Compromise on start time for Chicago’s gay pride parade
December 22, 2011 12:22PM
A participant in last summer's Pride Parade | Tom Cruze~Sun-Times
Maps
Updated: January 24, 2012 8:19AM
Organizers of Chicago’s annual gay pride parade have agreed to keep their regular noon start time, rather than begin at 10 a.m., after one of Chicago’s oldest Roman Catholic churches objected that the proposed earlier start, along with a new parade route, would have blocked access to Sunday Masses.
The new route will take the parade past Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church for the first time. The parade is held the last Sunday in June and draws a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
“We met with representatives from Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church last week,” Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) and Chicago LGBT Pride Parade organizer Richard Pfeiffer said in a written statement Thursday. “We discussed moving the start time back to 12 noon to help accommodate Sunday services along the parade route . . . We believe this is an agreeable compromise to help keep the parade safe and manageable while respecting the diversity of our neighborhood.”
AP
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