From live music to parades to heaping mounds of…
Irish-Americans and their wannabes celebrate St. Patrick's Day around the Bay Area
From live music to parades to heaping mounds of corned beef and cabbage, this is the day for lovers of all things Irish
Ronnie Trujillo, right, heads security outside O'Flaherty's Irish Pub on St. Patrick's Day in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
From left, Keith Brophy and Jason Gorman, both originally from Tullamore, Ireland, pour beer into a small green mug hanging around Press Abella's neck as they celebrate St. Patrick's Day at O'Flaherty's Irish Pub in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. The trio came to watch Ireland vs. England in the Six Nations finale rugby match and celebrated Ireland's victory. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
Press Abella, of San Jose sips Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey from a small green mug hanging from his neck as he celebrates St. Patrick's Day at O'Flaherty's Irish Pub in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
From left, Keith Brophy and Jason Gorman, both originally from Tullamore, Ireland, laugh as Press Abella, of San Jose, drinks beer from a small green mug as they celebrate St. Patrick's Day at O'Flaherty's Irish Pub in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. The trio came to watch Ireland vs. England in the Six Nations finale rugby match and celebrated Ireland's victory. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey is served at O'Flaherty's Irish Pub on St. Patrick's Day in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
Katie Bunton, of San Jose, celebrates St. Patrick's Day at O'Flaherty's Irish Pub in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
Patrons dressed in green watch the Ireland vs. England Six Nations finale rugby match at O'Flaherty's Irish Pub to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in San Jose, California, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Ireland defeated England 24-15. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
Members of the McGrath Irish Dancers perform at Dublin's St. Patrick's Day weekend festival celebration in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. The city's celebration also included the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Plastic Paddy band members Erin Bloom and Matt Faris, from left, perform at Dublin's St. Patrick's Day weekend festival celebration in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. The city's celebration also included the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Colorful balloons are photographed along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Lilian Elliott, 10, of Grass Valley, watches the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade as it marches along Dublin Boulevard in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Michelle Welty and her Irish Setters two-year-old Keagan, right, and three-year-old Kaitlin, left, with the Irish Setter Club of the Pacific make their way along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Cameron Jagher, 2, of Livermore, dances along as the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade marches along Dublin Boulevard in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Members of the Irish Setter Club of the Pacific make their way along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Stephanie Busam marching with the Girl Scouts Crossroads Service Unit of Dublin, Pleasanton and Sunol makes her way along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
The Piedmont Highlanders Drums and Pipes bagpipe band marches along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
"Young Citizen of the Year" Alisson Loo waves along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Ruth Kanikeberg, 4, and sister Lydia, 6, of Dublin, from left, watch the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
The Dublin High School Irish Guard marching band makes its way along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
A parade participant marches along Dublin Boulevard during the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Spectators line Dublin Boulevard to watch the 35th Annual Dublin Lions Club St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Calif., on Saturday, March 17, 2018. Dublin's celebration also includes a weekend festival featuring three stages of Irish music and dance plus live music in the Irish Tea Cottage. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
By Patrick May | pmay@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: March 17, 2018 at 12:47 pm | UPDATED: March 17, 2018 at 2:28 pm
Click here if you are having trouble viewing the photos or video on your mobile device.
No self-respecting Irish soul in the entire Bay Area was going to be sleeping in Saturday morning. Not on St. Paddy's Day. Not when places like O'Flaherty's Irish Pub in downtown San Jose were open for business, serving up Irish breakfasts, 52 beers on tap and live rugby on the pub's TVs.
"You get a real feeling of family in a pub," which is why Jason Gorman, originally from County Offaly, was standing at the bar just after 9 a.m., nursing a pint, cheering on Ireland over England, his Irish eyes smiling. "If you want a job, you go to the pub," he said. "If you want to know what's going on, you go to the pub. If you want a date, you go the pub."
And if you wanted to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in San Jose, you showed up here just like Gorman, 44, a Santa Clara County parks maintenance worker, and his pal Keith Brophy, who grew up next door to Gorman back in Tullamore in the Irish midlands.
In the East Bay, the proud burg of Dublin lived up to its name again this year, hosting the city's 39th annual St. Patrick's Day weekend festivities that started Friday night and continued on Saturday, with its St. Patrick's Day Parade moving through downtown.
Meanwhile across the Bay, the 67th annual San Francisco St. Patrick's Day Parade and Festival was expected to draw more than 5,000 people, making it easily the largest St. Patty's Day event in the region.
At O'Flaherty's, the Irish-loving San Francisco Bay Area's favorite day on the calendar got started bright and early. On an otherwise sleepy North San Pedro Street Saturday morning, the green balloons hanging like a latex necklace around the front door at No. 25 were a dead giveaway. Inside, all hell was breaking loose as a full house watched Ireland nail a grand slam by trouncing England in the Six Nations rugby finale.
