Revelers in shamrock green made a triumphant return to the pubs and bars of Portland’s Commercial Street on Thursday after two years of St. Patrick’s Days dampened by the pandemic.
With new COVID-19 cases and positive test rates as low as Maine has seen in months, most indoor mask restrictions lifted and the January omicron surge in the rearview mirror, residents like Ant Labbe of Standish seized the opportunity to celebrate.
“Family and friends and lots of alcohol,” Labbe said when asked what brought him to Portland for the holiday. He and his group, one sporting a kilt, were smoking cigars and passing a flask outside Rí Rá, a popular Irish pub that opened at 7 a.m. Thursday.
Around noon, Rí Rá had a line of green-clad patrons spilling out the door. The pub had served a full Irish breakfast Thursday morning and was featuring traditional music, like the Claddagh Mhor bagpipe band, throughout the day.
Like Labbe, Portland resident Andrea Liming and two friends began their day at Rí Rá and were bar-hopping down Commercial Street and through the Old Port in matching green wigs.
“Everyone’s so friendly,” Liming said of St. Patrick’s in Portland. “I mean, they might get mean later.”
But inside Andy’s Old Port Pub, it was all smiles as patrons listened to fiddle music and knocked back beers. This is the first real St. Patrick’s Day that the cozy bar has been able to have under owner John Lowell, who bought the place in January 2020.
“That would have been our reopening day,” he said of St. Patrick’s Day in March 2020, which came just as businesses were closing to stop the spread of the then-novel coronavirus. “Nobody was open, and right after that we went into quarantine for a couple of months.”
Lowell, sporting a red “kiss me, I’m colorblind” T-shirt, said it was much the same in 2021 — Portland’s St. Patrick’s parade was canceled again and most people were still leery of going out.
“We got a handful of people who made a day of it. We sold T-shirts,” he said. “It was still a St. Patrick’s Day, but not the ‘Oh my god, we’re dragging ourselves over the finish line at the end of the day’ kind of St. Patrick’s Day that they historically used to be.”
Now, it feels like things might actually be returning to normal — even as the state and epidemiologists warn another surge could come in the future. Lowell said they’re starting to see some days with genuinely good business and are looking forward to a busy summer season.
“Am I looking at (this St. Patrick’s Day) as some sort of watermark for what I can expect this year? I probably am a little bit,” he said. “It’s nice to see some people out having a good time.”
