Inventing the Irish
WE IN Boston like to think we invented Irish. Irish-mob movies have been filmed here in town. We have a professional sports team whose name and branding are all about the green. And we host what is arguably the country’s best-known St. Patrick’s Day parade. Sprinkle in an abundance of Irish pubs, Dropkick Murphys, and a list of fair-skinned politicians that’s longer than Smitty McFlannigan’s bar tab at the L Street Tavern, and you have more Irish pride than you’d find at a Colin Farrell fan-club meeting.
But apparently we aren’t the only ones known for our love of green beer and bar fights. If you can believe this, Hoboken, New Jersey, puts on quite a little Gaelic shit show of its own each year. And to make certain it is, in fact, a shit show, they even celebrate St. Patrick’s Day a full two weeks earlier than the rest of the world, hoping to make it easier for Hoboken to be everyone’s destination of choice for excessive drinking and subsequent vomiting. Curious to see if this Jersey celebration can possibly hold up to ours, I make plans with some friends from Manhattan and head south to meet them for my Saturday excursion.
So how can I describe the event? To use a current New York–area reference, it’s like our celebration on HGH. For the festivities, Hoboken is crushed by an influx of nearly a million people who stuff themselves into a one-square-mile celebration zone that is, by the end of the day, akin in both sight and stench to the men’s room at Madison Square Garden after a rock concert. The local DPW should consider lining the streets with urinal mints.
On this day, bars open at 6 a.m. and are usually at capacity by 9. Another major part of the celebration is house parties. As you walk down the streets, you’re hard-pressed to find any dwelling not dripping with Jersey Shore natives cranking Journey tunes out the window. Our day is spent hopping from house to house drinking beer from a bag and listening to small talk about how last year some kid named Joey got so wasted that he peed on the Playstation. Ahhh — good old-fashioned Irish tradition!
Our last stop is not only our best, it’s also our longest. At this particular party, there’s a good group of people who’ve been brought together by a friend of a friend, who shows his commitment to the celebration by hiring a bagpiper. Do you guys like bagpipe music? I used to. But after our piper’s two-hour performance in a 700-square-foot apartment, fueled by continual Jameson nips . . . not so much.
All things considered, I have to raise my now-piss-warm cup of keg beer to the people of Hoboken. They really do throw one hell of a huge party. But for me, something just isn’t right. Maybe it’s all the shamrock-themed Mets T-shirts, or maybe it’s that overbearing Jersey accent that to me screams “Gimme a cannoli,” not corned beef. Whatever the case, it makes me realize that I like my Irish Boston-style: a bit more traditional, a little less Italian, and, of course, all about hating on anything related to New York. @
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