Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Today is St. Patrick's Day. Like many other cities around the country, the celebration began yesterday here in Denver with a parade in the Lower Downtown (LoDo) neighborhood. It started at 9:30, and so a little too early for me. However, I did manage to head down to LoDo in the afternoon, finding the place filled with thousands of 20-somethings, all trying to get inside the same bars, such as Scruffy Murphy's Irish Pub, seen in the photograph on the left. This neighborhood is filled with rooftop bars, all of them packed wall-to-wall with people. One of them, El Patio, was blasting what to me was horrendous music at the sound level of a jet airplane taking off. How lovely it must be to spend the afternoon up there. Okay. Okay. I know I am an old curmudgeon. Deal with it.

Meanwhile, a little further south, on Market Street, right around the corner from historic Larimer Square, Nallen's Irish Pub was celebrating its 32nd St. Patrick's Day, and also seemed to be packed to the rafters, as seen in the photograph on the right. Years ago, when I first moved to Denver, the most well-known Irish restaurant and bar in Denver was Duffy's. It was located downtown, right around the corner from the 16th Street Mall, and had waitresses that had worked there for decades. When the National Association of College Stores had their convention at the newly opened Colorado Convention Center, which I attended thanks to my job at the University of Denver Bookstore, I overheard one out-of-towner describing how he kept asking people on the street for bars to visit in Denver, and every damn one of them told him to go to Duffy's. Ironically, they were always closed on St. Patrick's Day to avoid possible lawsuits resulting from overdrinking. How times have changed here.

And, of course, all those twenty-somethings just love to dress up in costumes and party. Be it St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, Oktoberfest, Comicon, and whatever other holidays a costume might be appropriate, they will be down in LoDo celebrating. The next big event to draw people to LoDo will be Opening Day. I used to attend the Colorado Rockies home opener every year, no matter the weather, but eventually, after the introduction of "dynamic pricing," where the price of a seat went up or down based on the popularity of the event, not to mention the phasing out of ballpark ticket windows and the start of online sales, with a fee added for the "convenience," no less, I decided to skip opening day and just walk around the neighborhood each year and enjoy the ambiance. I remember going up to one of those rooftop patios to take a photograph of Coors Field, located across the intersection. That patio was, of course, packed with people, but I assumed the place would clear out once game time approached. And I was shocked to find that nobody ever left, or even went in to watch the game on television. Nobody was interested in baseball. It was just another excuse to party. Oh well, it certainly makes for great people-watching. Happy St. Patrick's Day Everyone!