STILL #1: Hoboken Tops List of “Douchiest Cities to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day”

No more bagpipes, but still plenty of D-bags…

On the website DeathAndTaxes.com, author Cher Martinetti names Hoboken as the Pot O’ Gold medalist in “the 5 douchiest cities to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day” contest.

Granted, we’re just a small city, but we managed to beat out LA, Chicago, Dayton and Albany to claim the top spot. Of course the methodology for Martinetti’s poll was rather unscientific, based primarily on anecdotal evidence.

Her beef with Hoboken? She used to bartend here. “I worked St Paddy’s one year at Cadillac Bar and I’m still emotionally scarred,” she told hMAG via twitter.

Fair enough—we’ll give you that one.

Back before the City cracked down on the bars, bartenders served in the trenches—fighting the battle in a controlled environment. Sure, it was a lot of money… but it was blood-money. Bartenders would wake up on New Year’s Day and shudder, not because of a hangover from the previous night, but from the knowledge that Hoboken St. Patrick’s Day was right around the corner.

In 2003, Hoboken decided the bars were the problem, so they started raiding establishments throughout the day and shutting them down for any manner of infraction. This caused bar owners to scale back their service, resulting in unhappy customers going home and throwing house parties. A few years after that the situation grew exponentially worse, as meatheads did kegs & eggs with Jameson chasers in their condos with their bros, and without a bouncer or bartender to cut them off—meaning everyone was belligerently hammered by 10:00 a.m., three hours before the parade even started.

Now the parade is gone, yet the douchebaggery remains—albeit on a much smaller scale. Nevertheless, Hoboken’s parade-free St. Patrick’s Day still cost the City $94,000 in overtime.

Yet people still see the parade as the problem. Others still see the bars as the problem.

We think it might be the douchebags.