Editorial: South Side St. Pat’s parade deserves one more chance

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Updated: February 18, 2012 8:11AM

Most people are capable of drinking, as they say in the beer ads, “responsibly.”

But some people just can’t drink. Ever.

On March 11, we’ll see how that plays out in a whole parade.

Three years after being scrapped because the drunks were spoiling everything, the South Side St. Patrick’s Day Parade is back, this time with all kinds of assurances that it will be super family-friendly and tolerate no boozing or brawling or vomiting or public urinating.

The parade, you might say, is taking the pledge.

Do we think the parade organizers can pull it off?

Not really.

Do we think they should give it a go?

Sure.

But if the parade proves a bust again — if the organizers and the police still can’t beat back the waves of drunks — let’s kill it again for another three years.

No, make that 10.

Bring back the parade “for one year and see what happens,” said parade committee member Jim Sheahan, expressing our own view. “It’s a great day for the neighborhood. It’s unfortunate some idiots come in and goof it up.”

We like a good parade, especially one that winds through a proud city neighborhood, and there is nothing inherent in Irish ethnic pride that inevitably results in a booze fest. So many of the problem drinkers at past parades were not even of Irish descent, wouldn’t know James Joyce from James Cagney and lived in the suburbs.

If done right, this year’s parade, marching down Western Avenue through the heart of Beverly, could be as uplifting as the Bud Billiken Parade down King Drive, the Gay Pride Parade down Halsted Street and the German-American Parade down Lincoln Avenue.

The Chicago Department of Transportation issued a permit for this year’s parade, though the local alderman, Matt O’Shea, appealed to Mayor Emanuel to block it. In the past, O’Shea wrote in a letter to the mayor, the parade has been “rowdy, drunken and often violent,” and the organizers of this year’s parade don’t have a solid public safety plan.

This is true. The organizers don’t have much of a plan right now. We haven’t heard of anything significant beyond setting up checkpoints to inspect coolers and bags, like at Taste of Chicago, and routing those notorious chartered buses — full of college kids who think St. Patrick was a brewer — to heavily policed drop-off spots.

But the parade organizers have hired a private security firm for the first time, S3 Safety Service Systems, which does security at Bears games. It is working with the police on a more detailed plan.

Among the security measures we would like to see is a rule that no tavern along Western Avenue can open until at least two hours after the parade ends.

Beverly is one of those strong and racially diverse neighborhoods that form the backbone of Chicago. It’s a classy neighborhood that voluntarily killed its annual parade three years ago because the parade had no class, or not enough.

But many Beverly residents dearly miss the parade, a once sweet tradition that began in 1979 when a small group of moms and dads pushed kids in strollers around the block a few times.

Let’s hope for the best for this year’s parade. May it once again be much more about parents and children than about college kids in beer buses.