Horse Hockey: Gotta watch your step
Baggy pants wearing inner city youth went mostly missing at this year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Midtown, according to media and eyewitness reports….
Hey and they didn’t even dial in a discriminatory dress code.
Some Westporters were wondering if the large numbers of school-skipping African-American youth that have regularly attended the downtown parade would follow it to Westport. You may recall that Westport has wrestled for years with the issue of kids hanging in the street outside bars in the wee hours on summer Saturdays.
Didn’t happen, says Westport businessman Bill Nigro.
“It was huge, the number of people that came to the parade was just huge,” Nigro says. “And the number of families that came was huge, but the number of inner city people was less than in recent years – it was a really good-looking crowd.”
For the most part, Nigro characterizes the parade and post parade action in Westport as tranquil.
“This was the first time in recent years they didn’t have any major incidents at the parade, none,” he says. “And Westport didn’t have any incidents all night even. At 2 a.m. our security staff said they had no incidents other than they told a few drunks to go home. That was it. No fights, just a couple of drunk shoving things.”
Which is not to say that the day went entirely problem-free…“Well the police had their horseback team in Westport and the horses left big piles of poop out in the street in a couple of spots,” Nigro says. “And I saw a guy step right on one of them and his feet went forward and he fell on his back right into the pile of shit, and his friends just busted out laughing.”
Hold it right there…aren’t police expected to scoop their poop just like pet owners?
“Well, there was a cleanup guy down there shoveling it,” Nigro says, “but there were four horses down there and they were well fed.”
