250 years of celebration - New York City's St. Patrick's Day Parade

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CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Voice Reporter

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“In the last few years Leahy felt the parade needed a real endowment to continue the work it has done,” McConnell says. “To date the parade has existed on a core voluntary group putting it together. Leahy decided that since the 250 anniversary of the New York City Saint Patrick’s Day parade is this year he would publish a book on the history of the parade as a milestone, through Quinnipiac University Press.”

Leahy appointed his Vice President of Public Affairs, Lynn Mosher Bushnell, as general editor of the book. “She thought she’d go out there and there’d be a whole archive of easily accessible historical materials to research. But there was nothing. There were just some photographs here and there. There was no archive, no central place.”

That proved they were doing groundbreaking work. Mosher Bushnell took on the project over two years, conducting research at every historical archive and every newspaper in New York. The most helpful place for source material turned out to be the Irish American archive at New York University (NYU) where she gathered previously unseen images for the book.

Meanwhile historian Ridge had written a chronology of the parade in 1989 that had impressed Leahy. Ridge was commissioned to write the text for the new book in association with the research material complied by Mosher Bushnell.

“The book has images that stretch all the way back to the late 1800’s,” says McConnell. “It’s a great historic document that we have about the parade that never existed before. Currently the exhibition that accompanies the book is on display at the Irish consulate and we’ve been invited to bring to the Irish Cultural Center in Phoenix, Arizona – where there is a significant former New York population.

ooksellers like Barnes and Noble, who are creating displays for it in their windows here in New York, have embraced the book. They suspect it will sell particularly well at Christmas. The biggest thing about the book is that all proceeds from it will go to an endowment for the parade in years to come.”

The launch of the book dovetails nicely with the fact that the Grand Marshall of the 2011 parade is an author, the 80 million books bestseller Mary Higgins Clark, who speaks, McConnell says, to the character of the parade. She has great character herself, having survived tragedies in her personal life, and she’s a terrific representative for the Irish.

“She’s a brilliant choice for the 250 anniversary,” says McConnell. “She is someone who will live in history, her books will live on, and she’s someone who’s just a modest, wonderful Irish American woman who cares about her heritage. She says that when she marches up Fifth Avenue she will bring the ghosts of all the Irish marched. She’s taking them all with her.”

McConnell admits that his own understanding of the parade has changed over time. “When I came here in the 1970’s from the North it was a bit of an affront to me. I didn’t understand why they could be so excited about being Irish when we were having such a terrible time at home politically. It took me many years to understand that Irish America is a different place. It took me a number of years to understand that Irish America played and would play a significant role in the story of Ireland itself.”

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