LES History: The St. Patrick’s Day Parade is Born as a ‘Breakfast Meet’
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St. Patrick’s Day in Union Square, ca. 1874
On this day in…
1763 – Many books and archived newspaper articles cite March 17, 1763 as the first St. Patrick’s Day celebration — claiming it was held not as a parade, but as a breakfast meeting at the Crown and Thistle Inn on Whitehall Street. Then in 1779, the annual breakfast turned into a staged parade where “400 Irish volunteers marched behind a British band from Lower Broadway to a tavern on the Bowery.”
Today in LES History is compiled by Lower East Side History Project, an award-winning non-profit organization which offers research, consulting and daily public and private walking tours. See the full schedule here: http://leshp.org.
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