There was Pride and pandemonium in Lakeview.
On June 30, Chicago’s Pride Parade kicked off in the North Side neighborhood. Pride is one of the largest parades in the nation, a time to celebrate LGBTQ+ people, love, culture and freedom.
Has the party outworn its welcome? That Sunday, the warm and fuzzy feeling of Pride was overshadowed by the ugliness and vandalism of mobs of drunken partiers. The sweet and honeyed flavor of Pride was replaced by the bitter aftertaste of chaos.
After the parade, young people roamed the street until well after dark, mobbing the Lakeview neighborhood until early the next morning.
The city’s Pride Parade started as a small gathering to commemorate the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York City, according to a history of the parade by Block Club Chicago. “In the early ’70s, the parade moved from downtown to the Lakeview area and started as a relatively modest celebration of LGBTQ+ rights,” Block Club reported.
Today, it has morphed into one of the largest parades in the nation, drawing an estimated 1 million revelers. Unfortunately, too many of them don’t know when to quit partying and go home.
In 2014, then-44th Ward Ald. Tom Tunney suggested what seemed unthinkable then — that the city consider moving the parade back downtown, where it could be more safely accommodated. After the recent chaos, it’s time to revive that notion.
At Pride 2024, the “celebrations” went on into the night and early the next morning with people reportedly fighting, jumping on cars and throwing bottles at police officers.
The police made dozens of arrests around 1:25 a.m. in the 3000 block of North Clark Street — more than 10 hours after the parade had ended. Nearly 60 people were arrested, including nine minors. Four firearms were recovered. Fourteen of those arrested were charged with felonies.
A sampling of the charges: reckless conduct, battery, assault, resisting or obstructing an officer, aggravated battery. One 15-year-old was charged with unlawful use of a weapon by a person under 21 and for possessing a laser sight and silencer.
I am a longtime Lakeview resident. I have attended and written about the parade for decades. It is an old and troubling story. In 2022, three people were shot, another three stabbed and 26 people arrested in Lakeview in the late hours after that year’s parade, Block Club Chicago reported.
This year, officials worked to avoid past disruptions by shrinking the event to control the crowds and lessen the stress on the neighborhood and police resources. The parade start time was moved from noon to 11 a.m., its duration limited to two hours and the number of entries chopped from previous years, from around 200 to 125. (In the past, the parade has at time drifted past the four-hour mark.)
Those plans drew heat from some local leaders, activists and businesspeople, who complained that the iconic event was being stifled and shortchanged.
The evening after this year’s parade, I went out for dinner around 7 p.m., hours after it had officially ended. I encountered numerous gatherings of revelers, who were roaming up and down North Broadway, sitting on doorsteps, hanging out of cars, and running in and out of traffic.
They were drinking in the street, and the scent of marijuana was in the air. The crowd had a brackish cast and left me feeling that something bad was coming after the lights went out. The Pride Parade is becoming a magnet for mayhem and bad behavior.
Why host an event in a Chicago neighborhood that draws a million people? The parade runs through one of the city’s largest and most active entertainment districts, snaking along narrow streets that are lined with dozens of bars and restaurants, where revelers start drinking and continue well into the night.
Today, the LGBTQ+ community and culture are celebrated and embraced widely — why continue to hold the parade in one neighborhood, one that cannot safely accommodate it?
Bring it back downtown and run it along State Street or Columbus Drive. Bring it to the city’s center, where more can watch and applaud, where parade marchers, singers, twitchers and steppers have more space to show their stuff.
Sure, some bar and restaurant owners will fight mightily to keep the parade in Lakeview. It’s their most lucrative one-day event of the year.
Residents and other business owners will tell you that while they welcome Pride, its turbulent aftermath does more harm than good.
This great parade is becoming more known for pandemonium than for Pride.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
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