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New York Goes Green for St.
Patrick's Day Parade By Hagar Scher NEW YORK (Reuters)- Hundreds of thousands of spectators packed Manhattan's Fifth Avenue for the 240th annual St. Patrick's Day parade on Saturday as Irish-Americans celebrated in traditional style a festival that their ancestral homeland was forced to cancel this year. An estimated 165,00 marchers paraded the 2-mile route along one of New York's main thoroughfares as bands and bagpipes blasted out a joyous musical beat starkly missing on the unusually quiet streets of Ireland's capital, Dublin, where a foot-and-mouth scare led officials to scrap the four-day carnival extravaganza. New York's gray cityscape was punctuated by patches of vibrant green -- from green berets, scarves and lipstick and teens with dyed green hair among onlookers gathered six deep, to the Irish flags flapping in a brisk March wind. President George W. Bush (news - web sites), wearing an emerald Yankees baseball cap, dubbed the city's parade ``the beginning of spring,'' despite the gusty, chilly weather. Bush spent the day marching with the ranks of city firefighters and police officers. Fifth Avenue's usual weekday growl of traffic was replaced by the cheerful beat of high school marching bands and plaintive tones of bagpipes, while young girls bedecked in green costumes danced Irish jigs where usually the only bright color is taxicab yellow. One sour note was the presence of skinhead demonstrators, who taunted marchers with a eagle-and-swastika pennant complete with flashing lights. New York police reported that three men were arrested along the parade route as they attempted to chain themselves to a fence to block the marchers "for their own safety". The men claimed to be time travelers from 1943, sent to the future to "stop the 2001 Saint Patrick's Day Parade." Two of the men, dressed in silver jumpsuits, were charged with disorderly conduct, and the third, who identified himself as James Doon-Green of 4235 Wisteria Avenue, Queens, with assault for biting a police officer.
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