"Watching Ireland beat England on St. Paddy's Day — this is what we live for," said Brophy, who came to the United States 21 year ago and also works for the county. His team's historic 24-15 victory over its arch-rival was pure heaven, he said: "The Irish will be celebrating this for a week — assuming they're awake!"
Surrounded by the 16-year-old pub's barroom memorabilia shipped to California from Ireland, celebrants showed up early to toast their own Irish-American roots — or those Irish-American roots they wish to God they had been born with.
"St. Patrick's Day to me means a celebration of drinking," said Desiree Velez, a 30-year-old administrator at San Jose State University who'd be hard-pressed to claim even a strand of Irishness in her DNA but who was here to watch the rugby alongside her honorary Irish relations. "My niece was born on St. Patrick's Day so we celebrate together every year."
And not just the two of them, said Velez, sitting near the bar. "My whole family's coming — two brothers, one sister, friends and family, 20 of us all together," a real mash-up of Mexican-Americans in touch with their inner Irish.
That was just little ol' San Pedro Street. But the entire Bay Area was buzzing this weekend with Irish celebration: Rosie McCann's Irish Pub on Santana Row was putting on Irish music by the Kavanaugh Brothers, face-painting for the kids and a bagpiper. Molly Magee's over in Mountain View on Castro Street was serving up great music, hat and jewelry giveaways and Smithwick's imported Irish ale, along with a slew of Beer Blends like Fat Tire and Guinness. Elsewhere, events large and small unfolded, including The Tenth Annual St. Patty's Day Alley Party at Taverna Aventine in San Francisco.
The Irish are practically woven into the social fabric of the Bay Area. Ever since the first wave of immigrants came to California, fleeing political unrest during Ireland's struggle for independence from England, one generation after another has grown up in Oakland, San Francisco and everywhere in between. And they've celebrated their heritage every step of the way.
Irish-Americans created businesses during the Gold Rush and prospered in the region, helping to build San Francisco's infrastructure and becoming powerful political leaders. With the Gold Rush, the city's Irish population grew to 4,200 in 1852 and by 1880 that number had swelled to more than 30,000 or 37 percent of San Francisco's population, according to Mary McCloy, a certified guide in the city's Tour Guide Guild. And St. Paddy's Day, of course, was always front and center.
"The Archdiocese of San Francisco would suspend Lent restrictions on March 17th each year," writes McCloy, whose grandparents had come from Ireland. "I attended St. Rose Academy, and we actually had annual Irish/Italian Games in which the Red and the Green would compete in volleyball and basketball. At that time people wore their nationalities proudly."
The Irish, she writes, "helped to establish San Francisco's infrastructure and transportation. In 1847 Jasper O'Farrell drew up the survey extending the area of San Francisco and making Market Street a wide thoroughfare cutting diagonally through the City….And City Engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy was responsible for the West Portal and Judah Street Tunnels as well as the Hetch Hetchy Dam and the Crystal Springs reservoir that supply the City's water."
And the dam that made Hetch Hetchy possible, of course, is named after O'Shaughnessy.
Today, even while California's Irish-Americans population has dropped to about eight percent, its member still keep the flame lit, with groups like the United Irish Cultural Center in San Francisco sponsoring events year-round.
There's also the Crossroads Irish-American Festival, founded in 2004 as way of promoting "the discovery and understanding of the Irish experience in the Americas" as a way to preserve Irish culture, history and arts in the Bay Area's Irish-American communities.
Back at O'Flaherty's, Brophy was getting a wee bit sentimental, as the Irish are wont to do at times: apply just an ounce or two of Guinness and that sentimental Irish heart can get downright wistful.
"Here, today, I feel a camaraderie with my fellow Irish," said Brophy, drawing on his cigarette on the sidewalk as the rugby game exploded inside. "But tomorrow, it'll all be gone. Back in Ireland, everyone knows their neighbor, everyone helps each other. But here, it feels like everyone's a stranger."
And with that, the joyous barroom crowd of Irish and not-at-all-Irish let out a united and awesome roar.
Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.
Follow Patrick May	@patmaymerc
Morton's steakhouse moving to a new downtown San Jose home
Restaurant will take over the prime McCormick & Schmick's location
San Francisco street food fest: Dumpling Down for Lunar New Year
Celebrate Lunar New Year at the city's SoMa StrEat Food Park's Dumpling Down fest
Store works with winery to find a way to cut costs, return to $1.99 level first launched in the year 2002
6 hot new food trends unveiled at San Francisco's 2020 Winter Fancy Food Show
From cauliflower puffs to drinkable collagen, avocado tea and more